Happy to birthday to our self! Tomorrow, birthday boy Silicon Canals turns four. Here’s to four more years!
In startup ages, that’s already an eternity you know. It’s been a hell of a ride, good and bad: we’d almost quit (several times), we almost got acquired, but in the end, we stayed on course. If you want to know why we started in the first place, go read our first post ever (in Dutch).
Our mission today remains very much the same as when we started. We want to become the leading tech startup platform in the Netherlands – although we already claim to cover the entire Benelux region with Silicon Canals.
In fact, we have – in stealth mode – been covering some French and German tech startups news. As both countries, as far as we can tell, don’t have a dedicated English-language startup platform anymore (both Rude Baguette and Heureka/Venture Village seized to publish in English), we feel that it might be a massive opportunity for us. Right now, we’re merely dipping our feet in the water, but should the right partner arise, we’re very much ready to speed up the pace.
Besides that, we’re working on so many things, let me just give you the full scope of what’s in store.
Partners
Up until now, we had a great media partnership with EIT Digital that we’re hoping to prolong for the coming time. Also, we just closed an event partnership with IBM – more to come on that soon! Next, we’ve upgraded our media partnership packages. Companies and institutions looking to reach our target demographic – startups, scaleups, developers, investors, basically the whole startup ecosystem – should use our services to promote theirs. Ready for a quote?
Reach out to me personally for our media kit, and I’ll give you a special birthday deal, of course. My treat!
Events
Last year, we rebranded our Meetup group to Silicon Canals, but haven’t done many events since. That’s a shame because we kinda like them a lot, and our visitors do too. We want to hold at least one monthly Meetup on average, starting October. Want to host one? Feel free to reach out.
With great pleasure, I can furthermore announce we’re going to do the first more prominent event in January 2019: The Product Summit. From idea to exit.
It’s going to be a top-notch, in-depth conference for 200 highly curated CEOs, CTOs, product managers, and senior developers working at the top scale-ups in the Benelux. As of now, we’re looking for speakers on various topics related to product development (basically anything but genuinely technical stuff). Also, interested parties willing to sponsor or hold a workshop are utmost welcome. More on that, soon.
Apply here for an early bird-discount!
Digital Waves
More dipping toes into strange new waters. We’ve tried and tested Digital Waves, an online video talk show about digital entrepreneurship, together with our partner Node1. We were all very very very pleased with the results, so we will continue right after the summer with a full season of shows. Consider yourself – entrepreneur, investor – a good interview candidate?
Be my guest – literally.
The team
Last but not least, a little something about our fantastic team. We’ve quite recently hired Akansha Srivastava, an Indian-native, seasoned tech journalist who came to the Netherlands as an expat, as a Senior Editor. She built a strong editorial team of freelancers and grew our pageviews tremendously in a ridiculously short amount of time, with now a 25-30% month-on-month growth during the summer. Typically, that’s the slow season.
We now even expect a 50% growth for the next month. Admittedly, a woman of her experience (she’s the former managing editor at Gizbot) needs to have a leadership role in the company, that’s why she’s been promoted to Editor-in-Chief, effective immediately. I will be assuming the role of Publisher at Silicon Canals, leaving all editorial duties with her.
Congrats Akansha!
Thanks for reading all the way to the end. If you support our mission, keep sending us your startup related press releases, become our media partner, buy our event tickets, come to our Meetups, subscribe to our newsletter (below), watch our videos, share our news on social media, and spread the word about our mission. Hip hip hooray!
Party image by Shutterstock