Tag Archives: ideas

Stay on Target

Posted by holoholo on 25/04/2012 None comments

These series of guest posts are written by the teams attending the Tetuan Valley Startup School 2012 Spring Edition. This post is from the holoholo team, formed by Jay Hum, Gonzalo Calle and Joaquín Grech

Since becoming a member of the Tetuan Valley Startup School 2012 Spring Edition, which started on March 7, we have pitched at least once, sometimes twice a week. In addition to the formal three, five, or seven minute pitches to professors, mentors, entrepreneurs and potential investors, we have given spontaneous one minute elevator pitches to people we’ve run into or just happened to meet at various networking events. We have also recorded a pitch and posted it online as part of the application process to some accelerator/incubator programs.

Before each pitch, we spent at least a couple of hours refining the slide deck, rehearsing the presentation, and preparing answers for the Q&A session. After each pitch, we received a lot of feedback from various sources. Some feedback was positive, which was good because it validated that we were on the right path and the audience understood our product. Some feedback was negative, which was also good because we then knew that we had a gap to fill or had to describe something more clearly. Finally, some feedback was contradictory, which is not good because it leaves us wondering which direction should we take in the pitch and/or product. There is nothing worse than hearing from someone that he/she clearly sees the product/market fit and the huge upside, and then turning to someone else and seeing a confused look on his/her face.

Yesterday morning, we had a 15-minute meeting with an individual from the US who has been on both sides of the table. He has been an entrepreneur and is now a Managing General Partner and Managing Director for two venture capital funds. After we gave him the elevator pitch, he said: “Right, so it’s like a combination of X and Y, but with Z.” He immediately got the concept and said that he really like the idea. Since he understood the product so quickly, the rest of the meeting was used to discuss customer acquisition strategy and costs.

Contrast this to yesterday afternoon, when we had a five-minute pitch to a VC from Israel. After given the same pitch that has been refined over the past month and a half, the VC started the Q&A session with “I don’t get what your product is or what you are trying to do.” Something you never want to hear from a VC! Needless to say, we were shocked and taken back by this feedback, which was completely unexpected.

The more you talk to people about your idea and the more you pitch, the more feedback and opinions you are going to get. It is always much easier to criticize and knock something down than it is to build something of value that lasts. Net net, there comes a point where you have to ignore all the noise, focus on the core of you idea and product, and stay on target.

Be open; there is good-will in the Entrepreneurial World

Posted by Letzee on 20/03/2012 None comments

These series of guest posts are written by the teams attending the Tetuan Valley Startup School 2012 Spring Edition. This post is from the Letzee team, formed by Victor M. Lozada and Juan Diego González.

My professor of Entrepreneurship at the MBA program of IE – Hana Milanov – sent us a questionnaire the day before the first class asking us about our entrepreneurial experience and if we had any idea for a new venture. The last question was whether students were willing to share this idea with the rest of the class. By that time, I did have an idea, not related to Letzee – that project came at the end of the program, and wasn’t my own, but my partner´s, yet I answered that I didn´t want to share it. Why? Well, there is a preconception that your business idea is the backbone of the success of your future company and that it is somehow very “steal-able”. I could not have been more wrong.

After one year doing the program, changing my business ideas every week, talking with really experienced entrepreneurs, I realized that the more people you talk about your ideas the better! When you have an idea, that idea is based on YOUR experience, YOUR abilities, YOUR notion of a market, and YOUR creativity. I´m not saying it couldn’t be enough with that to start, but only rare people can mix all these attributes, have an epiphany, and be able to execute, and that is the reality. But look how the “strength” of the conception of an idea changes if it comes from experienceS, the abilities of a TEAM, market notionS, and the explosion of creativity that comes when PEOPLE get together. Believe me when I say that when you get inputs from different people about your idea there is only one direction to go – improvement. Of course, you have to evaluate from whom you ask opinions. I was lucky enough to be surrounded during this period of my life by like-minded individuals with a collage of business experiences, whose feedbacks are more than valuable.

Also, something remarkable happens when you start sharing your ideas; a network of people willing to help you starts to expand, and believe me when I say that there is a LOT of people out there willing to help you launch your idea – there is indeed good-will in the entrepreneurial world. When Juan Diego Gonzalez, my partner, and I created the “draft” of the idea that would be the base of Letzee, we went to our Internet As a Sales Channel professor at IE, Fernando Aparicio, to get his feedback. Not only we got it, but he put us in contact with Agora News, who are experts in video streaming, who in turn put us in contact with Kubide, the company that we are proud to call our technological partner in Letzee. Kubide in turn put us in contact with Tetuan Valley, and here we are! And the more people we get in contact with, the more help we find, it´s like you open a door of a room full of support.

So, the conclusion, don´t be like me at the beginning of my MBA, be “open” with your idea, and always look for help, even though you think you don´t need it, just look for it, because when you do, you´ll be surprise of what you find.

Understanding the creativity: the lateral thinking

Posted by Jorge Muñoz on 19/03/2012 None comments

These series of guest posts are written by the teams attending the Tetuan Valley Startup School 2012 Spring Edition. This post is from the HowMaths team, formed by Jorge Muñoz.

One of the critical points when you want to start a business is the idea behind and how it solves a problem. But the key factor to succeed in time is the evolution of the idea. Nowadays the world changes faster than ever and so the companies and their ideas must do.

