Is design more than just making it pretty?
Marcos is a Product Designer at Quipu. This function requires making important decisions before tackling the visual part of new features. The multi-step process consists of structuring and simplifying the product, talking about it with the potential users, and, finally, making it look good.
Create engagement with qualified customer communication.
Ana is an Account Executive in the Success department at Quipu. It means that her principal function is to be in contact with consumers, namely the bookkeepers, in order to reach their demands and expectations regarding the service Quipu offers. Ana gives them the necessary tools to cover all their needs and solve their problems. For example, if a client has the opportunity to improve his use of the software, but isn’t aware of it, Ana is responsible to help him make the most out of Quipu. Her final goal is to generate engagement with clients to establish a long term relationship.
Especially after the initial product launch and after achieving the first milestones, startups most often try to get some press coverage, in order to increase the attention of venture capital firms, business angels and early adopters for their product or service. For that reasons, they usually reach out to local or international tech and startup publications. Getting featured in one of those can be as challenging as securing funding or getting your first customers. So it’s important for startups to take a close look a the publications they aim to target and to avoid common mistakes.
The tech and startup media landscape, internationally, in Europe, Spain & Barcelona: Aside of international tech publications like TechCrunch, TheNextWeb and Venturebeat, there are European startup/tech publications like tech.eu and EU-Startups, Spanish ones like El Referente and TodoStartups, as well as local ones in Barcelona like Barcinno and Barcelona Startup News. In order to get to know some of these startup publications better and to get a behind the scenes view, we recently organized a little round table discussion with Vivien from Barcelona Startup News, Sophie from Barcinno and Thomas from EU-Startups. If you’re interested in Startup PR, the role/state of tech media and the startup ecosystem in Barcelona, this one is for you:
During the discussion, there already came up a few tips and tricks. Publications like Barcinno, Barcelona Startup News, and especially international startup publications receive a huge amount of press releases per day, so in order to increase your chances of getting press coverage, you should really make sure to reach out the right way. To provide you with an overview, below you’ll find a summary from the discussion between Vivien, Sophie and Thomas, and some additional best practices:
What is news? The fact that your startup exists or just launched is usually not newsworthy. Unless you just invented a time machine or teleportation technology. Most interesting content for startup and tech publications is exclusive information and news that make their readers go „wow”!
Prepare a good press pitch: Provide all relevant information. Make it as simple as possible for the editors to understand your product, it’s USP and why your story is newsworthy! Keep your email pitch short and suggest an interesting angle for an article. Also: Don’t ask for permission to send a press release. Just do it!
Sending your press releases via email: Keep your emails to each of the contacted editors short and don’t send too many releases to the same editor in quick succession. Send them out individually, with a personal note (never: Dear editor…). If your email shows that you understand/read the publication, your chances of grabbing the editor’s attention clearly increase. Best case, the press release will be sent by someone the editor already knows.
Be a good communicator: When contacting editors, pick the subject line of your email carefully and make it stand out. Some editors of popular startup/tech publications get a few hundred emails a day, so you wanna make sure they at least open your email. If they do, and afterwards reply with some questions, save them time, by quickly replying. Sometimes it’s really a matter of minutes. If you don’t reply fast enough, the editor might already consider another story. On the other hand, if you are the one asking questions, make sure the editor can answer with one line or a simple „yes“ or „no“. Saving time is key!
Keys to good press releases: Great content and exciting news spreads automatically around the web. Your press releases should be a good read, easy to understand and as interesting as possible. Readers of startup publications, like pretty much all humans, like big numbers, interesting facts they didn’t know yet, successful people/stars, nice pictures, stories that spark emotions.
A sense of exclusivity: Media people like to talk to the people in charge. That being said, press releases should be sent by the startup’s CEO not by an intern or a PR firm. This is true especially for early-stage startups. And: Journalists like exclusives! By giving a publication the exclusive right to publish first (embargoed news) you will clearly increase your chances of getting featured there!
The perfect timing for sending your press release: Send your press release with advance notice. For example: If you’d like to see your news/story covered on Wednesday afternoon, reach out on Monday morning at the latest, saying that the day of the announcement will be Wednesday. The most important thing to keep in mind is: Editors don’t like old news! On the same day the first press coverage about a specific topic goes online, all other media outlets should have received the corresponding press release. Otherwise your chances to get additional press coverage are almost at 0%.
And if it doesn’t work out? Don’t take it personal if a publication doesn’t write about you and your startup! If your team and idea is strong, you will make it anyway! Other ways to get visibility for your startup are to properly present it on AngelList, Crunchbase, F6S, Product Hunt, Betalist, and of course on big social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram.
In itnig’s Podcast #26 Bernat Farrero, CEO at itnig and César Migueláñez, Product Director at Factorial, talk with Pol Narbona, Product Owner at Typeform about Product Management.
Pol shares his story with us: How he arrived at Typeform, how he started out as a Product Owner and gives us a little overview on how he works with two road maps — Discovery & Delivery — in Product Management. For the whole talk you can view this video on the Dual Track Agile methodology:
At itnig every Friday we sit down to talk with interesting people whom we meet throughout the week and we make a podcast (in Spanish) out of our conversations. You can listen to it on iTunes, subscribe to our channel on Youtube or enjoy it through iVoox.
