Category Archives: referama

@StartSpain #AngelSchool: 101 Investing in Internet Startups (Powered by @Zoomry)

Posted by admin on 14/02/2012 None comments

Howdy friends!

Nast Marrero, here! Last week we launched Startup Spain‘s first program: the Angel School. Our take is: it’s been a great beginning for Startup Spain. We had more than 60 attendees of which more than 2/3 were potential investors.

This is an unusually large display of interest in the Spanish investment arena, where most events see no more than 20 or some participants maximum. Mentoring Angel Investors to better navigate their deal analysis is a keystone in fostering ITC startups in Spain. The program was a real marathon: 10+ hours of training (don´t worry we let them stop for lunch ;) . Thankfully, our first group of graduates proved to be up to the challenge, taking advantage of all the different elements of the day.

Missing from the program were the typical made-up miracle cures and formulas. We strived to keep the content practical, following the Tetuan Valley Way with hands-on exercises and significant mentors’ experiences

The event was hosted @ the awesome facilities of Madrid International Lab and kicked off by Iñaki Ortega, Director of Madrid Emprende, and one of the main forces behind Startup Spain. In his opening speech, Iñaki brought up the importance of joining private and public efforts to facilitate and develop entrepreneurial activity, and the key role those efforts will play in the long-run global competitiveness of Spain.

Two roundtables with rockstar speakers cherry-topped the program: one from Investors already Angel Investing and another from Entrepreneurs. Each of them gave invaluable insights on what it is they look for, value, and ask during an early stage investment.

The investors’ roundtable was moderated by our very own Alex Barrera (co-founder of Tetuan Valley & CEO of Press42), and formed by:

On the other corner, moderated by Ricardo Fernandez (director of Step One Spain), the entrepreneurs’ roundtable formed by:

Both roundtables aimed to give participants a overview of the ecosystem, showcasing startups from their seed stage through founders that have already made an exit, with similar ranges of experiences coming from the Angel investors, from managers that were just launching their first investment through those who have been in the game for a while.

Given the success and the of the program and the importance we place on such event to foster investment culture we’re already iterating on the feedback from the first event to run a LEGENDARY second edition of Startup Spain Angel School on March 22nd. Wanna get your tickets? Check here!

We had the pleasure of following all the twitter interactions of the event through Zoomry, now in it´s beta stage. The product is awesome and if you check #AngelSchool Social Media @ AngelSchool.Zoomry.com… You can see for yourself they’re up to something big!

You might want to check the slides of our presentations in our slideshare or check the pictures in our flickr group.

Thank you for reading… Bestest!

Developer’s Toolbox

Posted by referama on 10/12/2011 None comments

These series of guest posts are written by the teams attending the Tetuan Valley Startup School 2011 Fall edition. This post is written by the Referama team, formed by Alejandro Riera and Fernando Sáinz.

This is a matter of personal taste, but there are still a few recommendations that we wanted to share and that we would’ve wanted someone to tell us:

Tools for the Team
Git – absolutely great for Source Control. It’s fast, takes little space, works offline, let’s you branch and merge painlessly and instantaneously, and gives you access to the Amazing World Of Github. As Philip said, Github is awesome, it gives you hope on people’s ability to build great products, and provides you with a nice free mac app. Git may not look so good at first, with his rather unfriendly command interface, but you only need to know the very basics to enjoy it, take a look at these tutorials.

For Project Management, we tried Bugzilla and Trac but ended up with Pivotal Tracker, really nice for agile development, and we have an eye on a new free player Trello. Some times just a nice shared google doc will do, just keep track of where you spend your time on, and have a feasible “next task” always available. This allows you to know your real speed, be selective and avoid deadlocks.

For working remotely, give a try to Google Hangouts with Extras. It gives you cam, docs, simple drawings and screen sharing. Increasing the font size it’s often a good idea.

For mockups, first notebook and pen, then balsamiq, then the rest.

Shared Dropbox Folders – they are great, just don’t use them for source control.

Tools for the back

A quick check on Katelyn’s list:

- Source Control, Github, done

- Real Time Alerts, try something basic like pingdom to know that your site is up, and a tool like Airbrake (rails, iOs, js) to handle the errors more wisely.

