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Serial Entrepreneur Nacho Gonzalez Barros sharing his insights from Infojobs, Mailtrack & many more

In this edition, Podcast #32, Jordi Romero talk to Nacho Gonzalez Barros, who is typically introduced as serial entrepreneur, together with Juan Rodriguez, CEO at Camaloon and César Migueláñez, Product Director at Factorial. Nacho will share his story and experiences of launching and growing different businesses with us. Listen to our podcast on Youtube, iTunes or iVoox.

Nacho, what is your story?

I started in 1995 with one of the first ISP in Spain, called Intercom. I was 19 at that time and it was there that I saw how to start something. I got hooked and dropped out of my telecommunication studies. During this time at Intercom I was also very involved in the hiring process and really loved the part of finding talent. In this time about 100 selection processes went through me at the Intercom Group. This is where in 1997 I saw the opportunity to create Infojobs. We started with a technical co-founder and a business founder.

Actually we have had Albert Feliu and Javier Llorente as guests on our podcast as well!

Ah nice! Yeah, we’re all from the same family.

We spent a lot of years creating a company. Nowadays there is a lot of literature, but when we started out we had to learn as we went along. Infojobs went really well but that was just the start for me. When we sold Infojobs, I saw a new opportunity, the partners at Intercom trusted me and I set out to create Neurona, something like the Spanish LinkedIn, which I later sold to Xing, the German LinkedIn. Next I worked on Niumba, a web of apartments which was sold to Tripadivsor.

These three were the positive experiences but I have created a lot of failures.

There was Lincara — a social media platform focussed solely on the Spanish market. It was a disaster. Tuenti came along and we were not the best at executing. I was unfocused. We copied Friendster’s model but then Facebook came a long. Take a look at myspace and what happened when Facebook came along.

When you start, while trying the MVP, you can do other things but once you have traction you have to be all in, completely focused on the business.

Another example was Amigosfree, free dating site like plenty of fish. It’s the startup that had the most traction but we were missing a full time CEO. Dating creates recurrency, it’s a very attractive sector. And being free when Match and Meetic were paid was also a great advantage but here again the execution failed, I was doing too many things at the same time.

Now I am working on Mailtrack and it’s going very well — it’s a plugin for Gmail that adds a double check when your email has been read in Gmail. When somebody opens your email you are notified that the email has been read. We have 50 thousand customers with recurrent payments and are among the 100 extensions on the Chrome Appstore.

You’ve been working on Mailtrack for 5 years now. How does a product like yours evolve?

You put a pixel in the body of the email but technologically it’s incredibly complicated to create a product inside one of Google’s Apps. It seems really simple but technologically there is a lot of complexity behind it.

When you send an email with Mailtrack you add the statement ‘Sent with Mailtrack’ to the email. What part of growth comes from this virality?

About 45% of our growth is thanks to this virality.

Word of mouth is also important for us. There is a Wow effect upon seeing Mailtrack at work. Even people who are really into technology are surprised by this. It’s a very precise functionality nobody had worked on before.

In your past experiences there are either exits or companies that are closing. Mailtrack is going well but you haven’t sold yet. What is your plan?

The natural evolution is selling the company but we are not actively looking to sell, we are creating revenue. We have 2 million users and recurrent revenue — the most natural is that there is a CRM company in the US who sees this as a feature to their product. Not only valued by revenue and EBITDA but by the potential.

I don’t think of my company as my baby, I am a bit addicted to change.

Yes, so it seems. It seems like every 4 or 5 years you have a new idea.

I am really enjoying working on Mailtrack but the normal thing is that there will be somebody much better than me at scaling the company. I am much stronger at starting things and bringing them to revenues.

Do you do an autoscreening of your ideas?

Every time I am more rational and more of a realist when thinking about starting a project. Not obsessing about the solution but about the problem. Understanding the market, possible customers, talking to them. When I see that there is something that I need, that’s where I start with a project.

Dog fooding.

