Managing the Tech Startups Series - No.1 Julio Alonso

Last week I began a temporary series in this blog called “Managing the Tech Startups”. All these lectures are very interesting, especially to entrepreneurs and geeks “techies” (I’m both) but I see an opportunity in trying to link all this knowledge to the social entrepreneurship sphere.

As our first guest speaker we had Julio Alonso, an avid blogger and currently CEO & founder of Weblogs SL, the leader company of weblogs in Europe and Latin America.

We discussed several topics including: bootstrapping (Bootstrapping Your Startup), the use and value of analytic (e.g. Julio uses real-time information using Google Docs and Google Analytics; Enrique Dans offers a complete summary – in Spanish though) and how the commercial side of blogging works (Jacobo Molins discusses more about professional blogging and fundamental differences with magazines in his blog). A catch phrase in the session was: “turn parachuters into church-goers”. 

Well, from that conversation with Julio Alonso here are 5 points I consider relevant either for a tech start-up or a social-entrepreneurship for-profit start-up.

1. Realize that there’s a shift on the way your consumers engage with the web. (Blogging has a future? There’s a whole discussion about it out there, so make your own conclusions. “"It always has been an embarrassing word," The Awl's Choire Sicha said. "First it was embarrassing because bloggers were these dirty, horrible people, and then it was embarrassing because our grandmas have blogs, God bless them.") 
2. You better have support from your family. When embarking in a startup it is very important to have the support of your family and closest people. Otherwise it’s twice as hard. 
3. Money isn’t everything. In that sense I’d like to add: three factors lead to better performance and personal satisfaction: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Your staff better be passionate about what they are doing. 
4. Your target audience is no geographically constrained. In this day & age your target audience potential donor can be anywhere. The barrier is language. 
5. Reputation is critical. Don’t abuse your consumers. Trust takes a lot to build and can easily be destroyed, so offer value and content. (e.g potential donors, they need to believe the organization is doing excellent, transparent, trustworthy work, and that it will continue to do so).

There are some unanswered questions (Guerson Meyer has some interesting ones) but evidently there was not enough time (for foodiesquare.com it was really worthwhile LOL) so I’ll post them here:

 - with the incorporation of new reader technology (e.g. iPad) can blogs benefit to enrich their content?
 - as people spend more time on social platforms,what efforts is Weblog currently undertaking to deviate traffic to their blogs?