- Deployment Scripts: tools like capistrano will let you update your server in seconds and – even more importantly – rollback automatically to a working version when you screw things up. Add some backup routines into the mix for sanity.

- Continuous Integration: just start testing. At first seems like a pain, but just try it. Pick a simple feature and make a small test to see if it works. Soon, you’ll be enjoying the sight of a machine performing hundreds of tests on your app at your command. We know you’ll like it.

Tools for the front
- Firebug or Chrome developer Tools (check the videos) are lifesavers, but we bet you already use them.

- Give a try to HAML. Some people love it, some hate it, but thanks to it our html is twice shorter and four times more readable. Takes 1 minute to learn, make up your own mind.

- CSS: there are so many terrible things to say… we want to make a tips&tricks crash course in Carabanchel this month, for those who already know it well, it’s worth checking out compass and html5-boilerplate to see a summary of snippets and good practices, even if you don’t plan to use these frameworks.

Learn and Ask
- Find blogs, podcasts and screencasts for your languages of choice. The last ones are just incredible to learn hand by hand from experts (for rails & js, check out railscasts and peepcode)

- Find out about other projects stacks (webpulp.tv , highscalability) and directories of libraries with ratings (ruby-toolbox is amazing), join a google group of programmers and ask them about their choices and experience after you’ve done your research.

- Get to know your community and check that your libraries are well supported. Go to github if you are lucky and check the last update time, the number of watcher and forks, the opened issues.

Before finishing this post, just three more quick tips: for backend stuff stackoverflow is great, but sometimes you may get better results adding serverfault to the google search. For osX, iterm2 is awesome. And do yourself a favor and use a mail service such as Amazon SES, spending days trying to fight spam folders it’s not worth it.

Launching a startup is impossible (without a thermal detonator)

Posted by referama on 26/11/2011 1 comments

These series of guest posts are written by the teams attending the Tetuan Valley Startup School 2011 Fall edition. This post is written by the Referama team, formed by Alejandro Riera and Fernando Sáinz.

Lately, we’ve been laughing at the never ending pile of difficulties in order to run a startup. It’s the same kind of laughter that you have when you dive through a huge wave in the sea just to meet her bigger sister and the rest of the family upon emerging. Philip’s last article encouraged us to resist the ‘Trough of Sorrow’ that follows a successful press coverage. Great, if we are lucky enough to get Techcrunched we’ll be closer to facing the “crash of ineptitude” and “wiggles of false hope”. Only then we will be know if we can make it out alive from the the valley of despair and the temple of doom.

At least it is becoming clear that this is an adventure. Who is picking up the names? We were happily thinking about early adopters when we discovered, The Chasm. If you manage to attract some people you’ll walk directly into the pitfall of death, also known as the inevitable phase of annihilation or destruction of hope. Yes, we will launch a startup and enroll with the lemmings, awesome.

But hey, failing is good, investors love people who have already failed, and we’ll have better chances on our fourth attempt. When you think about it, it is tempting to crash our 2nd startup just a little faster.

Everyday you do your best at reconciling certain contradictions like, “don’t focus on money now, you still don’t know your clients or product” and “tell me your electricity expenses in five years” .. “ do not take friends as founders” and “you have to trust and know your founders like the back of your hand because a startup is like two years in a submarine”. Focus but do twenty things at a time, listen to feedback but stick to what you think is best, etc.

Competitors are a another good reason to give up before you start. Do you have lots of them? That’s bad. They probably have a couple million in funding, and have been trained by Spartans with years of experience. And if there are very few competitors, even worse, this means nobody cares. But, if choose to do it anyhow, clones will blossom like mushrooms overnight ready to surpass you.

So people will say, “Google, Apple, Facebook or any of those could develop what you do with the snap of their fingers”, and then ask “What is your unfair advantage?”. A good anwer would be “our madness”. We wished we could say “our grand network of partnerships” or “because we’re holding a thermal detonator”. At the end, any edge we may have can be matched by others, but our strength is to want something to exist and to be stubborn enough to create it one way or another. If you don’t want to put in that in your canvas, you can say that being small lets you evolve faster and try new things. Now you sound like a mutant cockroach, only with shorter life expectations.