Yes, Infojobs was exactly this. I was a recruiter and I was going through 1000 of CVs so I really understood the problem other recruiters had. Now I am starting something related to hiring. I know the problem by heart. I see the problem and can visualize the solution.

I think before even starting to create a MVP you should go out talking to people to see if what you are thinking of is a ‘Must-Have’ or a ‘Nice to have’.

Fall in love with a problem before doing anything.

I think it’s important to recruit people close to you, early adopters, for a brain storming session about this problem and you really need to have a clear business models. There needs to be a clear business and you need to see that there is a space for you out there.

How are you going to start it?

Very cautiously as there is a lot of uncertainty. I am not going to raise capital but set out to better understand the market. Going from company to company to understand how they work, how they do recruitment and see if this solution could fit with their work style.

Listen to our podcast to learn more about Nacho’s plans for the future, how he sees the founder personality and what he thinks about the process of scaling a company. 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.

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How I Got Hired & Ditched By UBER

This is not a picture of me.

There is a lack of engineers everywhere, but finding talent is especially hard in the Bay Area.

I’m from Spain but 5 years ago I went three months to SF, to attend a couple of conferences and visited some friends.
At that time I was trying to start something, but I changed my mind and I started looking for jobs in the US instead.

Getting in contact

Every single company I visited was recruiting.

Tech companies provided pizza, beers and tons of famous, smart people to talk about smart things. All to attract talent.

I sent out many resumes, but 90% of the times I didn’t receive any response, and I couldn’t figure out what was missing.

I have a CS degree, five years of experience and lots of open source contributions in cutting edge technologies. My best guess was that US companies were not willing to sponsor me a `H-1B` visa.

I was close to giving up and going back to Spain when I received two calls from a couple of companies. One of them was Klout, the social media analytics company that sold for $200 million. The second call was from a company that was just starting up at the time, they wanted to disrupt the transportation industry.

The interviews

The first interviews are always done by telephone. They ask you about your background, some theoretical questions and some *puzzles*.

When they have decided that you’re smart enough to meet face to face, the real interview starts, and it’s not a normal meet and greet, it can last up to three hours.

You talk with people from different departments, answer more questions and solve more *puzzles* on whiteboards.

– Implement a function that calculates square roots
 — Sort and concat arrays in a optimal way
 — Guess the two missing numbers in a array with `n — 2` length containing `1..n` unsorted numbers
 — Calculate the number of digits for a given number
 — Implement a function to detect palindromes
 — …

Most of them were doable, but I think they were missing some amazing developers that may not know how to solve those problems,
but they are capable of solving real-life problems (fix this bug, port this library, refactor this code…).

Some of the theoretical questions I had (mostly javascript related):

– What is a closure and which disadvantages does it have:
 — What is hoisting.
 — How does `this` work.
 — How `float` works and which issues does it have.
 — How does the event loop work on the browser and how to delay a function to the next tick.
 — How to optimize CSS, and how does specificity work.

The offers

Both companies I interviewed for offered to sponsor me a H-1B visa and a good salary.


I ended up accepting one of the offers because they where more transparent with the stock options (which I later discovered not to be so great after all), and because they told me that I could work remotely until getting the visa.

I signed the contract, opened a bank account, left my job and came back to Spain.

The silence

Back in Spain I started to prepare myself for the new job — I was looking forward joining a new team. I learnt Python because I saw some people using it at that company’s offices.

I was super motivated and willing to start! I even sent some emails to the CTO to get some instructions on how to setup my development environment.

At my starting date I received the first email from the CTO saying that they were not able to get my visa and that they were thinking about the aspect of working remotely.

I answered them that it wasn’t a problem for me. I had been working remotely for a while and it had never been an issue.

What happened next? Nothing. Silence. I was completely ignored.

The problem

Getting a working visa in the US is not easy. If it was, most developers would be working there. It has gotten a lot better the last years, but companies should start to be more open minded about hiring remote workers.

