Tag Archives: innovation

Tetuan Valley for Dummies: Notes from the playbook

Posted by Katelyn on 16/05/2012 None comments

This except is from the “Tetuan Valley for Dummies” Playbook. To download a free copy of the playbook click here.

Part I
Section 1. The Origin of Tetuan Valley

It is difficult to imagine it now, but back in 2009 there weren’t many events or meetups in Madrid for entrepreneurs, far less when specifically talking about tech entrepreneurs. It was quite a lonesome, non-collaborative and non-supportive environment in which the few people that dared to try to start up were constantly being discouraged and mocked by even their closest friends and family members…

….Small numbers of entrepreneurs translated into a small number of events. In one of the few events there was at this time, Iniciador, Tetuan Valley was born. Luis Rivera and Bernardo de Tomás, the founders of Okuri Ventures, both regularly attended this monthly event. At Iniciador, an entrepreneur gives a keynote talk and afterwards the attendees go to a nearby pub to grab a beer and network amongst each other. The event often missed its target in that most of the attendees weren’t entrepreneurs, but people trying to sell services and “miraculous” courses to the few entrepreneurs that were there.

Bernardo and Luis found it very off-putting that, given the status of the already small and weak ecosystem, there were people trying to charge entrepreneurs thousands of Euros for things like outsourcing their product development or teaching them how to build a 150-page business plan filled with invented, untested hypotheses. All these offers were filled with false promises to give entrepreneurs more users, clients, or, the ultimate “big-sell,” better access to funding.

Amongst the crowd, Luis found a familiar face; a former high-school peer, Alejandro Barrera. Alex was a computer scientist that had just come back from a year at the University of California-Berkeley, studying and falling in love with Silicon Valley, the startup world and entrepreneurship in general. While catching up, sharing a few beers, hearing Alex’s Silicon Valley stories, moaning about the local Spanish ecosystem and criticizing all the “fame and front-page photo seekers,” one thing was clear: criticizing and blaming others was not productive; they needed to do something about it.

Want more? Download a free copy of “Tetuan Valley for Dummies” here.

Lean Startup, innovation based on the scientific method

Posted by Jorge Muñoz on 11/04/2012 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 HowMaths team, formed by Jorge Muñoz.

Let’s start with the definition of a startup:

Startup: novelty technological company with limited resources that operates in a high uncertainty environment.

The problem with the uncertainty is that it is worthless to have a business plan for 5, 3 or even 1 year. If we add the fact that the startups don’t have lot of resources, it is very probably that most of the startups will fail. But not all; there were several startups that have created great products that nobody expected to be a great success. Some of them are now one of the biggest companies in the world, just because they risked it with a new technology or product that nobody knew how the people could use it.

What is the secret for a startup to succeed? The only way to deal with the uncertainty and create a successful company is to learn quickly. Without more information we can think that the goal is to launch a minimum viable product and see how the market behaves. Then we can continue launching new versions of the product and keep watching what happens. We could even have growth as this graph shows:

At first sight it could seem that the company is doing well because it is getting more and more paid users. Nevertheless, in this case we are wrong. If we see the percentage of paid users related with the visits, (visits are the 100%) the graph is the next one:

As we see the percentage of paid users is decreasing. It is possible that the growth in the number of paid users is a consequence of a big investment in marketing that is generating more traffic to the website, but sooner or later the sales will collapse and nobody will know why. The company will be stuck in the land of the living dead companies; it would get a moderate success but won´t be able to grow anymore. Here is when the scientific method is important:

Scientific method: Set of steps set in advance in order to achieve valid knowledge through reliable instruments, standard sequence to ask and answer a question.

When the minimum viable product is launched to the market it has to be to answer an initial hypothesis. Without wondering the proper questions we are going to learn nothing.

When you test to see what will happen you will always succeed, because you always see that something happens, although nothing is happening.

It is very important to choose the right drivers that lead us to a good understanding of what is happening in order to answer our initial question. With drivers like the ones of the first graph, we would trick ourselves and feel that the company is growing well, when this is false.

The process should be the following:

Ask a hypothesis
Choose the correct drivers to answer the hypothesis
Launch a minimum viable product in order to check the hypothesis
Analyze the results with the user feedback and the drivers
Create a new hypothesis and star over again

This cycle allows us to learn, but it also should be done quickly. The faster we are learning and validating the hypothesis the faster we respond to the needs of the users and the less resources we spent. Furthermore, we won´t spend time developing features that are not going to be valued by the customers.

This method is valid when the company is starting and growing because the impact over the number of users is minimum. But when the company has grown and has a known brand it is not recommendable to experiment with all the users. It could lead to a great insatisfaction and decrease the sells. The impact of the experiments has to be controlled and it has to be launched only in a few customers, just to create the minimum negative impact.

Is the Market ready for your product?

Posted by Letzee on 03/04/2012 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 Letzee team, formed by Juan Diego Gonzalez and Victor Manuel Lozada

Companies spend millions of dollars doing market research when preparing to launch a new product into the market. Sometimes spending big amounts of cash doesn’t guarantee a successful product. An example of this case is the Oakley OVER THE TOP® sunglasses. These were a very innovative solution for sport sunglasses. In contrast with the traditional sunglasses, which you wear beside your head, and use your ears for supporting the sunglasses legs, you would wear the OVER THE TOP® sunglasses on top of your head, just like a helmet. Apart from looking like a creature from another planet while wearing this innovative design, it had its advantages and added value to what was currently available in the market. First, they were more comfortable; you didn’t have the pains beside your head compared with the tight fit of other sport sunglasses. And second, you could move very abruptly and they wouldn’t fall. So, what went wrong?

