Online shopping site Flubit has been crowned winner of the 2013 London Web Summit startup competition
Hoxton-based Flubit creates unique offers on products that online shoppers would like to buy. Consumers paste a link to a desired item at the cheapest price they’ve found and Flubit creates a better offer unique to the customer.
Flubit was up against more than 100 startups to win the competition, held last Friday at The Brewery.
The competing startups were whittled down to 23 finalists, who pitched themselves to the competition’s 12 judges, including Atomico’s Wouter Gort, Index Ventures’ Martin Mignot and Edventure’s Esther Dyson among others.
Judges then picked four finalists to present on stage, in front of the Summit’s 1,000 attendees. As well as Flubit, the other finalists were online identity firm Trustev, game developer Grand Cru and data scoring technology startup Kreditech.
“Winning this award is great,” Flubit CEO Bertie Stephens told Tech City News.
“Eighteen months ago we had nine people who risked everything to join us. Now we’re 35 people and growing fast. Having top VCs and judges choose us as the startup winner gives us real outside validity as to where we’re heading.”
Flubit has not always been a Tech City darling
The company initially launched as another group-buying site, like Groupon, but quickly realised the model would not be successful. Within a year, Flubit raised $1.75m to pivot into its current model.
“Right now, online shops spam consumers with deals and discounts that they guess you might want. We’re changing that by adopting a demand-led model, where we give consumers a lower offer for a product we know they want to buy,” explains Stephens.
“Consumers and retailers both benefit: shoppers get the best offer and merchants have a new channel for reaching more sales. No one else out there is doing this.”
Take up of the service is increasing quickly. Last month, the company processed more than £300,000 worth of transactions, mainly in the toy, computer games and media spaces. “This is where we’re seeing the strongest traction right now. On average, retailers using Flubit see a conversion rate of 30 per cent – ten times higher than the ecommerce average.”
What’s next for the company? Stephens says he wants Flubit to dominate the UK market in this space. The company is working on partnerships with multi-channel solution merchants, such as eSellerPro, to make its service available to as many retailers as possible.
“We’re working on integrating our partnerships. Merchants will be able to turn on Flubit as a channel in a few minutes. This means we can reach thousands of retailers.”
As the startup winner of the London Web Summit, Flubit’s prize package includes a cloud computing package from Windows Azure, a high-level review of the company’s contracts by Hiscox, logo design services from 99 Designs, and $5,000 of cash or services from iSeed.