Born in Poland and raised in Germany, Markus Stefanko (pictured on the far right) headed straight for Copenhagen as soon as he finished school and was set for his first CTO position at the age of just 20. In the Danish capital, he worked on the professional electronic sports team MYM. The site attracted 1.4 million users and VC funding of $2 million from Seed Capital and Danish IT billionaire Preben Damgaard.
After working with Morten Lund for five years; firstly at Copenhagen design agency HelloGroup as a Solutions Architect, later for three years at Everbread, hacking out travel solutions from Mallorca, Stefanko co-founded PitchXO. Under his direction, PitchXO has already made it into the UK’s Rackspace Startup Programme and has offices in the US, Denmark and Hong Kong.
What is your startup?
Our startup is PitchXO. We always thought that there was a better way of sharing material than sending out a PDF through email. Sometimes you don’t know whether the PDF was opened, who it was shared with or which pages the reader found interesting. We thought there was a better way to send pitches out, that’s why we created PitchXO.
How did you come up with this idea?
We had been working closely with >Morten Lund and his organization ‘onlyXO’. Morten is a serial entrepreneur and investor and has had stakes in over 100+ different companies. He is always pitching someone and he wanted a way to keep track of who was looking at what and which deals were related to which person. We built pitchXO initially to solve these problems and then prepared it for wider roll out.
Who are you targeting and how big is the market in HK/Asia?
Hong Kong and Asia has a really great startup scene currently which is booming. Looking at the Alibaba IPO, it is clear to see that there is a lot of opportunity for startups in Asia!
We keep getting surprised by our customers and what they want to use PitchXO for. We initially were focused on startups who were looking for an investment round. We created features such as the ‘KPI’ and ‘Updates’ pages which would help them keep in touch with their investors after a successful round and have even created the ‘Pitch Academy’ which is a free online course which gives advice on everything from sources to find investment to structuring the pitch deck.
Our customers have also shown us that pitchXO can be used for sales, sponsorship acquisition for events, PR agencies and even for internal documents and updates within a company.
What are your futures plans for your startup?
Our future plans will involve making things even simpler. We love to get feedback from our customers and improve what we are doing. We recently added a killer feature which enables viewers of material to click anywhere on a presentation and leave direct feedback.
We will also be adding to the Pitch Academy and inviting members of our network and successful entrepreneurs to give their advice with the aim of creating a comprehensive resource for pitching which doesn’t currently exist.
1 Benefit and 1 Challenge in the HK startup scene?
The main benefit of being involved in the HK startup scene is being able to learn about all of the different startups. Asia is really booming at the moment and we love our jobs. Being able to learn about all the different products and companies that people are working on is awesome and being able to talk to passionate people on a daily basis is a major plus.
One of the main challenges would probably be the time difference when trying to schedule meetings with clients and potential customers from the US region. This can quite often lead to meetings that go on into the night as the US wakes up at around 10 or 11 PM local time. However, we love to talk about our product and love to hear about other people’s projects so this is only a minor annoyance.
What is PitchXO?
Markus Stefanko on Startbase.HK: Markus Stefanko
PitchXO on Startbase.HK: PitchXO
