Branding is no longer about creating a name and a logo, it’s about combining product and magic, according to Marc Lite, CEO and co-founder of Firma, Barcelona’s most famous branding studio.
Marc has helped clients such as PepsiCo, Unilever and Esade, as well as local startups such as Badi and Bandit find their voice.
The following steps are what Marc thinks all companies need to go through, to begin the journey of building a strong, long-lasting brand.
However, before you invest anything in branding, make sure your product or service does three things:
Works perfectly technically.
Creating value for your users.
And that the user interface and experience is very good.
The main goal of you creating a brand for your startups is to clearly define a positioning statement that communicates through all the brand touchpoints.
This communication needs to be presented in a coherent and consistent way to your audiences.
Many small startups are used to rapidly changing environments. Being agile and lean means iterating and changing a lot to make your product better, and for working with technology and product development this mindset is great. For brands however, staying the same is better.
Take a look at the strongest brands in the world (Coca Cola, Apple, Orange..), can you remember they ever doing a major change to their logo or color? Of course not, it would be a disaster.
Even though you see your own brand every day, remember that most of your users don’t, and suddenly changing would weaken your brand a lot.
But before you start producing your coherent content, you need to take a sharp look at your company and ask yourself these questions about your brand identity:
Is it ownable? Can we own the segment or the market?
Are we relevant? Does our target audience find us interesting?
Is it different? Do we stand out from our competitors?
Are we durable? Are we positioned to last over time?
If you want to ALL the insights from Marc at Firma, check out the video at the top.
Humor is a universal language, it has no limits, no boundaries. It is the channel to communicate with your customers and collaborators in a direct way and the most efficient transport for your ideas to go around the world.
In the ever-growing ocean of content that is shared every day in social networks, those that add irony, sarcasm or sympathy or usually the ones being shared the most. All colors and tones of humor are welcome on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, blogs and newsletters.
So, if you want to know how you can use the right sense of humor to spread your brand in all the corners of the world wide web, here are some clues:
Connect with your audience. Write, edit, program or design in a way that you talk to your customers in a natural way, inteligent people with whom you would go for a beer with. You will understand their needs, this process is called empathy.
Be funny without making a face. This is important, a good sense of humor does not consist of easy jokes. You could be sympathetic the same time smart and professional. The tone should fit with your company’s values.
Original content. This is the key to everything and to have more value adds some customization and adapt your messages to each format. Creating content is easy, being original not so much, start enjoying your own products and services. Enjoy doing your job. Feel it and try it. Write down your sensations and you will have perfect script.
The spark. This point is as easy as it is difficult. There is no manual to know for sure what’s funny, the best way to know may be to use the scientific method. Make a hypothesis, try it, and then take a distance and decide: Does it make you smile? Then it’s working.
Choose your channel. The continent is as important as the content, it simply chooses the networks and channels, it does not have to be omnipresent. Always think about who you want to read your content and who your target audience is and that will give you the answer.
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.
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.
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!)
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.
