Tell us more about Newswhip, how did it all start?

Andrew Pitching at Blackbox Connect

I met my cofounder Paul four years ago. We knew of each other beforehand, we both had startups before and neither of them were doing so well. He was writing news articles for the Irish market and I was working on a location based deals platform. Neither worked out so we met up and started discussing new possibilities. His journalists were obsessed with the social scores they got on the content created, they were always refreshing the page to see how they were doing in terms of views. We thought — How interesting would it be to see which guys do the best on social? And this is now Newswhip started.

Initially for normal news readers, but wasn’t popular enough. We built new features, so journalists and media people started using it and we’re now monitoring all online content and we rank it in real time, with a much wider reach.

What is Newswhip’s vision? Which direction will you be growing in?

Newswhip’s tracking tool: Spike

We want to monitor all of the world’s content and see what people care about. We do want to add more product and analytics, get more statistics on top of the real time data, include demographics and many more features. It’s important to remain very agile constantly, we’re still a startup even though we’re in our growth phase.

How is this market evolving?

It is certainly growing, content is massive. It’s getting a lot of attention from big players. Even high competition is a good sign. We are still maintaining our leader position and keep up with what happens as we grow.

What were the major milestones you went through while developing?

The Newswhip team

Quite a few I must admit. The idea was really exciting and I got into it right away, I wasn’t going to start anything unless it was a good idea. Because we previously had startups, we had no money. We needed very early initial investment though and were lucky enough to get some from NDRC Launchpad. They gave us some money, taught us a few things and the idea had enough legs to close our very first round. After that we went to Dogpatch. There, we closed our second round and that kept us going until the most recent round. The company got into profitability so we were more flexible with picking the investors we want to partner with.

This time around, we had a few VCs on board as well as The Associated Press, Matter, Tribal.vc, Social Starts, and 500 Startups. We also went on Angelist and trended to the #1 position. In the end, we were able to raise 1,6 M to secure growth in the next months to come.

What advice would you give to young entrepreneurs?

The most likely thing that will make an entrepreneur successful is perseverance. Both myself and Paul have been fighting it out in the trenches for a while before we got this one right. You have to be able to accept that most likely your first company will not make it. If I was to do it all over again, I would be more open minded. You think your idea is great but opportunities come from anywhere. Persevere and think of ways to go around obstacles and make things happen.

Another very important thing is your team. Find talented people, attract them to your idea, it can be very tricky to get the right people early on so they need to identify with your vision.

Last but not least — dream big, there’s no point wasting your time with the small stuff.

You can follow Andrew at @andrewmull or @NewsWhip.