Tag Archives: startup school

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.

Tetuan Valley… for who?!

Posted by Katelyn on 04/05/2012 None comments

The Tetuan Valley team has gone and written a book. Yep, thats right, we´re all authors now.

Who´s it for?
Anyone who might be interested in running a similar program, or knowing how we created Tetuan Valley.
It´s also for our alumni, to celebrate all their amazing hard work

Why´d you write it?
We want to find other people interested in promoting entrepreneurship, both in Spain and around the world. We want to help these people learn from our experiences, get their feedback, and maybe find partners or allies in unexpected places.

How do I get my hands on a copy?
1. Click on the “Pay with a Tweet” buttons you see on the TetuanValley.com/Playbook or Startupspain.com/startupschool/ pages. Or this one:

2. Tweet about it when the window pops up
3. The download will automatically show up for the Playbook

Why Pay with a Tweet?
We want EVERYONE to know about this, and the more we tweet the more likely that is to happen.

And if I want to do more?
In addition, we are accepting donations to support the continuation and growth of Tetuan Valley. If you´re interested, you can donate here

Need more cowbell?
The playbook will shortly be available on 24symbols.com

Conquer the entire world

Posted by Airsign on 27/04/2012 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 Airsign team, formed by Miguel Páramo

Lets try to motivate a bit with this one. You can think about this being motivational bullshit, maybe it is. I just want to give a reason to explain why I wrote this:

Every day there are tons of projects gaining users (or clients) at a high rate. In many cases those projects don’t have a solid business model or well determined pain behind them. So, what is the key of their success? Answering this question is actually very complex and the reasons may be different in every situation. But there is something they all have in common: Marketing, simple calculus and inertia. Elementary maths.

Lets see then:

Yeah, you have your very well located pain, you have your strong and solid strategies and all of the resources needed to launch your startup and become one of those lucky self-employed badasses. But have you ever though about the scope of your market? What is it then potentially? 100K? 20M?

Nowadays all of us have big opportunities on the global technological market. Never in history was it easier to create something and deploy it worldwide, operating into a market with not just 1M but 100M to 1B of potential clients/users. If your idea seems to be targetting an environment with lower that 100M of those buddy… seriously, you can consider opening your market wider. If you are aiming very high, in a pessimistic case, you are going to catch just a sadly 0.0005% of your market (5 clients of every 10k). That is when elementary maths steps in and gives us about 50k clients. If you look at the Long Tail model, that means that those initial numbers are expected to increase just by inertia, without even appliying marketing strategies. This is validated knowledge. However, don’t expect to keep those clients easily depending on your product. A snowball/waterfall effect can happen on that cycle. With perseverance, marketing (important) and some luck on your side, you can expect 100k users the first year. Not bad at all.

You shouldn´t try to make effort on closed markets but maybe because altruism. Think globally and let the simple math and the inertia to be on your side. Think that nowadays the amount of users you have is, despite what some investors say, one of the objective measures that is directly proportional to the value of your system. Depending on your project, you should try to attract users first while still maintaining the platform. Maybe one day you can apply several different revenue models that your users wouldn´t have paid for before. These are long term strategies, and are against many of the lessons we have been taught. It´s risky and hard, but remember, this is happening every day.

Heaven, Hell and Spanish Entrepreneurship

Posted by Incentivalia on 24/04/2012 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 Incentivalia team, formed by Jorge Bestard and Magd Kudama.

Everytime I help or advise one of my fellow startups, I sometimes get a question which to this day shocks me… “What do you want in return?” People have a hard time understanding my answer “Nothing”.

The best way to understand what we have learnt in Tetuan Valley I feel is best expressed through the “Allegory of the long spoons” which can be found in the Bible. It goes something like this:

A man spoke with the Lord about heaven and hell. The Lord said to the man, “Come, I will show you hell.”

They entered a room where a group of people sat around a huge pot of stew. Everyone was famished, desperate and starving. Each held a spoon that reached the pot, but each spoon had a handle so much longer than their own arm that it could not be used to get the stew into their own mouths. The suffering was terrible.

“Come, now I will show you heaven,” the Lord said after a while. They entered another room, identical to the first — the pot of stew, the group of people, the same long-handled spoons. But there everyone was happy and well-nourished. “I don’t understand,” said the man. “Why are they happy here when they were miserable in the other room and everything was the same?”

The Lord smiled,“Ah, it is simple,” he said. “Here they have learned to feed each other.”

...the soldier next to you, makes you stronger

Spain is going through hell right now. Greed, deceptive business practices, speculation etc. have haunted Spain for the last decade, and the results are obvious: Spain is on the verge of disaster. We’re in hell right now and we can stay here, or we can fight our way back.

The allegory of the long spoons,shows us that either we die as individuals or we succeed as a group. That is a message that more entrepreneurs in Spain each day are living by. Entrepreneurs are helping eachother out in a society that does not understand them, with government that bashes them with absurd laws, and with the huge uncertainty and mental anguish that characterizes our practice. Little by little, with these collaborative efforts, we are Starting up Spain, and creating an atmosphere of creativity, productivity and talent much needed today.

Demo Day is Tomorrow!!

Posted by Julie on 24/04/2012 None comments

Happy Demo Day Eve, everyone!

It has arrived! After all of our sleepless anticipation and countless Twitter and Facebook reminders, Demo Day is tomorrow!

For those of you who do not yet know, Demo Day is the final session of the 6th Edition of the Tetuan Valley Startup School. We will get together to celebrate the graduation of nine wonderful teams of entrepreneurs, all of whom will be given one last shot to pitch their presentations and, for the first time, wow us all with an actual working demo of their proposed product. These teams have all come incredibly far in the past 6 weeks of Startup School, and we expect big things from them tomorrow night.

In addition to the teams´ pitches, we will also welcome keynote speaker Iñaki Arrola, an industry heavy-hitter, who will undoubtedly have some very valuable words of wisdom to share with everyone.

Finally, as always, there will be pizza and drinks for everyone!

So if you still haven´t done so, head to our ticketea page now and get your (free) tickets, and we will see you tomorrow night!!

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