Tag Archives: interview

Startups In Spain – Today: @echeckin_svcs

Posted by Katelyn on 13/02/2012 1 comments

These series of guest posts are written based off of interviews done with entrepreneurs in Spain, as part of an initiative to bring awareness about the Startup Spain movement. Today we interview Ernesto Guimerans de Alfonso, co-founder of  echeckin services and Tetuan Valley Alumni from Spring 2011

Company: echeckin services
Founded: 2011
URL: http://www.echeckinservices.com
Twitter: @echeckin_svcs
City: Madrid

Founders: Ernesto Guimerans de Alfonso and Victoria Martin

We offer a cloud based platform to register user presence at specific locations and communicate tasks from those points. Users and companies configure their services online and through mobile devices they can interact with the platform at the points of interest.


Who is behind this project? Who are the team members?

The founding members are Ernesto Guimerans de Alfonso and Victoria Martin. We’ve known each other for 5 years from working at the same company. There we found we complement each other perfectly and although we have similar technical profiles, the fact is that we are really different in other respects. Recently, after turning our idea into a company, we hired Borja Pelegrín to strengthen the commercial side and the product design. Short-term, we plan to hire a teleoperator, a graphic designer and a programmer.

 

How did you came up with the idea? What is the story behind it?

During our last jobs working for a private company (2006-2010), we were lucky to share experiences with a great team. Without a doubt, working in the R&D department of a company that really supports innovation has helped to deepen our desire to innovate and be entrepreneurs. Since 2010, the mobile phone has become like a tiny personal computer – and its evolution goes on and on –  so we began to inquire about it´s possible uses in order to help companies to improve their daily operations. When working for a private company we found that change is hard and transitions are slow. So we decided to take the leap and try to make money with echeckin, our own project.

Towards the end of 2010, we went “all-in”, and left our jobs to dedicate ourselves full-time to the project. It wasn’t easy, but we felt that it was our time, and with the support of friends & family, we did it.

For months, we worked with our contacts to start searching for the best solution to help companies with mobile technologies.  Because the range of possibilities was so broad, we failed to define a particular market and a product to solve their needs.

After months of  hard work we unexpectedly discovered Tetuan Valley Startup School. At that moment we thought that maybe the program could help us. It turned out that it marked a turning point for us. We applied with “a service cloud-based platform with NFC technology”, and we participated in the Spring 2011 Edition graduating with new contacts, mentors, good feelings, encouragement, of course a lot of work, and having learned a few things that helped us to better define parts of our business plan.

After finishing the experience, we were deeply immersed in the tech start-up world, but we still had a lot of work ahead. We mainly lacked two things: commercial validation and funding. Then we thought that maybe it could be good for us to continue with our project under a start-up accelerator, and here we are. Now we’re nearly finished the 4-month Business Booster accelerator program in Valencia.

 

How do you envision the future of your business and what are the key challenges and questions that your market niche is facing?

Of course we see a promising future- otherwise we would be wasting our time. A current relevant opportunity could be that NFC technology becomes popular. However, any similar technology can be adapted to our platform; our real value proposition is the platform itself.

Although we integrate several technologies, NFC is really impressive with regards to it´s ability for human interaction with the environment through a simple approach. With the convenience of electronic wallet and customer loyalty so far, we are really convinced that this technology is here to stay: a few months ago there were just a couple of NFC mobile devices, now there are more than 10-  next year all mobile device manufactures have announced that they will have at least one NFC device.

Everybody- users as well as all kind of companies, no matter their size or sector, can use our platform daily.

 

What is your status as of today or, in other words, what are you guys up to these days?

We have raised 48k in public funding. But we’re still looking for seed funding; we’ve already presented our project at two business angel investor forums. Short-term we’ll present in two more in order to complete our first round of seed funding investment.

Regarding the echeckin product: we have installed a pilot for time & attendance at a private school in Barcelona and soon we’ll install another one for a cleaning company. We’re also working to develop our freemium service and we hope to launch that before the end of  2011 so that anyone can test the service absolutely  free.

 

What is the single most important barrier you have had to face in order to start this venture in Spain and how did you overcome it?

