Guest Blog from Team HipSnip

Remember these two? It’s Phil Woodward and Jos Shepherd from Team HipSnip who won the 2011 edition of the EAA. We touched base with them last week to see what they’ve been up to since the competition. Sounds like they’ve been busy!

Here are a few words from Phil:

Phil Woodward & Jos Shepherd, winners of EAA 2011

HipSnip has had a good year in 2012.

Following winning the EAA in June 2011 HipSnip raised an initial seed round of funding to further develop their shopping Q&A app. As the product and business developed, what became clear was that there were a number of potential commercial models that could be followed, beyond focusing purely on a consumer mobile app (which can be difficult and expensive to build).

This led to refocusing HipSnip's proposition on providing a shopping Q&A platform that could be embedded directly into retail and publisher websites, with both web and mobile interfaces. This approach paid off, with HipSnip being accepted onto Springboard in April 2012, one of Europe's top tech accelerator programmes that was hosted out of Google Campus.

This 12 week accelerator programme introduced the founders to over 140 top mentors and advisors, and helped to rapidly focus the proposition and introduce the company to new clients. HipSnip now has a very strong sales pipeline with a number of major retailers and magazine publishers.

In August it closed a second round of funding to support this sales pipeline, and it is about to deploy it's shopping Q&A platform for a major UK magazine publisher. In addition, in September, it won a place on Tradedoubler's Zoo Project. Tradedoubler is Europe's largest affiliate network, and the Zoo Project provides commercial support for a small number of innovative businesses operating in performance marketing.

The expectation is that the business will grow quickly over the next 12 months and has a very exciting future.

So, what do you say? Think you’ve got what it takes? What are you waiting for? Join EAA 2013 today!

About HipSnip:
HipSnip is a shopping Q&A platform which helps shoppers quickly decide what to buy and to buy more online. It is embedded into publisher and retailer websites and makes it easy for shoppers to get advice from a publisher's enthusiastic audience and from expert retail staff.
HipSnip helps their clients increase audience engagement by providing a fun social experience on the owner’s website.