1) You are co-founder of dialo.de and dealjaeger.de? Please tell us more
about these startups.

Dealjaeger.de is the shopping community where users can post the best
on- and offline deals. The community can then vote on all deals to
determine the best. But some worldwide unique features make
Dealjaeger.de really special: "Steal the Deal"/ A user posts a great
deal, but you know where to get it cheaper? Steal the deal from the user
and get all his points. "Jaeger des besten Deals"/ A reverse auction to
find the best deal for a given product. Right now we post one deal per
day and ask the community to find the best price for the product (winner
gets a Dealjaeger.de T-Shirt). Shortly everybody can post these kinds of
deals and promise a bounty to the user who finds the best deal. We will
enable everybody to become their own "Preisagentur"!

dialo.de is the Web2.0-like directory assistance in Germany. dialo.de
can be found under www.auskunft.de as well. The best German domain for
directory assistance. We just relaunched (Beta2.0) with new and improved
features. Right now we are getting great feedback for the relaunch. Our
users love the new "Suche in Karte" (search within map), the added city
guides, and that we include Google and Technorati results within their
searches.

2) Are they part of the same company? Why did you decide to start
another time consuming venture if you are working hard at dialo.de at
the same time?

No, both are stand-alone companies. dialo.de is a project of ICS
Internet Consumer Services GmbH (www.internetconsumerservices.com).
Dealjaeger.de is part of Dealjaeger GmbH i.G. Dealjaeger is just a great
idea. The market for it is so huge. See all the comparison shopping
players aournd. We just felt that space needed a revolution we hope to
create with Dealjaeger.

3) Who are the investors in dialo.de? You have a very interesting way of
financing a company - raising big stakes but promising not to dilute the
investor later on? Why this? Does it pay off?

When we initiated dialo.de we felt we needed a strong and reliable
partner to take on Gelbe Seiten, Germany´s yellow pages leader.
Bremen-based KPS Group made a great offer for a long-term cooperation we
could not resist. However, we have scaled the cooperation a little bit
back, as the market has become very competitive in Germany. That scaling
back allows us to realize Dealjaeger.de as well.

4) dialo.de has several Germany based competitors like Qype, Plazes,
Google Maps in Germany - why is Germany in such a rush suddenly to make
local search work? Why do you think dialo.de will succeed?

Indeed, the German market has turned highly competitive with the
deregulation mid of 2005. All the required data is pretty much for free
now and the German market is the second biggest in the world. So
everbody wants a piece of the cake. There are now a dozen relevant
players with money and access to a user base. So you need to
differentiate as a start-up. Qype is now more a Time Out magazine
written by users. Plazes has a global approach and is to some extent
similar to WAYN. We will follow the Onvista approach: Take on the big
guy (Gelbe Seiten) by building the greatest product and rely on word of
mouth!

5) Dealjaeger seems somewhat similar to kaboodle - but focuses more on
the community approach - do you think it will be a hit?

The feedback for Dealjaeger.de in Germany is just amazing. People just
love the "Steal the Deal" functionality. It´s like a game and appeals to
the competitive nature of all of us. So we are pretty different from
kaboodle. Dealjaeger is more for the savvy shopper. It´s about finding
great deals at great prices in a fun way!




6) What´s the upside for the users of Dealjaeger.de?

We will share the money generated through the click-outs with the
community. At start we will probably pay the best ten users per month.
That number will increase with time and traffic to 50 or 100

We also really appreciate getting feedback from early users - give it a try:

- URL: www.dealjaeger.de
- Username: "Creative"
- Password: "Weblogging"
- To register then go to link "Registrieren" in the upper right corner

7) What did you do before your actual companies?

Daniel and I founded venture-backed getgo.de in 2000 (in total we were
five founders). getgo.de became the e-commerce market leader for event
tickets (primary market) in Germany. It was sold at the end of 2002 to
CTS Eventim AG (number 2 worldwide behind Ticketmaster with 600+m EUR
market cap). Until beginning of last year Daniel and I were responsible
for CTS´s new media (primarily www.eventim.de & www.getgo.de) and
project management (primarily World Cup´06 ticketing) divisions. In
total we were responsible for over 100 employees. Daniel is also one of
the founders of GfeH (www.gfeh.de), one of Germany´s leading online
marketing agencies. I´m an investor in 100world (www.100world.de),
Germany´s leading SOA company for retails banks

8) What is your (long-term) goal as an entrepreneur?

To build a great company to work for and to change a relevant market
through innovation. I truly believe that great people and a good idea
will always succeed. And obviously we want to be successful with what we
are doing!

9) What is your most important lesson as an entrepreneur?

Finding great people. An A-list player is five times more productive
that your average Joe, but fortunately does not cost five times more ;-)
And is so much easier to manage...so it´s an easy investment decision.
Our initial hiring took pretty long, but we now have assembled a team of
A-list players.

Sven thanks a lot for taking the time!