Microsoft ScaleUp Berlin – meet PhraseApp

The Microsoft ScaleUp program (previously known as Microsoft Accelerator) is designed for Series A startups and offers access to sales, marketing and technical support. Eligible startups partake in the immersive program at one of our eight global locations followed by ongoing support from a dedicated team of success managers. One of the ScaleUp locations is Microsoft ScaleUp Berlin, where a dedicated team around MD Iskender Dirik twice a year support a batch of up to 10 startups with dedicated coaching, training and technical support. In this blog series we will introduce one of the participating StartUps each Tuesday.

Dynport, the company behind PhraseApp, was founded in 2009. PhraseApp is an agile software localization platform that helps brands and tech companies around the world to speed up their internationalization and translation processes.

Customers around the world rely on PhraseApp as the most comprehensive and developer-friendly translation management solution, fulfilling the company’s mission of painless software localization.

Frederik Vollert, Co-Founder & CSO states that“We’re trying to become a leading software provider in the localization sector. Cooperating successfully with Microsoft is our first step towards this goal.”

60 seconds with PhraseApp

PhraseApp participated together with nine different Tech-Startups at the Microsoft ScaleUp Batch Week in Berlin. We have asked them some questions about the collaboration with Microsoft and their new learnings.

How are you involved with Microsoft ScaleUp?
Learning from Microsoft with its great experience and direct connections to companies is a huge opportunity for us as a young company. We have built a product that is very popular with software developers and startups. Now, we’re aiming to bring additional value to Microsoft’s customers so that we can prove that our business model is scalable and that our product helps enterprise and mid-market companies as well.

What was the biggest challenge for you before the start of the program – and have you overcome it yet?
Our challenge has been to communicate the benefits of our product to an audience outside of the software developer community. Microsoft brings with it access to a broader corporate audience and we’ve been working on finding the best possible integration with the Microsoft ecosystem. Our solution is a version of PhraseApp that runs on-premise inside our customer’s Azure cloud in combination with our Add-In for Visual Studio Code. Together it’s a great solution for independent software vendors looking to speed up their release processes as well as for global brands aiming to reach global audiences with innovative digital products faster.

What areas did the ScaleUp Batch Week help you the most?
The ScaleUp Batch Week gave us the possibility to work with internationally acclaimed coaches who are experts in their fields, such as the speaking coaches from Virtuozo or the negotiation specialist Daniel Reisner, which were amazing experiences for me and my team. In the following weeks we were able to refine on our value proposition with Oliver Morgan of Tailored Brands. He aided us through the process and helped us immensely with his clarity and advise. The work Tasja, Iskender, Philipp and Bernard put into this great program is simply stated awesome and we’re thankful for their advice and support.

In a nutshell: What makes the Microsoft ScaleUp special for you?
The high quality of the provided workshops and coachings mixed with the market know-how of the Microsoft organization stands out among programs for growth-stage startups. Among our cohort of startups there has been a great comradery from the beginning and it has been fun to share our challenges with them as well as learn from their experience.

What are your next steps?
We’re now taking the learnings from the ScaleUp program and are putting them into action to further grow as a company.

This blog post is part of a series of participants of the Microsoft ScaleUp Berlin Batch March-June 2018.

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