RobertoMB

This is the first one of an interview’s series I intend to run on this blog. Please leave your feedbacks on the comments session! The main goal is to present Brazilian startups to non-Portuguese speakers.

Meet Gustavo Gorenstein – better, meet Guga, as even his relatives call him. He kindly accepted to be my first guest. 

Guga runs Poup, an online cashback startup. Poup’s business model is simple: they are a list of online stores. If you buy things in one of these stores, Poup gives users money back.

The magic? They share the money the store gives Poup to each successful sale with the user.

Guga (center) and Carlos (right) with Poup’s team

So, Guga, could you tell us a little bit about your background?

Sure! I worked for a large corporation for several years and, in 2010, just decided to join my wife and apply for an entrepreneurship master degree in University of London. It was close to what I did in my job and innovation and entrepreneurship were always passion.

And when did Poup start?

During my stay in London, I launched with a group of friends “TipGain”. I got also in love with technology – my iPhone has a great part in it – and I have seen with my eyes that running a tech startup could be fun and the thing I wanted to do for a living. So I got back to Brazil and started discussing startup ideas with one friend from London, day by day, while I was figuring out what to do with my life. The both of us like a lot coupons and discounts and I’ve discovered the cashback business model and loved it. Then, we decided to start testing hypothesis in a Wordpress blog which became Poup’s MVP. My friend decided not to continue in the business and I’ve found a nice team here in Brasilia, specially a great CTO, my co-founder Carlos Botelho.

Besides being a non-technical founder, you’re also self-funded. How did it happen to you?

Since I started worked as an intern, I always earned more money than what I spent. So, make savings it’s a habit for me. When I decided to start running my own business, I got savings to at least be comfortable for a period while Poup is still growing in profits. When I came back from London, I received a nice proposal to work in an innovation area and with a confortable salary. At this time my wife was already pregnant and it made me think a lot.

However, by this time I was going to Stanford University, in the heart of Silicon Valley, to take part of a short entrepreneurship program called Emerging Silicon Valleys. When I was there I called the company, thanked them for the generous offer and said I could not take it. At that time, I felt that I was “all in” with Poup.

The fact that now I have Alice, my beautiful 2-month daughter, also pushes me into finding a way of making money with Poup, day after day.

You talked about Stanford and Silicon Valley. What were the greatest outcomes about the weeks you stood there?

I’ve been there for about two months. The most exciting thing I discovered there is that we, here in Brazil, are so close of what is done in the Valley. We have great ideas, we also have great entrepreneurs and we can also have success running startups. Speaking of entrepreneurs and ideas, we are in the same level.

And are you happy for what you have done until now?

You can be sure! We’re now open to public and this is such a great milestone to me. It allows us to tell more and more people to try our product and help make it better. I’ve also learned that a technical team was so necessary to make things work fine – and got a little bit anxious while we were developing our first version. But now we can run many experiments that we couldn’t before, like A/B testing. We’re also working hard to make more users know about Poup.

They are coming, aren’t they?

Yes, we’re happy about the growing rates. We got a few tier-A media cover, and this was great and generates a lot of qualified traffic. But we’re talking about e-commerce and, as a business-to-consumer platform, we need to scale – and scale fast. So, besides being bootstrapped, we’ll be starting to look for funding pretty shortly. The main goal is to scale our users, specially by fine-tuning the acquisition channels.

It seems that you got a lot involved with e-commerce in Brazil. What do you think about this market?

It’s a very hot one! The average online sales value in Brazil is R$ 350 (US$ 175) by sale – people usually don’t believe me when I talk about this number. Until now, we got an average of R$ 500 (US$ 250) in Poup. Conversion are looking pretty good right now.

If your plans succeed, how do you see Poup five years from now?

I can clearly see an online sales kickoff place. I see Poup as the place to start your online shopping experience. And, by the time, we think about turning this into an organic behavior. We care much about our partners – you’ll not see online stores in Poup that can’t be trusted. For the merchant, we offer people willing to pay for what they offer and in a “shopping mode”.

And, if Poup fails… What’s next?

To be honest, if we didn’t succeed, there’s a great chance that I’ll run a new business, maybe a startup. But now, as a father, there’s also the need of food on table. And, if everything else goes wrong, I would be very glad to work with innovation, entrepreneurship and startups in a company if it’s needed.

