START-UP NATION:Dublin-based communications software company BriteBill

‘I CAN’T STRESS the point enough – whatever you think you are starting is wrong,” says Alan Coleman, chief executive and founder of BriteBill, one of the Irish firms showing its wares at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week.

It’s a piece of advice Coleman learnt the hard way. In late 2009, he founded the company as GetItKeepIt with chief technology officer Jim Hannon, who he had worked with at the mobile payments software Macalla. The idea was for a consumer-focused website that would enable people to manage, analyse and pay all their bills in a single place.

Although the company launched its platform successfully and signed deals with Vodafone and waste collector Oxigen, which gave it a share of the savings those companies made by moving their customers to electronic billing, Coleman and Hannon realised a consumer web play out of Ireland was unlikely to succeed.

“Venture capitalists don’t invest in new consumer brands in a market as small as this,” says Coleman. In contrast, three very similar services to GetItKeepIt were founded in Silicon Valley in the same year and all raised at least $20 million on the back of their business plan.

Instead of targeting consumers directly, the company rebranded as BriteBill and now provides its platform directly to companies issuing bills – with telecoms and financial services the current sweet spots for the start-up. BriteBill’s technology is not about the creation of the bill, something which is addressed by incumbent mature systems, but about their presentation and delivery.

“We had learnt about the vagaries of consumer billing and there are three really important factors; getting the information to the customer so you get paid on time, using the bill as an opportunity to sell additional services, and making sure its explained in such a way that the customer doesn’t feel the need to contact the call centre,” explains Coleman.

He says BriteBill can work with “any mass biller”. Customers are using its service on consumer and corporate parts of the business and for printed and online billing.

The other side to the business involves white-labelling the GetItKeepIt platform so that postal services can provide it as a service to consumers. With their traditional business of delivering letters in terminal decline, more innovative postal groups are looking to new revenue sources.

“Our solution requires them to cannibalise some of their business – as it moves people to paperless bills – but if they don’t do something, they will passively watch their business disappear.”

The postal side of the business received a major boost last year when BriteBill signed an exclusive global agreement

with management consultants Accenture which will sell the software into its client base.

As a result Coleman, who early in his career was an Accenture consultant, has spent the past 12 months meeting postal services around the world. He says it is unprecedented for a small Irish start-up to secure a partnership with Accenture, which normally brokers such deals with more established players – although he concedes his knowledge of the firm helped. “I know the eco-system and culture of Accenture, which was very helpful in knowing how to engage with them,” says Coleman.

Originally backed with seed funding funding of €400,000 from Enterprise Ireland, BriteBill raised €1.2 million from the Ulster Bank Diageo Venture Fund, which is managed by NCB Ventures, in late 2010. Coleman says the company is close to closing another “relatively small” investment round.

“A lot of the opportunities we are working on are still emerging so this will enable us to prove things this year and get a better pre-money valuation next year.”

Although Coleman says the company, now with 30 staff split between its Dublin HQ and a development centre in Shanghai, still feels like a start-up, it does not have many characteristics typical of a tech venture.

“We are focused on getting to the break-even point and having the metrics of a successful business. In the US, there is a bias towards not having those metrics and over-investing in the hope of an outsize return.”

While conceding there is a buzz about the start-up scene in Ireland, with both veterans and novices sharing advice and information, Coleman is not getting carried away.

“Running a start-up requires a lot of humility,” he advises.