If you’ve been following the story of Mindie, then it’ll come as no surprise to learn that Mindie just raised $1.2 million from SV angels, Lower Case Ventures, David Tisch, Dave Morin & Slow Ventures, Betaworks, Pete Cashmore, Michael Arrington, Troy Carter, Chris Howard & Cashmere Entertainment, along with many other angels. The product, which launched just last October after the startup pivoted from Ever, a “moment publishing platform” earlier in the year, allows users to upload 7 second videos, backed by music sourced from iTunes free-to-use track previews, effectively creating a music video of your life.
I sat down with cofounder Stanislas Coppin (he is joined by Grégoire Henrion, Clément Raffenoux & Simon Corsin), to discuss the product’s evolution, and how they came to grow so quickly (you can see their activity on Twitter here). After launching Ever, the team noticed that the ‘moments’ people most shared were related to music, and, realizing the rest of the product wasn’t sticky enough, decided to strip out everything but the music moments. Something about Mindie’s full-screen swipe-able videos makes it very addictive – the average user swipes through 50-60 Mindie’s per day.
When the company realized it would need to scale up its activities, it went looking for funding in France. In lieu of a pitchdeck, they brought Mindie and demo’ed it – they were shown the door. Subsequently, the Mindie team went to the Silicon Valley and the first door they knocked on, that of SV Angels, was a winner. As Stan tells it, SV Angels intro’ed them to the entire Silicon Valley, which resulted in quite a number of high-profile Mindie users.Once word began, French VCs came back, but by then the round was overbooked (with an inflated valuation that comes with people getting excited about your product).
Today, Mindie is still working on polishing the product, and getting ready for a Mindie 2.0 launch that should come in the next few weeks. While the company isn’t disclosing user numbers, Mindie is seeing a 20% weekly growth, well above what Y Combinator’s Paul Graham says makes a company a startup.
The goal today: become MTV for Mobile. Mindie expects 1 Million users by the end of the year, after which they will likely raise another round to follow in the paths of Twitter, Path, Facebook, Pinterest & more.