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Prepare For The Future Of Marketing — Build Your Content Factory

There are few startups or young companies that doesn’t have a blog these days. We all know the benefits of producing content in one shape or another, but exactly how to do it the right way?

There are several ways to establish yourself as a quality content provider, and some things you need to avoid when interacting with people through content.

Build Credibility and expertise

Content marketing is more about showing of your knowledge, to help people, than to sell something.

A common mistake companies often do, is to produce their content like a very good-looking ad for their product. Wrong.

A blog article will usually never lead to a sale or a direct purchase, it’s about building credibility as an expert in your field. So when your potential customers is ready to make a purchase he or she knows what brand to trust with his wallet.

How content marketing doesn’t work.

This means that you can’t fake being an expert if you really want to get something out of your content. This blog you’re reading right now is not existing for you to buy or invest anything in itnig.

We want to be a real resource for the startup community, so that our startups benefits from the reputation itnig has as a good provider of useful knowledge.

If you’re company full of experts or people with a lot of experience you should take advantage of their knowledge, and present it through your content.

If you’re a startup, with a young team without experience, you can bring in external people from your network, experts or others for an interview, but present it through your brand, so both you and your external expert benefit from it.

Stay Relevant

Staying in touch with trends is getting harder, as trends are changing every day.

One of the ways of staying in touch with what’s relevant for your audience is creating a balance of current and evergreen content.

To only cover current trends is great when it’s hyped, but it’s a big risk to take if it fades away in a month or two. In other words, many hours of hard work can be wasted. To stay relevant you also need to present evergreen content; videos & posts that explain timeless topics which have been discussed, and will be discussed for the next ten years:

All of these articles are evergreen, and will bring people to the itnig blog for the next years. With a balance between this kind of content, and current events in the industry you’re in, you’ll be sure to create a brand that shines of relevance.

Avoid content shock

We are reaching a point in content marketing where publishing 500 word articles for SEO isn’t really working anymore.


As everyone is creating content we need to know our customers or users much better. Do the research, and instead of creating tons of short posts, create longer content with higher value. Also because Google now favors that kind of content. The average word count of a Google first page result is 1,890 words. Also Medium favor longer content, as a 7 minute read will rank better in their algorithms.

If you’re building or running a company I guess you spend a good amount of time getting to know your customers. Use this information to shape your content.

It’s however worth mentioning that if you’re doing video content, the rule of length does not apply as much as with written or audio content. If it’s not a super interesting keynote, try to keep it shorter, around 1–2 minutes, especially in social media.

Across platforms

There’s tons of places on the internet where you can promote your content.

Medium, Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Snapchat, LinkedIn, the list goes on..

The key is again to know your customer and your content. All platforms has their target audience and one or more types of content that performs well. Medium is obviously good for text, especially longer form. Facebook and Youtube is great for video. Twitter is great for spreading the word fast.

The different social media channels all serve their particular purpose, and you can’t stick to only one. When itnig writes a medium article we always try to include:

  • Videos
  • Photos
  • Social media content

It should be a goal to do this in all posts, but it’s hard and resource demanding. It’s however these posts that people read and share the most.

Now, go build your own content factory!

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This post was written by @sindre hopland, media manager at itnig, and based on Scott Mackin’s talk at itnig this fall.

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Undressing a CTO and how to become one

Do you want to become a Chief Technology Officer, or are you just curious about the role?

If you want your keyboard to remain your closest friend, you can stop reading right here, being a CTO is much more than just being a talented developer. But if you want to get some insights from three experienced Barcelona-based CTOs, please continue reading.

Investing time in your team is the most important task, even more important than focusing on your product.

Right place at the right time

Roger Campos from Camaloon (to the left) says that personal experience is much more important than how many years you have worked in a company.

In the startup world not all decisions within the company are carefully planned and executed according to the planned strategy.

Pau Ramon Revilla, former CTO of Redbooth, and currently founder at Factorial felt he was at the right place at the right time when stepped up as CTO for the first time.

