Managing the Tech Startups Series - No.4 Gabriel Aldamiz-echevarría

Make noise. Make more noise. C’mon more noise! When you are an entrepreneur loudness and being talked about is better than being secretive (not in all cases, so don’t start attacking). But it makes sense right? You want to be known, you want to be talked about. (Specially a social entrepreneur, you want brand awareness)

Gabriel Aldamiz-echevarría is in that for sure. He is the founder, with his wife (you see, it is important to have the support of your family they can even provide the idea) of Chicisimo.com.

And as a seasoned entrepreneur (Saktec Robotics and Strands) now he is leveraging all that knowledge, experience, expertise and contacts in order to grow with Chicisimo. (A brief side note: What is Chicisimo? Well it is a social platform dedicated to fashion. That’s it. Trés Chic! right? chic-isimo. It allows women share their own personal styles, brands, colors and styles. And obviously others can discover them, interact, and use as reference). 

The importance of making noise? Chicisimo has managed to be talked about in the Wall Street Journal, Vogue, TechCrunch, TheNextWeb (talking about the business model), ModaES (talking about chicisimo.pl and chicisimo.de) EliteChoice (talking about the value of insights for the fashion industry), EU-Startups (talking also about the new domains in Germany and Poland) among many others.  And once you start the noise you should go louder.

Well, from that conversation with Gabriel Aldamiz-echevarría here are 5 points I consider relevant either for a tech start-up or a social-entrepreneurship start-up:

1. Understand your business. Being cash strapped forces you to understand your business. You have to be very mindful of the resource allocation. They are scarce.
2. Jorge Mata also mentioned it. Scalability is the name of the game. Investors are looking for growth opportunities. And Gabriel stressed it: “You can have thousand ideas but you need one that scales.”
3. Appreciate the value of a community. Belong to a community. When you start a company, as an entrepreneur, most likely you’ll be on your own. So find a community to surround yourself with.
4. Dig deep into your contacts. Networking can be used both to leverage your name or as a competitive advantage. Be careful and respectful with your contacts, nourish the relationship, and understand your audience.
5. Empathy. This relates to the two previous points (and posts with Julio and Iñaki). A community involves everyone (family, friends, acquaintances, potential investors, mentor, etc) seek for their support; and in order to do that, develop enough empathy to know their interests, motivations and tune your message accordingly.

Business as usual, here are two post that I like from the session with Gabriel: one from Fabio Gastaldi and one from Radek Jezbera. Plus Enrique Dans' post.