On November 5th we held our biggest event to date. Almost 120 entrepreneurs came to listen one of the most successful Spanish entrepreneurs ever: Nacho González Barros.
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Fireside chat with Nacho González Barros[/caption]
We want to send out a huge thank you to our lovely attendees to make this possible. The event marked our 8th edition and our most successful until now. Also special thanks to our sponsor O'Reilly media for giving away a set of very useful books on lean methodology for our beloved entrepreneurs. Here's the group picture with the raffle winners:
Learn from the best
In the first hour, where we give the spotlight to the community to share their experiences and knowledge with the rest of entrepreneurs, we had Francesc Hinojosa (CEO @ Eureka Startups) and our lovely Dot Lung. Francesc shared his multiple experiences with Eureka and the crowdfunding campaigns he's launched. On the other hand, Dot provided Social Media wisdom through a 10 minutes questions & answers session on how to market your startup in the most prominent social networks.
Right after that, we sat down to learn from Nacho in the fireside chat.
The fireside chat
Nacho provided a masterclass on entrepreneurship and surprised fans and pundits alike. He started off reviewing his background in his early days as an entrepreneur. This part of the fireside chat saw Nacho talking about his times at Intercom, identifying the market need for something like nowadays juggernaut Infojobs, switching to new markets with Salir.com, Neurona and Niumba and then his failed projects. A major advise from The Man is "take actions following what people do, not what they say". Nacho has repeatedly found people giving him praise for his products, yet then they would neither invest in them nor use them.
Big part of the fireside chat was devoted to talking about his new venture Mailtrack, a service that provides Whatsapp-like double-checks in your Gmail inbox. On the fact of now drifting towards a global product, Nacho highlighted that "The best thing you can create is a product that will be used in a global scale".
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Learning and having fun with Nacho González Barros[/caption]
Another major highlight from the Mailtrack experience was that Mailtrack "was firstly used by ourselves, then by investors". That kind of users gave a big insight on whether the product could have big success.
Not only did we learn from Mailtrack's CEO, but we also had fun by learning. We learnt that Nacho's next venture will be something related to dating, because "that's where the money is!" and he made a vow to give all the attendees a PRO account if they helped expanding the Mailtrack gospel & finding bugs.
All in all, the event was a major success, and we look forward to having Nacho again in our future events. He's got all the qualities of the ideal Startup Grind speaker: he shares everything, he's fun and he's very down-to-earth despite his success.
We can't wait for the next event, so we will keep grinding.