I started at Redbooth, living on the founders sofa in San Francisco, coding for a roof over my head, so I wasn’t a very expensive developer. But as I went back to Barcelona, the former CTO and the tech lead left, and I was asked to be the new CTO.

For others it’s more of a transitioning after starting a company from scratch.

Both Albert Bellonch at Quipu and Roger Campos at Camaloon founded their startups, and gradually grew into the CTO role as their companies grew. Roger never really set out to become head of tech at Camaloon:

It was never a goal of mine to become a CTO, but you take on responsibility and do your best to grow a great team.

The biggest challenge — new developers

A huge challenge for most CTOs these days is finding talented developers in a highly competitive job market.

CTO Pau Ramon Revilla and Roger Campos says personal motivation is key when hiring new developers.

But what kind of developers are most tech leaders looking for?

They all agree that the most important aspect when hiring, is personal motivation, and if the person is willing to go deep in all kinds of challenges he or she faces.

Experience is important, but having worked for many years, is not necessarily the only metric that is valued, say Roger:

If a developer has worked in five different jobs the last years, doing the exact same task, to me he is less experienced than a younger developer, that has worked on many personal projects and faced complex challenges.

Pau gives junior developers two tips:

The startup world may be too harsh for many junior developers. To get the right kind of experience I would advice to contribute a lot in open source, and maybe take a job in a big corporation the first years.

https://upscri.be/285782-2

Invest in people

People have different skills and methods on how to lead a technical team, but the three CTOs agree that people is the most important focus for them in their work. Pau explains:

Depending on the company, most of the time the development team will be the most valuable asset, sometimes even more than the product itself.

All the CTO’s agree, and Roger says:

My biggest task and most important mission is to talk with people. Talk with my team, with the rest of the company and external people, that’s most of my job.

I keep coding to keep my sanity

Albert Bellonch (to the left) is still coding every day at Quipu, but will soon have to stop to code on a daily basis because his team is growing a lot.

It’s no secret that time spent coding decreases a lot when you move over to the role of being a leader.

Albert is currently leading a 4–5 development team at Quipu. He’s happy he’s still able to code every day:

I still code on a daily basis, and I’ve been able to create some cool new features for Quipu, but as my team grows by the months, I will soon stop coding every day.

Soft skills

A developer that has the aspiration of becoming a CTO should have a lot of experience, but there’s also other skills that are vital, says Pau:

Focus on the soft skills, you need to be able to reach a consensus with people, not only focus on your own opinions.

All the CTOs agree that you don’t need to be the best developer in the company to lead the development team, but there are some skills that are good to know these days, according to Roger.

It’s hard to point to one kind of technology, because everything depends on what kind of project you’re working on, but Javascript is probably the safest bet for a developer today.

(If you want more insights, check out the video at the top!)

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This post was written by Sindre Hopland and the video was edited by Masumi Mutsuda — the itnig media team.

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How EDpuzzle Went Straight To Silicon Valley Without A Single Line Of Code

Barcelona startup EDpuzzle went through Y-combinator’s Edtech program imagine K12.

A lot of Spanish entrepreneurs go to the US to expand their markets. It’s normal, it’s the right thing to do for most companies. But usually you take with you a portfolio of achievements and milestones from the country you started up in.

Not EDpuzzle, according to co-founder and CTO Santi Herrero.

We started from scratch at ImagineK12, now part of Y Combinator where big companies like Dropbox and Airbnb were born. We applied with an idea, but without any line of code at all. The idea we had when we moved to San Francisco was that we needed to build a tool that allowed teachers to make any video their lesson.

The Barcelona startup combines simple video-editing tools with analytics so that a teacher can take a video and make it personal for their classrooms.

The teachers can take already existing videos from Youtube, Khan Academy, Crash Course, etc. or upload your own, and then enable self-paced learning with interactive lessons, adding their voice and questions along the video.

Not global from day one

Experts often say that you need to have a global mindset from the first day, no matter where you start your venture.

And even though EDpuzzle hoped their product could reach a global audience, and today is used in 150 countries by 6 million users, the first focus was very local, says Herrero.

