It’s all about luck – and an open mind! When we decided to apply for EXIST we had to find a mentor from a university in Munich. This is one condition for getting financial support from EXIST. The mentor should be an expert on our field of business activity. However, finding an expert on the virtual goods business in Germany isn’t that easy! But, we had luck and a smart trainee, Matthias.

Matthias is doing his Diploma thesis about virtual goods in online communities at SnipClip and he was interested in participating at the Virtual Goods 2008 conference. On the conference website he discovered that Prof. Dr. Thomas Hess, who is a member of the conference’s program committee, is also the director of the Institute for Information Systems and New Media of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München! So we emailed Prof. Hess, met him a week later, pitched our idea to him and finally we had found our mentor!

Prof. Hess is the perfect mentor. He immediately understood our concept and business model, but even more important he gave us valueable feedback and provided us with insights about the media industry. Even more better, he and his team meet us every two months to discuss relevant topics. So we did not just found a mentor but a mentoring team! Here you see a picture of Prof. Hess and his team (not all are involved with us).

Of course, the team of Prof. Hess will also benefit from SnipClip. We will provide them with insights on our virtual goods business. I hope there will be one day also a scientific publication covering those insights. Be sure, we will let you know when it is published. So stay tuned and have a good time!