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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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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.

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How to write a press-release journalists actually want to read

One of our hard thinkers at itnig.

All entrepreneurs believe in their product, even those who maybe shouldn’t, and that’s great. But how to get journalists to believe in what you’re building?

I’ll give you some tips on how to let your press-release stand out amongst the thousands of developers that hope get their startup presented in the media.

As a journalist both at regular newspapers and for tech blogs, I got tons of press-releases every day. Some were good, others were horrible, and a few were really great.

It’s not given that these guidelines will guaranty that a tech blog picks up your product, but it will dramatically enhance your chance of “being discovered”, if you didn’t do any of these things in your earlier press-releases.

Remember that before your product has any market validation, you and your team are the product. Who are your team-members, what have they done before, and why will your team work well together, are all questions you need to answer.

Tell your story (briefly, not from birth). If something special in your life has led you to start your company, this is important to express. Journalists love a good story, and people do too. A good concrete example is Ryan Green who made the computer game That Dragon, Cancer, to help people confront cancer. He did so after his son was diagnosed with terminal cancer at the age of four. Not all stories are that powerful, it can be any kind of story, but if there’s a personal motivation for your startup, share it.

Multimedia is key. Present good pictures of you and your team, and the product your building, as well as the interface of your app, or the design of your website. If you make a video or a GIF, that’s even better. This is a great example from Amity, a messaging app.

Journalists are lazy/busy (depends who you ask). But one thing is for sure, it will help you a lot if your write finished quotes, so the writer can copy-paste the lines into the article, and doesn’t need to contact you. Make a team-member interview you, and answer the key questions about your project. The vision, the market, the product, etc.

Be exclusive. Obviously, you want to get your product in front of as many eyes as possible, but being a bit exclusive can actually help you a lot. Journalists wants to be the first to publish the story, in that way, other outlets need to reference to them in their stories. If you have a particular news outlet you prefer, send it to a journalist, and tell her that she is getting the story exclusively until tomorrow, when you’re sending it to the whole list.

For those of you that didn’t read the whole article, and just scrolled down to see if there’s a summary, here it goes (but you should read the whole thing):

Remember that you are the most important product, present your team.

Connect your own story with the story of the company.

Good pictures and videos/GIF’s of your product & team are key.

Write quotes, so the writer don’t have to track you down.

Give your favorite news outlet exclusive access to the press-release one day before everyone else, let them feel important (because they are..).

If you have any tips that worked for you, feel free to comment under.

We had Jeremiah Gardner visiting this fall talking about Value Creation. He made a lot of good points on creating a company journalists (and everyone else) actually cares about:

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