Our initial approach was to connect with 10 very interested and energetic teachers to learn from them as much as possible. This way we would get a lot of very vital information for the development of the product. Those teachers ultimately became some of our biggest evangelists.

After three months and demo day at Y-combinator, EDpuzzle had several interested investors in the US, so not long after returning to Barcelona, a part of the team went back to start raising a seed round which resulted in $800.000.

The CTO and co-founder thinks their very local focus helped them create a better global product, compared to if they went straight for the masses.

To really learn from your users you need to be very close to them, you can’t retract everything from analytics etc. After we got the validation we needed from several teachers, we started driving around in the US to all the education events we could find, and talk to as many teachers as possible. That’s how we grew.

Barcelona + San Fransisco

Even though parts of EDpuzzle’s team have been in San Fransisco from day one, the development of the product has been done from Barcelona.

Our competitive advantage is that we can hire great developers from our network in Barcelona, with a lower cost than in San Fransisco, and create a great product from here.

Says CTO Herrero who is hiring people in all kinds of positions after the company closed $3 million in their series A this August.

It makes a lot of sense for us to divide the business between Spain and the US, because our biggest market is in the states. I can’t say that this is the right thing to do for everyone, but the US market is easier to enter and people are open to new solutions, especially in the Edtech sector.

Keeping it simple

From the beginning EDpuzzle valued keeping their product as simple as possible.

Both EDpuzzle’s landing page and their product reflect their value of keeping what they do as simple as possible.

Both their product and their landing page reflect this value of simpleness.

They said it’s about knowing their audience, and that the last thing a busy teacher needs, is spending time on learning a new complicated tool.

In a matter of days they’ll release their android app, so students can consume their teachers’ videos no matter if they have a computer at home, or not.

We are now in 1/4 schools in the US, but our goal is to be in all of them.

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This post was written by Sindre Hopland, media manager at itnig.

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Why Barcelona Is Turning Into An European Hub For Gaming Startups

A total of 120.000 people attended the Barcelona Games World conference in 2016.

Barcelona Games World 2016 recently ended as a success with over 120.000 visitors over four days. It was the first year the congress was held, and entertained its attendants with over 1000 gaming stations, 30 mini conferences and 371 interviews with prominent game developers.

But this is only one of several elements that makes Barcelona one of the most vibrant hubs for gaming startups in Europe.

Big players

Most technology hubs around the world has big players both stealing & contributing to the environment. In some ways you can say that the big players validate the ecosystem with their presence.

As London houses major fintech startups such as Transferwise, Mondo & Atom, Barcelona has several big gaming startups like King (Activision), Social Point (local), Digital Legends and Tutotoons which have raised millions of euros the last years and engages 100 of millions of people through mobile and desktop games every day.

There’s also been a long time presence from veterans such as Ubisoft, Gameloft and other heavy hitters.

There are also a community of many AR and VR startups and companies that can be beneficial for game developers looking to create games in this space. Not to talk about betting games startups such as Playfulbet with over 6 million users worldwide, that have a huge community of Esports enthusiasts.

Pol Ruiz, CEO and founder of Playfulbet attended the Barcelona Games World, and told me how the conference was one of the greatest gatherings of gaming industry ever taking place in Barcelona.

The city is playing along

But big companies and innovative startups are not enough in the long run, to foster a true hub for gaming startups in Barcelona you also need supporters: gamers.

Luckily, Barcelona is also home to thousands of gamers. Not only shown through the Barcelona Games World conference, but through the annual Esports event ESL Expo, that attracted over 5000 people last year.

ESL Expo Barcelona attracted thousands of people.

Also local authorities are playing along, as Barcelona Activa, the local government arm supporting startups in the region has been backing an accelerator called Game BCN, aiming at accelerating gaming startups. There are also several gaming startups with funding and loans from the government operating from the city.

But it’s not only the local government who’s playing along, also the technical universities offer education focused on game design and development, both and bachelor and master degrees.

One of the biggest events in Barcelona every year is the Mobile World Congress, with over 100.000 attendants from all over the world. The speakers for the MWC 2017 was released last week, and the top headliner was John Hanke CEO of Niantic Labs that created Pokémon GO.

