Entrepreneur session 5:
Jesus Encinar
Session 5 in Managing Tech for Startups offered an insight to one of the most successful Spanish real estate websites idealista by the founder himself Jesus Encinar who's blog also offers some interesting posts... if you can read Spanish ;-)
Regrettably, I was flying when we had this session which meant that I had to do my own research...
Idealista was founded 11 years ago in a business environment which was already very saturated. Despite aiming for international expansion, the business was initially only implemented in the Capital of Spain.
Having only presence in Madrid allowed the company to focus and achieve great success in this vicinity but it made it challenging to raise finance as the scalability potential was not initially appreciated by the investors.
Nevertheless, when there is a will, there is a way...
After being rejected by 100s of investors, Idealista finally managed to raise $6.24M (€6M) in unattributed funding on 1/1/2003, which was achieved with help from Andersen Consulting.
Idealista has since expanded into Portugal and Italy which seems that their strategy is to initially penetrate countries that share cultural and language similarities.
The following tables show cultural similarities between Spain, Portugal and Italy.
Hofstede explains these differences in the following 5 main elements which are very interesting and really worth exploring when considering an international expansion.
Going back to the actual website, I must admit that I personally do not find it particularly user-friendly, but the company apparently makes great efforts and uses technology to track user experience in order to constantly improve the site accordingly.
I cannot comment on what technology Idealista uses for this purpose, but an eye track technology is an mazing tool which allows to track and actually analyse a user's behaviour on the website. The process would require a number of different users using the site while tracking their eye focus. The system is then able to analyse preferences according to age, sex or any other relevant demographic facts.
Another useful tool is google's site overlay which provides information about where and how often the user has clicked on different buttons/links on the site and illustrates this in percentage.
This tool is extremely easy to set up in google analytics and is a very useful when testing the design of a new site.
Technology aside, the success of Idealista illustrates that it is not always necessary to be 'born global' and it is still possible to establish an international presence and in a pace appropriate to the business...
Only when the business is ready to explore new markets!
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Posts
Careful with your research... it is Jesus EncinAr
ReplyDeleteThank you Jesus for reading this post and for highlighting this issue.
ReplyDeleteMy appology if my source of information have resulted in any incorrect information on this post and I would be happy to reaserch further and correct the information. However, I would appreciate to know what you are refering to.
That the name is Jesus Encinar, and that you should be careful with your research to at least get the name right. It is Jesus EncinAr, not EncinEr
ReplyDeleteMy apology to mr Encinar!
ReplyDeleteA small typo!! So care is needed with the editing rather than the research ;-)
No need to get so grumpy about it though :-)