on PR, international growth and uninspired outdated copycat ideas

Our MBA elective "Managing the Tech Start Up" proceed last week with 3 more sessions designed to help us get us som insights about launching and managing our own tech venture.

We had Iñaki Arrola, from coches.com, Gabriel Echevaria, from Chiquissimo and Jesus Encinar, virtual real estate local celebrity and founder of idealista.com and Alberto Torron, virtually unknown e-bay supplier that eventually opened up a series of specialized websites like todotaladros reaching 1,000 customers (yes, an ode to "(very) small is (or can also be) beautiful").

The sessions varied in degree of interest mostly depending on the eloquence of our guest speaker, but content wise they were, as always, quite enriching.

Naturally, my key take aways are essentially the ones I thoroughly look for to confirm the emotional decision that I already took that "my" idea for a venture has all the ingredients of the Next Tech Big Thing. Here they are:

1. unispired outdated and not necessarily exciting copy cats of already existing ideas have as much chance of succeeding as any other. It's all about the execution. For example, when Jesus Encinar decided to launch himself in the real estate online classifieds there were roughly 28 sites already in existence. In Spain only. I don't need to remind you that Facebook came way late to the social network arena, right?

2. when you go online, the interface is key. So maybe there are 20 guys doing the same as you do on the web. So what? Each person has as much patience to spend time figuring out his/her way around a website as they have for "amazing" telecom offer cold calls at dinner time.

It's not the functionality, it's the user experience!

Get the usability right and they will choose you. My favourite example of this are google.com and apple products. 10 years ago going to google.com and yahoo.com yielded completely different user experiences. I mean, the yahoo.com page is still so crowded that I really don't want to go there, it makes me dizzy! And remember the press conference of Steve Jobs when he  launched the 1st i-phone? He said something like "this gadget will revolutionize your life because now you have a phone, email and web browser all in one place". Daaaa!.... as if blackberries didn't exist at the time! Again, it's not the functionality, it's the user experience!

On this matter, one extra piece of reflection I would like to share: have a look now at yahoo.com, google.com and bing.com. Done? Isn't it funny how yahoo is still horrible, google is still simple and clean and bing is still faithful to Microsoft's (highly successful) business model of "copy the best but no less than 5 years later"?

3. Forget advertising, go to PR instead. No start up has advertising budget and placing ads is the "investment" with (one of) the most uncertain returns you can possibly make. So work your way up the brand awareness levels through careful PR. Suggested steps: 1) get your act together, make sure you have something decent going; 2) start a dialogue with influential bloggers in your field. here is a good tip of how to do it right (thx for the tweet, guerson); 3) pray that they like you and talk about you; 4) start reaping the rewards as mainstream media starts to talk about you

Incidently, since we are talking about PR and brand awareness... I am appalled at the pathetic traffic this blog of mine is generating.

I mean, I know that it may not be the most interesting thing but given the ratings below, and assuming that google analytics and statcounter are not purposefully sabotaging the results, not even my family seems to be following this blog and if it wasn't for the pity of my good friend Karan that seems to be the source of  60% of my traffic no one would read..., pardon, open these pages!

I will have to do something about it! Keep watching...

hjk