There are few statistics about the gaming industry in Barcelona, but in Spain there are about 450 development studios, with about 5.000 employees, where 40% of the workers are in Catalonia, according to Asociación Española de Videojuegos.

According to the AEV there are around 110 game studios located in Catalunya, and the number is growing every year.

What to expect from the future?

So with all these gaming related companies and institutions, can we call Catalunya or Barcelona one of Europe’s growing gaming hubs?

I think it’s safe to say that if the community continues to grow like it does now, we’ll see a lot of great companies coming out of the city.

For now, it makes it easier for the existing startups and entrepreneurs to find a friendly community and support for their ideas.

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Why Smart Cities Depend On Smart Parking

Smart parking is one of the easiest ways humans can make cities more sustainable.

The term smart city has become quite popular the last years. The expression indicates an urban area that, thanks to the use of advanced technology, isable to deal with a wide range of the citizen problems and needs in an innovative way. The purpose is to improve radically the quality of life, opportunity, health, social and economic development of the city.

However, a smart city is more than a digital or technologically advanced place. According to a group of researchers of the Vienna University of Technologies, the essence of a smart city is defined by six parameters: Smart Economy, Smart Mobility, Smart Environment, Smart People, Smart Living and Smart Governance.

Parking smart

One of the main problems for all big cities, and that touch on several of the six “smart parameters” are the lack of parking lots. Often, the public car parks built by the authorities, are not able to comply with the real needs of a city, defacing the landscape, with insufficient functional results.

That’s why different ventures have been launched the last years to reduce traffic and pollution in cities and make public transportation cheaper. For example, booking a parking spot online, allows you to avoid unnecessary queues, which again causes less pollution.

Parking is a central point of a Smart City, because a smart city informs people about available staging points in real time and enables them to build the best accessibility path with buses, trams, bikes or scooters, pedestrian areas, car sharing, taxis.

And to make the parking experience both more seamless and smarter, it’s also vital to allow people to pay for the parking service through their connected devices.

Even though the government or local authorities are the biggest owner of parking spots in most cities, they lack the flexibility to make concrete choices, investments in technology (for example for geo-referencing all the road staging points and therefore the possibility of informing on availability), but also directing and integration capacities whenever they are needed. This needs to be handled by a private company to work properly.

Not convinced?

That smart parking saves people a lot of time, instead of looking for a free parking spot, is alone extremely beneficial for society, making it much more efficient.

But if you’re not convinced by the arguments presented already, there are countless others showing how beneficial smart parking actually is for the cities of the future:

  • In the long run it would be possible to offer incentives to motorists for parking in low-demand areas to reduce congestion in areas with a lot of activity.
  • Set higher prices on blocks with low turnover and reduce prices in nearby areas with little or no parking activity.
  • Increase parking pricing during peak hours of the day and reduce it during off-peak hours to encourage drivers to run errands within off-peak hours.
  • Smart parking lets drivers reduce stress (according to a 2015 study)

50.000 cars

Parkimeter, a Barcelona grown startup, have since 2013 parked over 50.000 cars, becoming a leader in the booking market for parkings in Barcelona and Spain.

“How parking has been changed through technology, is similar to how the travel sector was disrupted 15 years ago,” explains co-founder of Parkimeter Jordi Badal.

There is hundred of choices for people choosing to park smart in Barcelona.

Our app allows users (local private, professionals and tourists) to find available parking spots, to choose (and pay for) the most convenient parking spot for them and determine the shortest route to get there. In other words, it’s a way to connect users with parking spaces and payment services thanks to modern mobile technology.

Climate changes, a fast growing urban population, limited energy and water resources, economic and technological changes are just some of the challenges cities have faced the last decades. Smarter parking solutions will not solve all these issues, but it’s an easy way to start, and a way all of us can contribute.

After all, the goal of smart cities are to address these challenges, big and small, and exploit the opportunities offered by these changes, and try to create new projects and services to improve quality of life, respecting the environment and future generations.

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This post was written by Braggion Martina at itnig startup Parkimeter.