The design was way too futuristic, and even if the product solved some issues, the design itself wasn’t going to be adopted by the users. They sold some, but had to discontinue the product because there wasn’t enough demand. The comments were, “They are cool, but I wouldn’t wear them.” How to avoid this before its too late?

There are many things to consider while improving or creating a new product. As an entrepreneur, you are very aware of what the market needs, or else you wouldn’t be an entrepreneur. I believe there are two ways of making sure your new product doesn’t fail.

1. Extensive market research. By extensive I mean expensive as well. The problem is that entrepreneurs don’t have the money needed for an extensive/expensive market research. You can do a market research, but be aware that the outcome might not quite represent the whole market. So be creative and make sure to get key answers to your market questions without breaking the bank.
2. Common sense. It might sound easy, but entrepreneurs tend to fall in love with their product and believe that it will be the next “BIG THING” and when people say otherwise they go deaf. So I recommend opening your ears and use common sense, if many people say, “That won’t work” don’t ignore them, ask questions instead and be smart about it.

You might come up with many products that you think people need. You may also come up with many improvements on other products in the market, but the need has to be clear and usable. Everyone would love a flying car, but how many people will actually pay and use one? Open your eyes for opportunities, open your ears for feedback, and most of all be smart and don’t treat your idea as your child, don’t spoil it. Grab it, criticize it, shred it, build it again from the ground up, and repeat as many times as necessary before going to market.

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.

Game mechanics: A way to improve your solution.

Posted by ACrowdOfMonsters on 26/10/2010 1 comments

These series of guest posts are written by the teams attending the Tetuan Valley Startup School 2010 Fall edition. This post is from the “A Crowd Of Monsters” team, formed by Axel MGarcia & Rafael González… among other monsters.

In this post I’m going to analyze how I think some game concepts could help to improve your solution.

Nowadays social perception of games.

Most of the people tends to relate the verb “to play” with a childhood activity. There’s a lot of people who relates “play games” with consoles, geek people or with cases of addiction.
However games are starting to gain respect among the people due to the good job the industry is doing. Nowadays the game industry manages more money than cinema; a completely new industry related with serious games is starting to show benefits of applied games; big super productions are arriving to the living rooms impressing everyone; new platforms as Wii or Nintendo DS are offering completely new ways of gameplay, much more affordable for every one and that have engaged a big mass of public.
Despite all of this, popularity of video games stills far from movies and keeps generating doubts as a powerful tool for our solutions and as a reliable business deal.

To play definition. Why we like to play?

What’s to play? To play is a PREDISPOSITION of humans to reach a feasible GOAL, taking into account a set of RULES, that generates a CHALLENGE, and that will provide REWARD.

Playing, wining challenges and achieving new goals is in our nature. Children use games as a mechanism for learning and training. Children run, challenge their friends, try to overcome themselves every moment, and for every goal achieved they get a reward. The most curious thing is that this reward is not just a trophy you get: Achieving a goal generates a strong feeling of satisfaction. This feeling is due to a chemical substance, dopamine, that is delivered by our body as a physical reaction to reward us. As every chemical component, the way in which this substance affects humans is highly complex. It’s almost a proven fact that this substance is the responsible of this feeling of satisfaction and wellness that we all experience once we have completed a task or achieved a goal, i.e. wining a race, understanding something or just finishing a level of a game.

How is that connected with a business?

Games based methodologies have been used in the learning contexts for a relative long periode. More recently some companies are starting to make use of more elaborated REWARDS for their workers, going a step forward of the classical ”a bigger salary”. This has lead to a more proactive behavior of the employees and a better perception of the work’s place and atmosphere.

Going back to the given definition of “playing”, and taking a look to our current lifestyle, we could imagine our job as a game… let’s just give it a try.
For every job exists a set of rules: to work X hours per month. With a goal: to be a good employee; the best whenever possible. This implicitly supposes a challenge: do all your assigned tasks correctly. And that will provide you with a reward: a salary.
This is not a bad game, vast majority of the people shows a predisposition to play it, and it’s perfect if your tasks fit your interests or if the reward fills up your personal expectations. But obviously this is not always like that, and in a lot of cases the goal doesn’t generate motivation. In others the challenge doesn’t imply any effort (monotony) and in others the reward lacs value for the employee.

As I said before, there are many companies that have started to flexibilize their goals and to provide more exciting rewards that adjust better to the expectations and interests of every employee. Just simply adding some game values to the organization, results and experience of the users can be improved.

How to apply that to your solution?

If we take a look of the most successful communities and social networks nowadays (Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare or StackOverflow), we will see that all of them offer some kind of point based reward systems providing social visibility, followers or just points and medals. All of them have their game mechanics: posting about your daily life, discovering new places o providing technical answers. Finally all of them provide you a goal: having feedback from your friends, more than X followers or to be the major of a place. Social networks don’t state a wining case, so goals are not already defined, they are just set up by the users along the time.

Taking all this into account I believe that thinking in your business from a game perspective and providing a game layer, can help you to engage more your users, to have more visibility, to get a bit more effort from your users to understand your solution, and to get more proactive and happy users.

At the end, if we look on how people react against an unknown game and compare it with how they react against an unknown application, we will observe that people tend to have more predisposition to understand a game, than to understand an application.

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