There is a huge deficit of talent in the US, and a lot of wasted (and way cheaper) talent in other countries around the world. An average engineer in the Bay Area can cost around $100k+. In Spain, the same engineer costs significantly less.

Even though I’m happy I didn’t end up in the states, it would have been cool to be one of the first developers at Uber.

The solution

Ironically, while I was on holiday in San Francisco I was working for [Teambox](now Redbooth), a company with their development team based in Spain.

It was an amazing experience, the development was happening 24 hours a day. The git repository was constantly receiving commits, never sleeping.

It was a great time, that I now look back on as me and Jordi Romero are working on our new project Factorial.

Luckily there’s more and more great companies being built in Europe, and there’s no need to go to the US to land a fantastic job as a developer. Both Madrid (14th) and Barcelona (9th)are climbing on EDCI’s digital city index list every year, and more and more startups are getting funded.

A recent report by Atomico predicts even greater times for European tech in the years to come, so no need to apply for the green card lottery this year, just hold on to your European passport.

This memoir was written by the CTO of Factorial.

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Factorial Will Change The Way Your Company Deals With HR

Co-founders of Factorial Pau Ramon Revilla (CTO) and Jordi Romero (CEO).

There’s a new startup in town, and we’re lucky to say it’s an itnig company.

Factorial wants to make the HR role both easier and less time consuming through their cloud-based HR platform.

Factorial has already started on-boarding several Barcelona companies to their platform.

Many small and medium businesses don’t have a budget for a full-time HR person, so managing employees, their contracts, pay slips, time off, benefits, insurance and much more, is left to the CEO, the office manager or someone else.

All of these tasks, and more, are automated through Factorial, explains CTO and co-founder Pau Ramon Revilla.

Our customer interviews shows that HR managers use 80 percent of their time on cumbersome chores, and only 20 percent on building culture and boosting productivity. We want to flip those numbers.

Bringing the Zenefits model to Europe (and the world..)

Even though there’s several HR management platforms in Europe, they are not designed for the needs of small and medium businesses (payroll, benefits, time-management, etc.) that Factorial offers, says CEO and co-founder Jordi Romero:

The initial seed idea was to bring the Zenefits model to Europe.

Zenefits was born from newly introduced regulations that forced American companies to provide certain benefits for their employees, but European markets work very differently, and this is where Factorial comes in. They’re currently exploring what to offer in the different markets, and they’ll start in a few European countries, according to CEO Romero.

Usually all companies reinvent their own way of dealing with HR processes, using forms and excel sheets, which is very time consuming. We’ll change that.

Moving fast

Only three months ago Jordi and Pau didn’t have a product, but they’ve been building non-stop and have recently started on-boarding companies into their platform, according to CTO Ramon:

We’re testing what’s basically our MVP with 5–6 companies in Barcelona now, and so far the feedback has been good.

They’re currently raising their first round of funding, and will be using the next 6 months to build an international product, and then establish partnerships for benefits around Europe.

“The initial seed idea was to bring the Zenefits model to Europe” — Jordi Romero

Both Romero and Ramon are coming from executive positions in SaaS company Redbooth, where they worked as VP of business development and CTO.

We’re bringing a lot of valuable knowledge and experience from Redbooth on how to run a SaaS company, the metrics, how to convert users in to actual customers, and much more.

Targeting startups

Factorial is meant for all small and medium businesses, but the first months their targeting startups, says CEO and co-founder Romero.

The co-founders in talks with the itnig design and business development team.

Tech startups usually have higher salaries, and are more creative in ways to compensate their employees. At the same time, they’re often very depending on efficiency and productivity, so it’s a very good fit for Factorial.

Factorial is one of six companies currently being built in itnig’s venture builder in Poble Nou, and all the other startups in the ecosystem are using Factorial.

Now the race to build a great team has begun, says Ramon:

We’re looking for great developers to help us build Factorial. As the CTO of Redbooth I’ve learned a lot about how to grow a team, create a good culture and to foster productivity and creativity. I’m looking forward to applying this knowledge in Factorial.

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