As humans we try to evolve the ideas in a rational way, this is named the vertical thinking. We get an idea and then start to change some parts of the idea to make it better. We improve the idea in small steps, keeping the idea workig during all the process. What we are doing in this way is keeping the inital constraints in the idea and avoiding the innovation. What the lateral thinking does is to remove the constraints to approach the problem in a different way. Lateral thinking gets the idea and changes one of its main features trying to approach the problem in a completely different way. It repeats the process changing more parts of the idea and it does not mather if the idea is unviable at some point, what matters is that we can carry out the final idea.

The brain is lazy and we are genetically prepared to reply with our past experience, in a scientist way: with the sorted temporal patterns we have learnt. Here an example, if we see the next sequence of letters:

A B C D E F

our mind is going to think in the letter G. If we see the sequence:

H I J R L M N

an alarm in our brain is fired and we focus our attention in the letter R because it does not match with the learned pattern. And something curios happen with the next sequence:

U T S R Q P O

we see the pattern but we need to start from letter A and repeat all the abecedary to know which is the next letter in the sequence.

Brain is lazy and is not prepare to innovate is prepare to remmember. Let’s see a visual problem where will be very difficult find a solution without lateral thinking. Try to find a parallelogram with the next figures:

The solution is very easy, your brain have built it automatically:

But now it is a new piece (something change int he problem you company is trying to solver):

Our vertical thinking says that we cannot place the piece in our solution. Our logic says there is no way to do it. Here is where we have to apply the lateral thinking. We have evolved the idea into a rectangle and we are trying to fit the new piece in the rectangle. But the constraint of the problem is that the solution must be a parallelogram. So, why don’t try to find a solution that is not a rectangle. This question will open our mind and help us to see other points of view. One of then can lead us to a completely new solution:

Here are some tools of lateral thinking we can use find new ideas or modify the ones we have:

Alternatives / Concept Extraction: Extract the concepts of an idea and search for different ways for develop the concepts.

Focus: Focus on areas that no one else has bothered to think about, so you can see the problem in a different way and find new ideas.

Challenge: A challenge, even those ones that are imposible to achieve, helps your mind to break with the initial constraints and other limits you set.

Random Entry: Choose a random stimulus (object, picture, sound, word, other idea,…) and think about how it can help to solve the problem or how can it be added to the idea.

Remember, the best way to find new ideas is not continuing with the old ones but change the bases of the idea and approach from different points of view. Don’t let your mind think as always by default and break the rules.

Its not only about you

Posted by Hukuju on 29/11/2011 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 Hukuju team, formed by Álvaro García, Joaquín Sánchez, Fernando Caballero and Fernando Amenedo.

Some times we think that we can build something that will change the world. But, have we ever thought about building something that will save the world? It seems that every young and enthusiastic entrepreneur, like us, wants to make something that makes him, hopefully, lots of money. And of course, the sooner the better.

How great is to find someone that with the same talent, enthusiasm and dedication tries to build something for the benefit of others. Let’s do some autocritic today.

“By the middle of the century, one in three people on the planet will be living in inadequate, often illegal housing,” says Cameron Sinclair. Cameron is the co-founder of Architecture for Humanity and Open Architecture Network, one of the greatest ideas that we have seen lately. Open Architecture Network was Launched in 2007 and has become one of the worldsʼ largest resource for humanitarian and community led design solutions. It has around 5000 designers that give a damn and over 25,000 projects. The Open Architecture Network is a collaborative database which Architecture for Humanity hopes will make it easy for architects, designers and engineers from around the world to freely share their work, evaluate and modify existing solutions, and collaborate around new approaches. Think of it as the Wikipedia of humanitarian design.

It is very interesting to to face such a great “competitor” (as this one is for us), someone, somewhere is doing something similar to help others. This doesn’t discourage us, and if you find something so molar in your case it shouldn’t. If you thought you had to learn from your competitors, well, you have to learn more from the ones that do the same, but don´t compete directly with you. Look up for three things:

1. Those guys are doing something for free, to help others. they probably have none or few resources. So, check that out, they still might be doing something great.

2. Are we accomplishing something substancial? In the case of Open Architecture Network they were are creating the database that will come from Architecture for Humanity itself. What are we creating? How useful is it.

3. There needs to be an impulse that moves you, something that you might call more “philosophical”. Something that can make you work for hours, days, years, just loosing money and sometimes patience.

There are really great stuff and great people working out there on ideas that can challenge you to aim bigger than you ever thought. Those are the ideas you should be looking for.

Another way of communication is possible

Posted by Coomunity on 12/11/2011 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 Coomunity team.

When we look around as citizens, users and professionals dedicated to new technologies, one of the questions we can do to ourselves is how the Internet has helped us to improve our daily life?

We can name a number of applications that have made our lives easier and more comfortable. We can communicate with people anywhere in the world in no time, work with them, share what is going on or what we like, and be closer to our circles. But… what is happening locally?

Most of the time we dont know who lives next door, for example, i have never met any of the neighbors in my building. How can we build bridges there?

In coomunity we believe another way of relationship is possible. With our project we intend people who live nearby stay informed and organized and give them the possibility to find services the neighborhood has. Anytime. Anywhere.
It’s time to look up and start working. The communication is one of the strongest needs of human being, so let’s see how can technology help us and make our lifes a bit easier.

We can!