But, come on… =)

I really believe that we’re helping people with Poup and we’re just in the beginning of something nice. I’m very excited about that.

Besides I’m a technical founder, I’m not a stricto sensu developer. I’ve learned how to code during my engineering degree, but since I finished college in 2009 I didn’t get “my hands dirty” in code many times. The main reason is that I have a great team to do that at IPe and since we founded the company I started to deal with the business side deeper and deeper, letting the coding stuff.

Once a nerd, always a nerd, you know. And when I saw Startae’s workshop on Ruby on Rails basics I decided to get back to this world. The major reason is that I have noticed that people are talking a lot about RoR and its productivity. I didn’t want to be the guy out of this game ;)

So, after four four-hour nice work sessions in evenings (too far from boring traditional classes) conducted by Julio Protzek – one of the most easy-teaching guys I’ve ever met - , here are my main conclusions about RoR:

- The most incredible thing about RoR is the environment and tools. With Sublime Text, Github and Heroku you have the things you need to code, version and deploy. No buggy FTP server, no databases dump, no freaking library dependencies. The code is also very readable. Learning OO and MVC couldn’t be easier to a rookie;

- The most annoying thing about RoR is also the environment. It’s a hard task to put things to work before you can freely code. People who are in this business for a while say RoR’s staff and the community itself is trying to make things easier and many things really are by now. However, what I have noticed is that this can be a significant barrier to entry this world. At this time I point recommend Rails Installer;

- There are many shortcuts and aliases that can help you code faster, but try to avoid them in the beggining. Spend a time writing down the commands in their full version and try to understand what the aliases are;

- Have a pet project of your own and make it your focus. On my course, we did a Facebook-like MVP (it was kindly called Fakebook) and developing things like a news feed, comments, user control and likes made us think about many aspects of the RoR platform. The challenge of making an “usable” thing avoids you of limiting yourself to stay with the easy steps only.

So, this is it. Now I have a personal commitment of doing again all the exercises and apply my fresh knowledge in another project. I don’t want to be a coding ninja, but now I feel more comfortable while thinking about my tech business ideas. 

This weekend I took the road to Goiânia, a 2.5-hours driving from Brasilia, to attend Startup Weekend Goiânia. Startup Weekends are not that new - they’re running since 2007 and people in over 300 cities made 600+ events happen since then.

I feel like a “senior guy” while talking about Startup Weekend. The major reason is that I got so much involved in Startup Weekend Brasília, the fourth of them that happened in Brasil. I’ve also attended other SW’s and it’s very grateful to see how the magic of turning people from zero to hero can happen in a so short period of time.

On Friday night, people pitch their ideas and try to convince people to join them. Then, now talking as teams, they use Saturday and Sunday to turn the Friday pitch into a viable business. Ok, it’s such a short time. But it’s time enough to live a few hours in the real startup world, dealing with problems like finding customers and prototyping. And reading things like this make us sure SW’s are really worthy. 

For the non-portuguese speakers, the above link is a Facebook update from Sussy, an attendee from Goiania. She heard about the event from a friend and didn’t know much about how it would work. While she was hearing people make their Friday pitches - and at the same time discovering how SW works - she decided to pitch an idea of her own. She made a great pitch about a solution to help people make better decisions. Remember that time you spent hours trying to decide between dressing this way or that way? Or, maybe, do you remember that time you got stuck while trying to decide where to go to beach or mountains on your next vacation? Sussy just proposed a system where your friends can help you finding answers to these questions.

Sussy and her dudes worked hard for 54 hours and got to “Choose”. They got second place in the competition! Investors liked them and the team is considering to turn the weekend fun into full life jobs… This is the magic I’m talking about!

“Choose” guys hanging out in Goiânia

The winning project was “Carro com Desconto” (“Cars with Discount”). They sell cars with lower prices than in the car dealerships. The miracle? They focus on cars that are stuck on the dealerhip stock - generally because they’re particular in color and other features and people don’t want it. So “Carro com Desconto” turn them into incredible daily deals with a 15+% discount.

Startup Weekends are also great in making the “startup world” meet. This is such important in a raising ecosystem like the one we have in Brasil. People are there as attendees, mentors and organizers and it’s great to see these friends you’ve made working, talk about startup life and drink a few beers. And maybe the new attendees will soon become mentors too, this is really not rare.

