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