The main barrier we find here in Spain is talking to companies. On one hand we are technical guys, not sales. However, the underlying fact is that most business managers are reluctant to hear about new services. They are focused on selling their product through traditional means even though these new services can increase their productivity, reduce operational costs and add value to the services they offer, like transparency for example.

Sometimes we get lucky enough to find people that are our “early adopters.” They help us improve and validate our solution, and they are willing to test pilots because they are interested in becoming subscribers in the future. That´s where we are now…

I´d like to make a call to these people -security, time & attendance, domiciliary health & care, presence control, etc-  who want to know more about us to come meet us, if they want for lunch, and talk about their services and real needs!! It would help us a lot in defining our features :-)

 

A word of advice to other entrepreneurs…

No doubt about it: being an entrepreneur is really hard, even harder than you have heard. The truth is that you must  be aware that the days of going out to parties, cinema, dinner with friends, and a lot of other social elements are over. To be an entrepreneur requires 75% of your day-to-day, and, of course 150% of your money. The rest of the time is for resting and exercise, if nothing else. If you put a lot of value on travelling, drinking with friends, being with your girlfriend, and so on, it would be better to continue working in your current company (if you have one, of course). I really mean it.

 

Parting thoughts…

Among the hundreds of quotes you can read and hear:

“I think ultimately, the technology that is appealing is really just mimicking life, right? In some way, shape or form, it’s either taking historical data, collecting and organizing it, and delivering it to us in a more efficient way, or in some, way, shape, or form, it’s advancing the speed at which that happens”.

- Ashton Kutcher,  2011 TechCrunch Disrupt

Regarding the effort it takes to be an entrepreneur:

“Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration”

- Thomas Edison

Startups In Spain – Today: @Spartanbits

Posted by Katelyn on 06/02/2012 1 comments

These series of guest posts are written based off of interviews done with entrepreneurs in Spain, as part of an initiative to bring awareness about the Startup Spain movement. Today we interview Luis Santos, co-founder of Spartanbits and Tetuan Valley Alumni from Spring 2010

Company: Spartanbits
Founded: 2010
URL: www.spartanbits.com
Twitter: @spartanbits
City: Madrid
Founders:

We believe mobile devices are becoming a part of ourselves, that’s why we create mobile apps people love, we build software they can feel.

Who is behind this project? Who are the team members?

Spartanbits was founded by Luis Santos, Elena Pérez and Luis Sánchez. Luis Santos is a software engineer with a passion for user experience design; he has developed Android apps for two years and is in charge of Spartanbits’ company strategy. Elena is a software engineer who enjoys working “under the hood,” developing our backend systems. Luis Sánchez is a jack-of-all-trades software engineer, he has worked in several iOS apps’ design and development, and ensures there is the right amount of love in all of our apps. The founders met at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid while they were finishing their studies.

 

How did you came up with the idea? What is the story behind it?

In 2010 we realized most Android apps didn´t have a good user experience, even those apps developed by huge companies like Facebook or Google. That’s why we decided to start developing apps focusing in user experience and visual design. Since Facebook didn’t provide a chat feature in their official app, we built the Facebook chat client Android users deserved, with a clean interface and extended features like photo, video and audio sharing. We called it Go!Chat for Facebook.

 

How do you envision the future of your business and what are the key challenges and questions that your market niche is facing?

Users are moving from PC to smartphones and tablets; they are going to spend huge amounts of time with mobile devices, using them to perform almost every task. Therefore they are going to need apps. But they won’t use the first thing that pops out in their screen, because mobile software is going to define us. Our main challenge is to find out how to fit in people’s everyday lives and to be part of them.

 

What is your status as of today or, in other words, what are you guys up to these days?

We are currently working on extending Go!Chat to other instant messaging protocols in the Android platform, like Windows Live Messenger and Google Talk, while we improve the Facebook and Yahoo! Messenger Android clients already published. We are also developing Go!Chat for iOS, which is going to set the user experience bar really high. We also have other internal projects in the works that have nothing to do with communication apps.

 

What is the single most important barrier you have had to face in order to start this venture in Spain and how did you overcome it?