First of all, we ask him to situate us and give us a bit of context before we enter in detail into his career path.
Typeform is a software for online data collection: forms, surveys, register forms — converting a bureaucratic thing into a conversation. But this is probably just the boring explanation of the produc t— we are really strong in design and user interaction.
I am from Barcelona and started to study here but then I had the chance to go to the US with a sport’s internship. In the 3rd year at uni I was doing some market research and needed to create a survey, I used Typeform and when I shared the survey the respondents were really surprised. I was studying Business & Tech and when I was finishing uni I started to look for jobs all over Europe. Actually I think Typeform was the only company in Barcelona I applied for. As they did not have any open positions in the Product team I started as Data Analyst, as part of the Customer Success team. Here I came to understand user behavior and I started seeing how the product team works. After a while and a restructuring of the teams, I applied internally for product owner position and here I am now.
I finished my university studies and started working at Typeform a year and a half ago. At that time I was employee #90 if you will and now, 1.5 years later we are about 180 people in the team. I think this gives a good impression of our rapid growth.
At Typeform we separate ourselves into different product teams, distributed along the User Journey:
In the Conclude team for example we work in different colonies with Designers, UX, Developers, QA and Product Owners. The colonies give us the info that people working in this colony are focussed on this part of the user journey.
These colonies are not hermetic, we switch between teams, actually it is pretty common for developers to be working on different parts of the funnel from time to time. This allows us to divide the product up in different parts and assign an objetive and metric to each of them.
However, we are changing this again as we discovered that there are lot of dependencies. For example: We wanted to create a user journey for a specific persona but if other teams are working on other priorities there are dependencies that arise. Now we are going for a more horizontal approach to have more context at the moment of working together.
Yes, we do Discovery & Delivery in parallel. While the team works on delivery of a tested feature, I can dedicate myself to identify new opportunities that come later.
In general, throughout all teams we work in 2 weeks sprints and with Scrum. We have seen that these are compatible with the Discovery & Delivery Agile roadmap.
If you are interested in finding out more about his work methodology at Typeform, we encourage you to listen to and watch his talk at itnig as well.
Listen to our podcast to learn more about Product Management at Typeform and Pol’s experiences with Discovery & Delivery. Learn more in this Podcast in Spanish on our Youtube channel, listen to it on iTunes or enjoy it through iVoox and subscribe to our newsletter to stay always up to date.
Gymforless has been acquired by Sodexo BRS Spain on February 1st 2018. Gymforless is a market place that gives access to more than a 1.000 fitness clubs to consumers and employees — combining thus a BtoC and BtoBtoC model.
From a simple gym access app Gymforless has become a benefit plan for companies, offering a better quality of life to their employees. As such Gymforless has attracted the attention of Sodexo Spain and the group has decided to acquire the startup. The leader in the sector of restaurant tickets plans to integrate Gymforless into their portfolio of services dedicated to contributing to the quality of life of employees and their motivation.
In this short video interview Oriol Vinzia, CEO of Gymforless talks about the past, present and future of the company:
With this acquisition Gymforless will become part of strong group while maintaining its autonomy.
“They know we are a startup and they understand we need to be able to grow at the pace of a startup.”
“If we integrate completely they know we’ll lose speed. In a few years the structure will definitely be different but at the moment we we will remain independent while creating partnerships with their existing clients.
Corporate wellness is a trend. Everybody talks about it and it becomes more and more important for companies to offer benefit policies to retain their talent. Everybody wants to work out and have it as easy as possible. With Gymforless companies can give their employees just that!”
Oriol, how did you start at Gymforless?
I joined Gymforless after the startup was founded and had been working for about a year. Guillermo Libre whom I met through Groupalia while we worked there together called me.
It was easy for him to convince me as Gymforless combines my two passions: sports and ecommerce. I started my career at Decathlon and later switched to online while working at Vente Privee and seven years at Groupalia, in the sales and marketing area.
How was your start?
When I joined Gymforless, Guillermo who had founded the company was about to leave so right away we went through a change of leadership.
The change of CEO in a very young company is not easy — I had to integrate in the team quickly and take new steps in a new direction together. As an app we started selling day passes but then pivoted to what you now know as Gymforless Club. Through our Club app you get to access different gyms in your area, you get to chose the day, activity and sports center.
The market is very competitive with a wide range of independent gyms and only very few gym chains it is also very fragmented and dispersed. We bring the gyms together so that consumers can chose easily. For gyms we bring them new users who discover their activities — Gymforless brings them extra revenue.
How did you approach sales and expansions within a city?
When Gymforless started it was not easy to sell — we did not have the app but had to sell the idea and there was nothing comparable to Gymforless in the fitness industry. So we looked to other areas where similar models are working. Booking.com does the same for hotels or ElTenedor for restaurants. We were a new player in the market, so it was first hard to explain it to gyms but after the first year the acquisition of customers has become much easier.
First we needed volume of partners and then we brought the customers. We were generating a high volume of transactions and we realized that this was an attractive offer for companies. Now we have a team dedicated to acquiring gyms, another team dedicated to acquiring companies as customers who offer Gymforless as a benefit to their employees and thirdly we have our marketing team concerned with acquiring final consumers. With this new area dedicated to b2b customers we were able to grow much faster and we’ll see what this new partnership with Sodexo will bring.