Entrepreneur Session 11
Rodolfo Carpintie
This was our last session and most certainly one of the most interesting ones. This post will be updated soon...
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Sunday 17 April 2011
Founder of ReviewPro at IE Business School
Entrepreneur Session 9
RJ Friedlander
A class with Enrique Dans and RJ Frielander at Managing Tech For Startups...
The session with RJ Friedlander was a very interesting experience and he offered us a great insight to ReviewPro. However, most information were confidential so I am limited with what I can share but the key concept was about opinions on the net...
Opinions matter!
Consumers are no longer convinced by fancy TV advertising or full page promotions in glossy magazines. They look for transparency and for real reviews. They ask friends and peers for advice and recommendations. They search the net and are influenced by what others have said about the product or the service they are looking for. They search for the truth!
Is this good or bad for your business? Well, this would depend on what actually is truth about your business. It is therfore very important to know what perception your consumers have of your brand and how they are experiencing your services.
I personaly believe that the transparency is great for businesses. It allows them to get closer to their customers and actually learn from their experience and improve accordigly.
This however requires the business to constantly being updated with what is being said about its brand and take the necessary measures when need to. It sounds more complicated than it should be. There are different tools that could be used.
Beside tools such as google alart within the google analytics tools, there are actually tools specified for different industires.
RJ Friedlander offers the solution for the hotel industry;
The first step is to know...
The second step is to learn...
The third step is to act...
The fourth step is... to stay one step ahead...
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!
Founder of todotaladros.com at IE Business School
Entrepreneur session 6:
Alberto Torron
It is often argued that the life of an entrepreneur is a lonely life where you have to absolutely scarify everything and everyone and only have one thing in you mind, which is your venture!
Is it really necessary to give up everything when deciding to becoming an entrepreneur?
According to Alberto Torron the co-founder of todotaladros.com it is not necessary to even giving up your day job!
Alberto, is still working in a demanding job with great responsibilities at the same time of managing todotaladros among a few other ventures. How does he do it? By managing a small but stable growth.
One of the reasons for their success has been the unique customer experience that they are able to provide. An interesting thing that he mentioned was that, if a customer has any concerns, he will be contacted by the owner of the 'store' personally to rectify the issue on spot.
This is obviously not a service that is commonly provided within the e-commerce environment and indeed not one that can be sustained if the business was to have a rapid growth.
todotaladros.com is a online ecommerce where you can purchase tools such as Drills. Starting with 5-6 Drills and selling from home, they now have over £150k worth of inventory.
Despite being a 'part time entrepreneur', Alberto has illustrated that it pays to be one. Without disclosing any confidential information, their revenue proves that a part time venture can still make more than a full time job.
It also shows that there is absolutely no perfect profile for an entrepreneur and that everyone and with any life preference can turn an idea into profit.
A great fact that he share with us was the importance of the ROI when investing in SEM.
He mentioned that it takes 300 visits to the site to make one conversion, which in this particular case is to purchase a product that costs an average of 200 Euros. So as he nicely put it "unless you want to work for google, then it makes no sense to buy AdWords costing 2euros and hope to make a profit just because of an increased traffic.
So...the advice is to calculate your ROI in all aspects of your business...even when it comes to marketing!
A final comment... I wonder how long Alberto is able to sustain his current lifestyle of being in a full time job and running a venture that is growing. My assumptions is that he would have to choose... It would be interesting to see what he would choose...
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