Recruiting engineers has been the biggest barrier, there aren’t many Android/iOS developers in Spain, and it’s hard to find people with the passion and skills we are looking for. To overcome this we started recruiting people we believed had strong problem solving skills and therefore the potential to become good mobile developers, half our team are mathematicians!

 

A word of advice to other entrepreneurs…

Love what you do and have passion, this will be your fuel, not money, not investors.

 

Parting thoughts…

“You‘ve got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology – not the other way around.”

Steve Jobs

 

Startups In Spain – Today: @Control_Ad

Posted by Katelyn on 30/01/2012 2 comments

These series of guest posts are written based off of interviews done with entrepreneurs in Spain, as part of an initiative to bring awareness about the Startup Spain movement. Today we interview David Pedroche, co-founder of ControlAd and Tetuan Valley Alumni from Fall 2010

Company: Control Ad
Founded: 2009
URL: www.controlad.es
Twitter: @control_ad
City: Madrid
Founders:

mentor-avatar

David Pedroche

mentor-avatar 

Pablo Cosias

Control Ad is a company that develops tools to audit and control advertising campaigns

 

Who is behind this project? Who are the team members?

Both Pablo and I have always had entrepreneurship in our hearts and were always talking about what it would be like to create a project, become rich and create more projects. So, we both left our respective companies, told our parents we were fired, and started working full-time in our ideas in January, 2010.

In January 2011 our friend Raul Luque helped us run the numbers to explore the project feasibility, in June he decided to help us with some money ( thus, becoming our first fool.. sorry, investor) and in September he joined us to be our CTO.

By October 2011 we found Manuel Tereisa, other foo.. sorry investor that put in some money and helped with sales.

And here we are, four foo.. sorry entrepreneurs ready to kick some ass!

How did you came up with the idea? What is the story behind it?

Pablo and I were flat mates and one day Pablo showed me a demo he was working on. Initially, the demo allowed you to identify CD covers with a picture from your mobile phone, and he said he was thinking about selling it. I told him I had a better idea, to use this tool to create something of our own, and that day we started to work in Control Ad

How do you envision the future of your business and what are the key challenges and questions that your market niche is facing?

We want to see all the important advertisers using our tools to know better when, where and how their advertisements are shown in the internet thus helping them extract more value out their marketing efforts and make better decisions.

What is your status as of today or, in other words, what are you guys up to these days?

We have made our first big sale to a big client:

Infoadex, a leading Spanish company in advertising that uses our technology to estimate their budget for the online advertising market.

This month we have launched our second product line “Control Ad Black List” which advertisers can use to keep their ads away from sites they might not want their brand associated with, such as those that promote violence, drugs or illegal file sharing.

Next steps after that… TV and radio! ;-)

What is the single most important barrier you have had to face in order to start this venture in Spain and how did you overcome it?

Bureaucracy is crazy in Spain, but there is something that pisses me off even more:

In Spain there is no entrepreneurial culture, everybody wants to have a “safe” job (extra points, if that job is for the government) and nobody will respect your work as an entrepreneur until you make serious money in your startup.

A word of advice to other entrepreneurs…

If you want free advisory from high-profile people, don’t pay for meals, invite them to breakfast.

Parting thoughts…

There’s one thing I learned in all my years. Sometimes you just gotta say, “What the fuck”

-Risky Business

 

 

Startups In Spain – Today: @beruby_es

Posted by jmcobian on 23/01/2012 1 comments

These series of guest posts are written based off of interviews done with entrepreneurs in Spain, as part of an initiative to bring awareness about the Startup Spain movement. Today we interview Miguel Acosta, Partner & CEO at beruby

Company: BeRuby
Founded: 2008
URL: http://beruby.com
Twitter: @beruby_es
City: Madrid
Founders:

mentor-avatar 

Miguel Acosta

mentor-avatar 

Nieves Perez

mentor-avatar 

Samuel Arenas

BeRuby is (i) having a virtual desktop with your favourite sites in one place (“the cloud”concept), (ii) saving money through your daily online activity (when you shop, visit sites, register, see videos, etc), and (iii) creating a community of users that shop (social shopping).


