You have an early-stage project ready for success, but chances are, you need funding. Without funding, reaching success is very hard, not to say almost impossible. If you are confident enough and ready to share your project with the rest of the world… Located in Barcelona, here are Tech Investment Funds for startups you can reach out to.
Continue reading “Investment Funds for Startups in Barcelona”Venture Builders, Incubators and Accelerators in Barcelona
There’s access to many venture builders, incubators, and accelerators in Barcelona. These programs are key for early-stage startups to reach their goals.
Continue reading “Venture Builders, Incubators and Accelerators in Barcelona”Podcast #24: Itnig’s point of view on Gymforless’ exit
In itnig’s Podcast #23 Bernat Farrero, CEO at itnig and Pau Fernández, CFO at itnig share their point of view on Gymforless’ exit. How did the company start, pivot, live the change of CEO and reach an agreement with Sodexo which lead to the sale of the startup last week.
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.
For this Podcast #24 dedicated to the story of Gymforless, Bernat Farrero, CEO at itnig, Pau Fernández, CFO at itnig, César Migueláñez, Product Director at Factorial, Roger Dobaño, Product Manager at Quipu and Bettina Gross, Talent Acquisition at itnig come together to talk about the beginning, the pivots and the exit of Gymforless.
Gymforless started out as a flexible model on how to use gym, directed to final consumer offering fitness tracking. Instead of models like Freeletics or 8fit, whom we have previously spoken about here at itnig, Gymforless focussed its tracking on workouts at the gym.
Guillermo Libre started out with the project and from itnig we supported him in tech development and an initial investment. The work on the b2c segment was very intense and it cost us a lot in marketing and customer acquisition, bringing only small margins.
Transition from daily pass to club, membership
With this panorama, Guillermo made a first pivot from a Daily Pass (pay per use) model to a Club Pass (a subscription) model. It was a hard decision, we were scared leaving something behind that was working and it seemed like a dangerous move.
It’s hard to leave something that is working, even though it’s not your core business.
After all, this was a very important change and from the on the project had a new direction. We were adding more features like rewards to work on churn. However this was only the first of many changes the startup would go through.
Guillermo, founder of the project had to leave the project and move to Madrid. In most cases such a change of CEO in an initial phase is the end of the business. Not in Gymforless’ case. Guillermo knew Oriol, current CEO, from working together in the past and he joined Gymforless to lead the startup through the next adventures. Oriol had extensive experience in Sales and B2B.
Pivot to a new direction — going corporate
The next step for Gymforless was a change in its customer target base. We started acquiring companies and offer gym as benefit for employees. The companies were very receptive to offer these kind of benefits and we soon had a working model. Oriol’s experience in B2B Sales helped this pivot from consumer to corporate business tremendously.
This change made the relationships with the gyms easier as well. Gyms no longer saw us as a threat, or cannibalization of their customers.
Listen to our podcast to learn more about Gymforless’ beginning and exit story. 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.
Metric based business decisions
Every week we take half an hour to talk just about any topic that crossed our minds during the last days and create a podcast for you (Listen to it in Spanish here and subscribe to our feed). We call it an Open Mic Podcast as we want to invite different people to participate, new ideas to take form and to shed light on various experiences and perspectives on business development.
You will hear Bernat, CEO at itnig, César, Product Director at Factorial and Jordi, CEO at Factorial discussing different topics with guests from our start-up ecosystem in Barcelona. This week Pau Ramon, CTO at Factorial, joins us.
This podcast #16 is special in the sense that we have three Factorial team members with us and will be able to learn more about how they measure and make use of metrics in their business decisions.
Pau and Jordi started working on Factorial a bit over a year ago but the idea was already formed a while earlier, while talking over a beer with Bernat. At this time they were working at Redbooth and thought it to be a good moment for change, to start something new, to create a team and to have sense of ownership that they no longer felt at Redbooth.
Pau Ramon has been working in tech for over 10 years, he studied multimedia and then dove right into web. Fascinated by internet companies, he started helping a Barcelona company that was creating a social network for models. He was working alone at the time, had to start creating a team — Almost by accident he became CTO. Through this experience he learned a lot and decided to continue in this direction.
He went to the West Coast of the US for a conference, missed the flight back on purpose and stayed looking to start something himself.
There he met Pablo whom we would later work with at Redbooth and that’s how we actually got started talking about metrics today.
“My role is not CEO, I like to do the product behind the business.”
At Redbooth I learned how to measure the success or failure of a business, to undo decisions that have been taken. I like to have one metric as indicator for the whole business and then segment it further based on funnel. We assign one metric to one function within the business or one person within the company. It’s important that marketing, product, sales, support…have their own metric and that they can see that the work they are doing are impacting the business positively. At Factorial for example, all metrics are always visible and every Friday we make a point of going through them together at our all-hands meeting.
“Metrics — a complex topic summarized in one number.”
When we started out building the product at Factorial and were not yet at the stage of customer acquisition, we took ‘activation’ of our companies as our main measure. It’s somewhat of a North Star — Something to guide you when you take a decision.
“I prefer an approximation to no orientation.”
To learn more about how they use metrics, what tool they use to measure and how they base their decisions on these numbers, listen to this week’s podcast here:
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