Got curious? We’ll run Startup Weekend Brasília again in Brasília in early February, 2013. Be my guest, I promise it’ll be great! And so you can see with your eyes the magic happening again.

Here in Brasilia we have a initiative called Startup Dojo. As my friend Fabricio Buzeto likes to say, is a place where we use the concepts from programming dojo to learn about startups together, in group.

We have monthly meetings and, in the last one, I started to think that besides the overwhelming amount of knowledge available about startups it’s not rare for people that are starting in this world to mismatch concepts. I guess the major reason for this  is that people watch to lectures about Lean Startup, Business Model Generation but don’t really get involved with the real facts.

I’m not a big expert in the subject, but I started compiling a list of references I use and will share with you guys, with comments ;)

The Lean Startup

Eric Ries’s book. There was too much buzz about this launch - and it’s a good book. But don’t think to find here all the references you need, it’s just a big picture. It’s a must read, anyway.

Business Model Generation

This is by far the most enjoyable reading I ever had. It’s full of nice pictures, infographics and things like that. The so called Business Model Canvas was first proposed in this book from Alexander Osterwalder. Here you’ll find how to think your business structure and see how you’ll make money and make things work right.

The Canvas is very popular, but not so many people enjoy parts of this book like examples of business models.

Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development

Professor Steve Blank is probably the most respectful person in startup world. He started looking to patterns of success in the startups he invested/mentored and made the Customer Development theory. In few words, it’s a model for companies to involve customers in the development of products, so the products will become close of what they really are willing to pay.

Blank’s theory was first exposed in Four Steps to the Epiphany. This book is not a easy reading and Brant Cooper did the great job of turning into one with the “Entrepreneurs Guide to Customer Development”.

Reading this book it’s a great way to discover the Customer Development cycle and why everyone is talking about that. It also gives us a great description about what’s a Minimum Viable Product.

Running Lean

Maybe the greatest “how to” for startups. It’s very focused on mobile and web apps. The most valuable session, IMHO, is when the author talks about how to interview customers to find a reasonable problem/solution pair. It also has a great interview script.

Steve Blank Talk on Youtube

A full class from Blank’s course in Stanford. It’s a great way to meet the Customer Development cycle. By the way, the whole Stanford Business channel is great. 

Start With Why, talk from Simon Sinek 

This is my favorite TED Talk. Mr. Sinek talks how passion leads to built great products. 

Mixergy

Interviews with the most influential people on Silicon Valley. Something like the “hidden secrets of running a startup”.

Startup Success Podcast

Another great interviews base. I personally recommend the episodes with Eric Ries, Seth Godin (The Purple Cow) and Jason Fried from 37Signals.

Hacker News

News curated from YCombinator community. It’s the best way to become connected to day by day news in startup world. It has a Reddit-like algorithm to put on top the most relevant news.

Steve Blank’s resources

Professor Blank also made a great job combining useful resources for startups in his blog. 

As I said in the beginning of this post, I’m not and I don’t pretend to be specialist in this subject. But I think this post could become a good kickoff point. Feel free to suggest other resources in comments ;)

United States East Coast got into hard times this week with the arrival of Hurricane Sandy. This video shows a timeline of how Sandy came to New York and gives a real snapshot of how severe it was.

It’s also curious how the startup world faced Sandy. Let’s look over a few examples:

- Trello, a very nice collaboration tool that I personally like a lot, suffered service outage like many other startups of NYC hot startup scene;

- Uber, the famous car ride service, put their service in “overprice mode” (they call “surge pricing”) to attract more drivers to offer rides - NYC public transportation isn’t fully functional yet. Thumbs down for them;

- AirBnB is stimulating NYC people who host rooms with them to lower their prices or even to turn them free like Shell, an Airbnb host in Brooklyn, did. They’re not charging people the default fee to rent rooms in the area affected by Sandy. Thumbs up for them!

AirBnB’s good example give us, brazilian startups, a mission: how could we react to natural disasters in our country? How could we help people if anything hard, sad and challenging like Sandy happens here?

crisdias:

Time-Lapse of Hurricane Sandy Over New York City (by SMvideoChan)