Who is behind this project? Who are the team members?

The project has had many shareholders and people who have helped the company during the past four years.  The co-founders that still work in beruby are Samuel Arenas, Nieves Perez and Miguel Acosta.

We all had known each other for many years and, at one point, decided to create beruby as we thought there was a market opportunity.  Nieves left her job at Telefonica and started the company, Miguel joined the following year (after being at Ask.com and Yahoo) and Samuel Arenas one year later (after being at Ask.com and Páginas Amarillas).

 

How did you came up with the idea? What is the story behind it?

It would be cool to say that it came one night in a bar… unfortunately the story is not so glamorous:

After many years working with internet companies we were seeing that the most valuable players in the sector were the users (which is kind of obvious).  The second most valuable players were the advertisers. And in the middle, there were lots of intermediaries.

A typical transaction would take place as follows:

(i) user searches for a product

(ii) search engines send the user to a content page

(iii) content page would have links from an affiliation network

(iv) the affiliation network link would take the user to the shop

For every intermediary there was a margin. Taking this into account, the idea behind beruby was to create a page for the users where they could start their internet experience (a “homepage”) and to give them the chance to go to the merchant directly, sharing with them the commissions the advertiser was willing to pay.

These simple ideas took us several months.

 

How do you envision the future of your business and what are the key challenges and questions that your market niche is facing?

E-commerce is definitely growing and we think that, given the opportunity, anyone would be happy to save money from each online transaction they make.

Our biggest challenge?  Earning money on the Internet has a negative connotation.  To overcome this, our strategy is to be open and offer transparent communication (for example: who we are, our address, our terms and conditions, etc) but it is definitely not easy when you are talking about giving out money online.

 

What is your status as of today or, in other words, what are you guys up to these days?

Our focus right now is on international expansion (we just launched Mexico), redesigning the page (we don’t know why but it seems that we always need a more modern version) and grabbing the attention of new advertisers and users.

 

What is the single most important barrier you have had to face in order to start this venture in Spain and how did you overcome it?

The most important barrier is funding… there seems to be a lot of seed capital but, once you reach a certain size, you are in the middle of a desert (too big for most local Spanish investors and too little for strong international investors).  Our strategy to overcome this phase (we are still in the middle of it) is to achieve breakeven and subsidize our growth with our revenues.

 

A word of advice to other entrepreneurs…

Hire slow and fire fast (this, by the way, is easy to say buy very hard to execute).

 

Parting thoughts…

The hardest part in a startup is that you wake up one morning, and you feel great about the day, and you think, “We’re kicking ass.” And then you wake up the next morning, and you think “We’re dead.” And literally nothing’s changed

Joe Krauss (Cofounder, Excite)

[Interview] Luis Arias from Balsamiq.

Posted by victoriacdh on 25/10/2010 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 CerdadelHuerto team, formed by Victoria Arias and Alejandro Hoyos.

 

Last thursday in Barcelona, the mockups we used in our slides for the Tetuan Valley Start-Up School aroused lots of positive reactions. Indeed, we had enjoyed a lot using the tool, created by balsamiq, that provides good and simple sketch-like drawings, for efficient and good looking mockups. As balsamiq happens to be a start up, we decided to interview for you one of their members, Luis Arias, known as the Web Developer Extraordinaire of the company, who shared very interesting information and advice with us. Enjoy !

“Cerca del Huerto Team (CDH): Hi Luis! Can you introduce yourself?

Luis Arias: Sure!  I am a senior (some would say old timer ;) ) software developer at Balsamiq taking on the lead role in the development of myBalsamiq, our webapp for using Mockups online.  Balsamiq Mockups is a really cool app that allows people to draw “low fidelity” wireframes, which less technically means they can sketch out ideas about user interface and communicate about them to other people on their team. Before joining Balsamiq I did a number of things such as working at XWiki, an open-source wiki written in Java, where I had a more market facing role. I have always been very interested in the entrepreneurial side of the industry and started my own consulting company fairly young. In the early days of that company we worked a lot on NeXTSTEP which is the ancestor of what powers the fancy iOS you see on iPhones and iPads.  I was also at the origin of an entrepreneurial community in 2003 at ESCP Europe with my friend Florence Laterrade.  We held jam packed monthly seminars for more than a year with the objective of helping each other on our entrepreneurial projects.

