Comments on: Is Stealth Startup Fruugo Stumbling Right Before Launch Day?

By: Finnish startup Fruugo avoids meltdown with approx. €1 million in bridge funding

Finnish startup Fruugo avoids meltdown with approx. €1 million in bridge funding — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 10:10:35 +0000

[...] company reportedly raised dozens of millions of euros, at one point flirted with an employee headcount of 150 to 160 people (including contractors) and [...]

By: Fruugo Debuts Closed Beta Of Highly Anticipated Social Shopping Service - 5th Edition | The Revolutioners

Sun, 01 Feb 2009 18:39:43 +0000

[...] (and first) time we wrote about Finnish stealth startupFruugo, we feared that they might bestumblingright before their expected launch at the upcoming SIME conference. The company was rumored to be [...]

By: Fruugo Debuts Closed Beta Of Highly Anticipated Social Shopping Service | 226bw Tech News Blog

Sat, 31 Jan 2009 19:24:48 +0000

[...] (and first) time we wrote about Finnish stealth startup Fruugo, we feared that they might be stumbling right before their expected launch at the upcoming SIME conference. The company was rumored to be [...]

By: Barclay Jiang

Fri, 30 Jan 2009 23:46:00 +0000

They should have started out building something that’s small and less ambitious.

By: Fruugo Debuts Closed Beta Of Highly Anticipated Social Shopping Service | All about MICROSOFT

Fri, 30 Jan 2009 15:20:40 +0000

[...] Last (and first) time we wrote about Finnish stealth startup Fruugo, we feared that they might be stumbling right before their expected launch at the upcoming SIME conference. The company was rumored to be [...]

By: Fruugo Debuts Closed Beta Of Highly Anticipated Social Shopping Service

Fruugo Debuts Closed Beta Of Highly Anticipated Social Shopping Service — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 15:17:55 +0000

[...] (and first) time we wrote about Finnish stealth startup Fruugo, we feared that they might be stumbling right before their expected launch at the upcoming SIME conference. The company was rumored to be [...]

By: Huugo

Huugo — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 11:30:06 +0000

Article about Fruugo in leading finnish business newspaper. It is on finnish but the future do not look so good: http://www.kaup...d=2008/11/16390

By: etui.se » SIME - Day 2

etui.se » SIME - Day 2 — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 14:34:25 +0000

[...] via Jaiku blir jag tipsad om att läsa om hur det egentligen verkar vara, [...]

By: Fruugo will do for online shopping what Malevich did for squares « New Practice

Wed, 12 Nov 2008 17:34:37 +0000

[...] uuteen ohjelmistoyhtiöön (TE 5.11.2007) Salamyhkäinen Fruugo pestaa staroja (M&M 8.5.2008) Rumors circling around Fruugo (Arctic Startup [...]

By: Vivian

Vivian — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 10:18:31 +0000

Looks like they’ll make a splash at Divia on 11th Nov. Finnish Link:

http://www.divi...uslaskenta.html

By: Jack DeNeut

Jack DeNeut — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 21:57:24 +0000

I worked with Tomas Zeman (commenter above), and it looks like they are trying to do exactly what we were trying to do seven years ago.

Here’s the patent filing* to prove it: http://appft1.u...=DN/20030144922 (reading the title alone will explain it).

*In 2004, I changed my last name from Schrantz back to my original last name of DeNeut.

By: Alex

Alex — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 19:07:43 +0000

So your target market is those with money burning holes in their pockets? Good luck with that in today’s economy.

By: Joshi

Joshi — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 18:02:30 +0000

One thing these kind of businesses need to keep in mind is the strength of your offline capability to get this business going. Online soultion is just a facilitator in these kind of models. Your actual business leans on your capability to execute this in actual world. Lets say if some one from Israel is going to order something. Who/which vendor is going to deliver the product? What are his delivery strengths? etc…

By: Fabio De Bernardi

Fabio De Bernardi — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 17:58:10 +0000

@Taneli Tikka: nice post you wrote and great CV/experience… if you plan to come in London be in touch for some business talk and a few drinks!

I admit I haven’t heard of Fruugo before and now I’m quite curious to see what are they developing.
This sort of news are bittersweet for bootstrapped start ups as you wonder what you could do with a few millions in the bank… well, if you can’t control your nerves maybe you end up losing them!

However, the online shopping space is rich of opportunities, it’s just a matter of cracking that space open and I’m sure that we’ll see new billion-dollar businesses there!
My 2 cents… I co-founded a social shopping site aimed at product discovery, say StumbleUpon for consumer products and although we don’t sell products directly our goal is to connect people to great products they wouldn’t have searched for. http://www.veedow.com/hello

By: tomas zeman

tomas zeman — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 17:08:39 +0000

I have been working in a company, that was planning to do exactly the same stufff as descripbed. it was in 2001. (cross border and multi currency e-shop)
Its not as easy as it looks like and very expensive to build.
But the current exchange rates and Euro can help a lot.

By: Chris Smith

Chris Smith — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 16:41:22 +0000

Yeah should have gone the whole way and bought the boo.com domain name as well for their launch. At least the CEO will get to write a book after it all goes bad. Fire up those private Jet planes and massive teams of people that just arnt needed. You cant buy the net….

By: George

George — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 15:12:32 +0000

Its sounds like they are starting to big, I think startups need to build a solid foundation and move from there. That’ll lead to better execution. They probably have a great idea but need more focus

By: Scott Jones

Scott Jones — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 14:47:50 +0000

Nice quote on the site

“Fruugo will do for online shopping what George Bush did for America.”

FAIL

By: Anonymous ex-boo coward

Anonymous ex-boo coward — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 13:27:02 +0000

Funnily enough, one of the biggest problems at the original boo.com was Finnish. The words are so bleedin’ long they had to redesign the front end to fit all the characters in. And filing VAT receipts in Finland…jeez.

Saying you’re going to be as big as Google is a. dumb b. just asking for comeuppance.

By: lukas

lukas — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 12:57:14 +0000

ah ok..thanks..apparently i am too young to know about that

By: Taneli Tikka

Taneli Tikka — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 12:30:39 +0000

Nice to receive a mention here on this post, especially considering that parts of the text (like the intro for Ollila and Siilasmaa) are about one-to-one from my original blog entry. Thank you for the attention.

The speculation around Fruugo continues. I wold LOVE to see them succeed and certainly think that there’s plenty of problems to solve in E-Commerce and money to be made in getting them solved. It’s a bold & risky venture, all the reasons to like it more and cheer them on!

By: Tonio

Tonio — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 12:30:34 +0000

lukas: Andy is referring to what boo.com used to be pre-bubble. http://en.wikip...rg/wiki/Boo.com

By: velmu

velmu — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 12:05:25 +0000

This has got to be a troll. Well, I bit.

By: Brent

Brent — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 11:47:34 +0000

They’ve already got issues just with their pre-sale landing page so i can’t even imagine what hell the dev team must be going through right now with the back-end to try and get this out on time.

Andy-
This is exactly what maybe 20-30 companies (most heavily funded) have tried to do over the last 5 years even. But yeah, boo was one of the first to try and use flash for their product display…. e-commerce platforms aren’t really the strongest of markets to be trying to jump into right now.. You’ve got all the really great open-source (or practically free) ones + then there’s always the old dogs who’ve outlived a lot like volusion (sp?).
should be interesting to see though.

By: lukas

lukas — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 11:41:39 +0000

@Andy boo.com is a travel site?!