Founder of Minube at IE Busines School

Entrepreneur session 7:

Pedro Jareño

Travel....relax and be assured that you would enjoy the experience as someone else has already done it before... 

And this is what our 7th entrepreneur in Enrique Dans's Tech For Start Up class has come up with:

Pedro Jareno has achieved to attract:

• 1.5M users
• 125.000 regisered users
• 900.000 pictures posted by users
• 200.000 real experiences that has been shared by users  

 The above has helped him to generate 2M Euros in revenue in 2010 and provide 20 jobs!

One thing I didn't fully understand was this;  Why is a site that is targeting a global reach not able to be read in English when the most spoken internet language is in fact English?

When this question was asked, Pedro commented that it is very expensive to add additional languages. First I thought that he was referring to the technology, which would make no sense. However, Enrique pointed out that community management in each language and tracking mentions on the net in any new language is part of adding an additional language. 

This makes sense. But still... I am not convinced that the necessary investment in adding the most searched language on the net is not worth the potential growth that it could provide.

I am however under the impression that Pedro Jareno knows what he is doing...

The only thing I could think of is that Pedro is aware of the growth potential in English and is postponing it until he is ready both on a technical level, sales and marketing as well the required changes in their operations. 

Furthermore, it is much easier to compete with the internet giants once you have a relatively good size user base. Hence, another reason that they may have considered could be that they are more able to grow in 'silence' without generating too much attention in the early stages of their growth, and only enter the big sea, when they are ready to 'swim along'. 

This seems to be a strategy taken by other Spanish companies, such as our previous guest speaker and the founder of Ideaista. 

So once again... the learning is that to be global you don't have to be born global!