Tag Archives: startupschool

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.

Level up with Gamification

Posted by holoholo on 30/03/2012 1 comments

Games are everywhere and an integral part of all societies. Games and competition form part of the human psyche and serve to display the mastery of a skill.

Today, most people think of the PS3, xBox, and Wii when they hear the word games. The big three along with the numerous games that are published each year form part of a very popular and profitable industry. So profitable that, according to market researcher DFC Intelligence, the worldwide video game industry is set to reach $70.1 billion in 2015 due to the combined growth of console, portable, PC, and online video games (http://tinyurl.com/3m5nrkl).

Up until now, Gen X’ers like myself, who grew up playing video games with crappy 8-bit graphics, drove the growth of video games. In the future, Gen Y’ers, who live and breathe online will drive the gaming industry. Gen Y’ers have been playing video games since childhood, and have thus been engrossed in the language and metaphors of gaming for almost their whole lives. Gen Y’ers are not the least bit intimidated by technology and innovation. In fact, GenY’ers openly welcome technology and innovation because they cannot function in or even conceive of a world without it.

Given the incredible rise of games and its mass adoption in most cultures, it is no surprise that people are more open to game mechanics in other parts of their lives. As a result, a new term or ‘buzz word’ has been generating a lot of hype and attention these days – gamification.

So what is gamification? What does it mean to add gamification to a product and/or service? What impact will it have on how we interact with brands?

Gamification is applying and/or integrating game dynamics, thinking, and design techniques into non-game activities or context. Gamification is a powerful new strategy for influencing and motivating individuals or groups, and is used to change behavior. Many businesses are now realizing that gamification can incent employees and partners to perform at high levels, improve customer engagement, and build brand loyalty.

Airlines have been playing this game for quite awhile with their frequent flyer programs. As people fly around the world, they earn points (e.g. 1.5 points for every mile flown), can level up (e.g move from gold to elite status member), earn rewards (e.g. free upgrade to first class) by completing challenges (e.g. fly three return flights in three months), and redeem points for something of value (e.g. free flight). Now tell me if you’re heard this one before: “I just flew [airline x] and the service was shit, but I have to fly with them again because I’ve accrued tons of points and status with them!” Yeah, I thought so.

The ultimate goal with gamification is to drive engagement and participation. That is, to establish a dialog and engage customers as well as get them to participate, share, and interact in some activity or community. There are three characteristics of gamification that can help businesses increase customer engagement and participation: performance, achievement, and social interaction.

Performance includes:

Real-time feedback – players can receive instant feedback on any action they take
Transparency – players can always see exactly where they stand and where everyone else stands
Goal-setting – whole purpose is to have a goal, strive for it, and hopefully achieve it; sub-goals can provide small wins

Achievement:

Badges – serve to demonstrate skills, achievements and reputation, which is a big part of players’ identity
Leveling up – levels indicate long-term achievement and status
On-boarding – teaching players how to play from within the game itself

Social Interaction:

Competition – games foster excellence and achievement through competition
Teams – teams provide an opportunity to connect and bond with others; peer pressure of not wanting to let down your peers can amplify behavior

The language, metaphors, and concepts from games have much to offer businesses that want to engage customers and change their behavior. However, gamification is not without its critics. Real-life is very messy, complex, and non-linear. Some argue that gamification creates an expectation that real-life interactions follow simple mechanics and that disappointment occurs when they do not. Others dismiss gamification as a fad and that adding game dynamics will distract from actually creating high quality products and or services. We think gamification is here to stay and that it’s now a matter of finding the right balance between art and science of ramification. It’s not an easy task, but we are looking to add a game layer to product at holoholo. Stay tuned for future developments.

Becoming entrepreneur in crisis times, a valuable choice

Posted by Toorisk on 14/11/2011 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 Toorisk team, formed by Tomás Carbonell and Jesús González.

Crisis times are tough for everyone and, as time goes by, people become more afraid, conservative and stop taking risks because it looks like the best alternative when things are going bad.
Entrepreneur
Then, financial crisis turns into behavioral crisis and vice versa, and this turns into the best excuse for doing nothing and wait for better times to come.

We shall agree that entrepreneurs need a stimulating ecosystem to step forward and develop their projects, and this is one of the main pitfalls in Spain. Thus we want to support the initiative Manifiesto España Emprende, where colleagues like Miguel Arias are pushing hard to set the ground for future entrepreneurs.

Finally we recommend you all to see this Ted video of Cameron Herold, who encourage parents and teachers to recognize and empower the entrepreneur talent in kids.

Because entrepreneurs can change the world… and the key to be an entrepreneur is to INnovATE… see you in the next post.