Trying to build a startup is impossible. But you are going to attempt it, till the death. Literally. 99 of startups result in a nuclear explosion, and the remaining 1 percent are not as fortunate.

Being part of the Tetuan Valley Startup School and el Vivero Carabanchel, made us realize that the best thing before vanishing off the face of earth is to be surrounded by other people who are going mental, and struggling just like us to make something new on their own. It helps to share each others frustration and enthusiasm. We work together on holidays; we discuss each others challenges and we will laugh together when we see the next tidal wave coming. Without a support group like this, we would explode before we even got started.

Please make it profitable

Posted by referama on 08/11/2011 None comments

These series of guest posts are written by the teams attending the Tetuan Valley Startup School 2011 Fall edition. This post is written by the Referama team, formed by Alejandro Riera and Fernando Sáinz.

It’s been already some years for us dreaming and struggling to build a good startup and over this time we’ve changed our minds about what a great business model implies.

When you’ve got no money but you’ve got time and you’re good at learning by yourself you feel that you have a great opportunity to jump right in and launch your own startup without worrying about how successful or profitable it might be.

That’s a fantastic starting point. Then, you set your mind and you put yourself on the path of releasing early releasing often. This gives you the freedom to experiment and iterate at your own pace, trusting you’ll find a way to better server your users. Business Plans are hypothetical and time consuming, let’s focus on making something great and figure the business model later.

 

 

- Ah, so you are a researcher? That's cool. What do you want to find? - Cash

 

 

After some time working hard you decide (or need) to make your first business plan (BP) and it’s a very interesting, frustating and surrealistic experience. People know that specially for startups BP’s are “numerology”, you summon your powers of foreseeing and command your spreadsheet to evolve your sad looking numbers to money making beasts. It would be actually fun if you didn’t have to face some cryptical and extremely boring terminology, and market data were not that hard to find.

Once you’ve finished and you’re amazed about how much -crap and fantasy- intuition you applied in some chapters, you see that you’ve slightly changed your mind. Now you’re a little worried that you might not get to those numbers. 300.000 users, or maybe 80.000, or maybe 10,… In that moment you want to know whether you can actually afford what you’re doing. You want to trust in your fictitious plan. And you wat to find out in which point it makes at least a sustainable business.

Two years ago we had a great experience in Bordeaux, France, working in the Pepinier d’Enterprise UNITEC. We could write a book about it (startup + Erasmus, you know what we’re talking about, Philip ; ) We met some wonderful people like Oliver Fry, who among many things told us to consider the opportunity cost. Even if you can afford a good level of uncertainty, wouldn’t you like to know that the 2-3 years that you might end up devoting to your project will come to a good end? Wouldn’t you like to know that you are not losing the opportunity to do another crazy great project that might have better chances of success?

We put two years of our lives into wolty, our previous startup, which we loved and we are eager to improve whenever we can, but which still required lots and lots of work to (maybe) become profitable. The Tetuan Valley crew have helped us to clarify ourselves. They have always encouraged us to pursue whatever crazy thing we had in our head, but also to find the connexion between those ideas and what customers will be willing to pay for.

We saw that if we wanted to make a living out doing what we liked the most, we needed better numbers, and we started Referama full of excitement and with better perspectives.

Looking for money is not something dirty, nor it should be an annoyance in your plans (hell, we’d like to never need money, we are open to lifetime donations). If your project starts as a hobby, perfect, but if you want to completely commit on what you wish to do, you’ve got to find a way to support it.

The best thing about building something out of an idea is to see how it reaches other people and how they like it. Getting people to use your free website is hard. To build something so useful that people is willing to pay for, is absolutely wonderful.

We are tired of seeing good ideas ending up in the trash. People get you excited with projects that you would like to have already available. In this TVSS edition there are plenty of ideas and projects that could improve our lives and we want them to succeed. There’s too many projects that would improve the world only if they had the resources. Please find the way to get the money to make them happen. Please, make them profitable.