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David Handlos (Stocard) speaks at Mannheim Founder Talk

David Handlos (Stocard) speaks at Mannheim Founder Talk

Yesterday evening (Monday, March 11), David Handlos of Stocard returned to his home university and spoke at the  MCEI Founder Talk. He revealed intriguing insights about the marketing opportunities in digital business start-ups. Further, he motivated students to found their own company instead of working in Investment Banking or Consulting after finishing their studies in Mannheim. More than 80 students attended the Founder Talk and had a lot of pressing questions for David at the subsequent discussion and get-together. We thank David a lot for the highly elaborate 90-minute talk and answering individual questions on starting-up and Stocard for yet another hour.

David Handlos’ (co-founder) start-up Stocard is a highly successful Mannheim-based start-up, which developed an app to ban plastic loyalty cards from customer wallets. After coming up with the idea for Stocard on a trip to Australia, David Handlos and two of his friends, Bjoern Goß and Florian Barth, started working on the start-up project part-time. After finishing their degrees at the University of Mannheim and at the LSE, the three of them started developing Stocard fulltime and were able to gain significant funding.

Following David’s experience, marketing of an app-based start-up should aim at utilizing minimum costs and founders should always ask themselves whether pricey marketing measures are actually efficient. For Stocard, the three founders used measures of Public Relations by contacting different German media formats and constantly touching base to inform and to finally get featured ("be nice and persistent"). In addition to PR work, they used Facebook and Google adverts, which did not prove to be very efficient at the beginning. One of the other measures Stocard employs, is optimizing its appearance in the App Stores by dedicated analytics and search optimization. 

The Founder Talk with David turned out to be a great success with interesting new insights and highly inspired students and listeners, as revealed by the Q&A and follow-up discussions. We thank David for this outstanding talk and support and will keep you updated about Stocard’s further development and success.

For more information and pictures visit https://www.mcei.de/starting-up/founder-talks/founder-talk-9

 

For more information on Stocard visit: www.stocard.de 

 

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Sponsors

  • University of Mannheim
  • Institut für Mittelstandsforschung
  • Gründerverbund
  • ESF
  • Europäische Union
  • Baden-Württemberg - Ministerium für Finanzen und Wirtschaft
  • Absolventum