CDH: What an experience! Can you tell us more about balsamiq?

Balsamiq is a life-style company founded by Peldi our great boss whose purpose is to help people make better software.  Our product, Balsamiq Mockups, helps people do this by letting them share ideas and design their user interface in a way that focuses on the real issues and avoids the distraction of dealing with a specific set of user interface components.  We have had much success as a company reaching out to 30 000 customers and making 1M$ of revenue in a very short time (I think it was 14 months on, and Peldi was almost alone all that time).  Now we are 7 employees with people in San Francisco, New York, Bologna, and Paris.  We are a very tight nit team despite the distance because we all spent some time together in Italy this summer and we are always chatting with each other on skype.

 

 

CDH: We read about “mybalsamiq”, the project you are currently working on. What is it all about? Why is it so awesome? :)

Well I hope it will be awesome ! :)  myBalsamiq is an online application that allows people to use Mockups in a project setting. People can sign up, choose a plan, and get started creating projects, and creating and organizing mockups.  We are currently in private beta but we are really getting there.  We have been holding back on launching because we want the application to feel right for us and for our beta users.  We also need to move from our beta infrastructure (from which we learned a lot in optimizing and tuning our app) to a production infrastructure which we are going to be hosting in the cloud on Amazon.

 

Mockups reproduces the experience of sketching interfaces on a whiteboard, but using your computer, so they're easier to share, modify, and get honest feedback on. Wireframes made with Mockups look like sketches, so stakeholders won't get distracted by little details, and can focus on what's really important instead.

 

CDH: As a start-up lover, what do you think we young to-be entrepreneurs could learn from the example of balsamiq?

Oh lots and lots and lots !!!  For a story like Balsamiq to succeed I think there are a number of things to point out.  Some of these are not going to be easy to work out because they are probably not repeatable, but everyone has access to opportunities and its their job as an entrepreneur to work with what they have.  One of the most (probably the most) important ingredients in Balsamiq is our wonderful Peldi, his leadership is invaluable and probably goes further than anything else to explain Balsamiq’s success.  The product itself has some very important attributes for success, we like to think that people who use it and buy it realize the value from Mockups within the first hour of use.  That perception is very important for people to talk to others about Mockups widely in a positive manner.  We also like to say we compete on support and user experience.  People who have issues with the product love our customer service and it is very important to us to get answers to their questions in a timely manner. So its important to choose your space and focus on what makes a difference in that space.  Simple to say, difficult to execute but the opportunities are there.

CDH: Do you have special advice or secrets to share with us about the start-up experience?

Remember that learning is as important if not more important than actual “success”.  The reason is that there are a lot of factors that you just can’t control, you also have to be there at the right place and at the right time.  So make sure that you are very observant in what you do and the results you obtain so you can learn from them. Having a very clear idea of *why* you are creating your startup is also very important because you can easily get sidetracked, there are all sorts of temptations and promises that might sound good and end up wasting a lot of your time.  If you have carefully thought out why it makes sense for you to do what you are doing you can always refer to it and see if your next steps make full sense in that context. Finally your time as founders is precious.  Spend it wisely, make sure you are not getting bogged down with minutiae, your job will be to find the resources to achieve your goals, spending time on anything else is time that is wasted. As a final note I would like to say that Tetuan Valley sounds like a great opportunity for budding entrepreneurs in Spain!  It’s great to see programs like that and if I wasn’t having so much fun at Balsamiq I would be tempted to apply ! :)  It’s very important also to talk to your fellow entrepreneurs, share ideas and experience.  In many cases no one knows how to build the business that you are planning to build, that is part of your competitive advantage that you are working on it, so its important to learn fast and be able to get advice and feedback from both experienced and novice entrepreneurs and advisors.”

 

Thank you so much to Luis for kindly answering to our questions in the middle of a sunday afternoon…!

If you want to know more about balsamiq, check out their website : http://www.balsamiq.com :)