Tag Archives: toolme

Team

Posted by toolme on 16/11/2010 3 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 toolme team, formed by Pedro Fraca Tarancón.

When you start working on a idea maybe you should need help in something. In a company this process is called job oportunity, and you creates a formal form that candidates can apply. You should have an interview with each one and select the best. In early stage ideas the best way to have the best candidate is these people that when listen your pitch establish a connection and a commitment with the idea.

Maybe a formal company candidate searches some money, accommodations, stock options and don’t see the main idea.

I begin this venture alone, and now I’ve a great team with only one purpose ENJOYING. And all the members are working hardly and thinking all the time how to improve our business model or technical stuff. Maybe an early stage can not pay to their initial team, but lessons learned & enthusiasm are the best payment for all the team.

When all your team is sad beacuse you need the prototype for two days and they could not work with it, you are with the perfect people.

Is great to see how people enjoy joining an idea and works doing it possible.

 

Listening to customers

Posted by toolme on 09/11/2010 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 toolme team, formed by Pedro Fraca Tarancón.

As everyone knows the product development model is not the best way to introduce a new product/service to the market. Steven Blanks talks about Customer Development Model, this model is centered on the early customer talk instead spent time developing a product that customer don’t need or does not fit customer needs.

Here in toolme we need to know features that customer needs to build our products. And we think that, before we build a product/service we must talk with potential customers/users.

You can use several ways to get customers feedback: phone, door to door, mail, advertising…. We believe in web technologies to do it, and is exactly what we did. It ss a cheap way to get fast and early stage feedback.

We need:

  • Online survey platform (i.e. google documents, monkey survey….),
  • Potential Customer/Users mails or another way to establish contact. I recommend to use an active linkedin group.
  • A present for one of the polled customer/user. With this we attract more users.

Now it is time to wait for responses and analyze data.

I will write here the response rate and percentage soon.

When hardware matters

Posted by toolme 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 toolme team, formed by Pedro Fraca Tarancón.

Nowadays we are on a mobile revolution that is focused on the software, because this revolution is focused on personal devices. And we can create amazing applications using this software, but when software companies want to create some process/business applications using new mobile OS, they can not found hardware that fits customer needs. The process/business world has been forgotten in this mobile revolution.

This world needs a revolution, devices are ugly, heavy and with old operative systems. Also, these devices are not designed for the purpose they are used, instead they are used in critical process, so design matters too. People who use it should be comfortable with it (they use it 8 hours/day or more), and we can create a commitment between user and device. We think to have all in one device is the key to create great devices, if we have some peripherals connected to the mobile device we can cause a bad user experience when using it.

Mainly, we are talking about built-in hardware like:

  • Barcode Scanner
  • RFID
  • Credit Card Reader

Today, thanks to Android and open hardware platforms like BeagleBoard we can create our own device with our hardware needs. The device creation will be a expensive process, but if we optimize it, we could help other companies to build their own products.

Beagle Board

It is time to go ahead and create a new bridge to create a revolution and allow process/business world to have the opportunity of get amazing new applications.