P. S. The ones who dare, follow us. If you don’t dare, just sit down and wait until someone tells you: “What are you waiting for?”

Tetuan Valley’s Chief WOWness officer featured on Radio 3 (RNE3)

Posted by fredrikhoel on 10/04/2011 None comments

On March 3rd, a familiar voice chimed through the radios across Spain as Alex, Tetuan Valley’s very own Chief WOWness officer, participated as an expert on Startups together with Emilio Julio Lorenzo, Professor at the Language and Information System department of UNED.

Did you know that a startup, by definition, has to be technology related?

A lot of us have a vague idea of what key-components a startup consist of, but the term has, as Alex explains a very specific definition.

“A startup is an interesting concept, that is used a lot in media but many people don’t know. A startup is made up by 4 concepts. The first one is, as many people are aware of, a newly started company, but what most people aren’t as aware of is that by definition it is a new company based on technology. It doesn’t mean that it has to be a computer company, it can be telecommunication, bio-technology, nano-technology, but it has to have a technological basis. The 3^rd concept is that it has to be, as the Americans call it; cutting edge. This means that one is working with a concept that implies a lot of risk. And finally, and maybe most importantly, the objective isn’t to create a business which happens with a lot of companies, the objective with a startup is to sell it, after 5-6 years. Fundamentally, the whole equation changes when you consider that in 5 to 6 years, your company will be sold because the idea isn’t to live by it. So there are those who failed. Google is a startup that failed, where they couldn’t sell it… I wish I could have failiures like that ”

Covering topics such as the amazing transformation of people that we’ve seen over the course of 6 weeks in Tetuan Valley Start Up School, the similarities and differences between being an entrepreneur in Spain vs. Europe, and University Spin-Offs, Alex delivers 30 minutes of diverse and interesting information about different aspects of the world of startups.

Check out the interview at http://www.rtve.es/alacarta/audios/uned/uned-el-mundo-de-las-startups-las-empresas-tecnologicas-del-futuro-02-03-11/1034236/

Proud to be there, lucky to have learned

Posted by labscope on 22/11/2010 2 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 Labscope team, formed by José Ignacio Galarza, Carlos Hernando y José Antonio Leiva

The fact we hold in our daily life is far from the entrepreneurial way that some of us would like to experiment in our careers. Generally, in our jobs, they reward short term, the ideas thought for immediate results. “Everything is thought of here,” “is difficult to change the course of things that work” or “we already have the ideas too much clear to change now” are phrases that we face in the effort to change reality.

We met TetuanValley Startup School through www.todostartup.com a blog for entrepreneurs with awesome ideas and initiatives. altough it was not the only way and we had already heard of this initiative, if only for daring to mix a term as pure from Madrid and other such related to silicone. It so happened that at that we were starting to think in our own business idea and thought it would be interesting to experiment and learn all we could with them.

Particularly we decided not only to learn but to submit to his view all our possible ideas, alternatives and changes from Labscope, our project: every day we proposed a different view, with something fresh and different and we learned a lot more than we thought, improving and getting new ideas for the next time. Unfortunately, this strategy partly designed and partly run over by our daily led us not to move constructively every day and maybe turn the ideas too. The truth, we explored a good range of possibilities for our idea and we have submitted to all professionals with fresh knowledge and experience.

Have we learned? A lot! We learned how things happen, what to do to start and how to orchestrate a business idea for someone to understand it and be seduced. We were provided with practical tools for strategic and financial management and above all they brought the voice of experience, the voice of those who have been here before by their speeches or just be pure feedback to our proposals in form of painful lashes.

Getting back to pessimistic statements, there is one in particular that catches my attention from time to time: “The other day I had a great idea, but it caught me at work.” Well, for 6 weeks we have been able to share experiences with about 30 people who had an idea and the courage to face his reality to try to materialize it. We can not say for sure which ideas will mature and which will be forgotten, but all have been defended with great effort. Last weeks have been a hell for almost everyone. Now we can

look back and enjoy the time and lived experience or take the knowledge we’ve learned, lashes we have received and incorporated into our bags to move forward on the path by which we asked for help to @jmcobian, @abarrera, @joelovely and the other guys from Tetuan Valley.

In Labscope, we would like to use our last post to thank both the organizers of Tetuan Valley as colleagues who were there. Every comment, every idea, every criticism from TV, Kpad, Serendipio, Veloread, Control+Ad, Automatify, MyCompra, Locialia, Brucut, Magic Tales were all so welcome. Few times in life one has the feeling of being inside a real dynamic environment and generating ideas. This weeks we experienced one of them.

Thanks guys, hope to see you soon