Why I left Brazil and brought my ideas to USA.
In mid 2011 I was here in the USA attending one of those tech-events in New York and I took my chance to visit Washington DC. Entrepreneurship has always been one of my passions, as well as innovation and technology, and shortly after that, I decided that it was time to startup my own business. I was 24 years old, had recently graduated from one of the best business schools in Brazil (among the top 100 in the world) and had managed to gather a couple of years if experience in finance and business development.
Three years later, four startups, one e-book and lots of stories to tell, here I am once again in Washington DC writing this post.
Ironically, even though I have created new enterprises whose valuations floated in millions, I’m not on vacation (when my posts start coming from Hawaii, then you can start to suspect).
If you are considering creating your own business or if you already work in tech-business, fasten your seatbelt. We will dive into three years of work in ten minutes — and you will understand why I left everything behind and came to the USA.
We never forget our first startup
In March 2012 we launched our first startup, Qualoo, a website to locate independent sales representatives (ISR). It was about that time that we learned about Lean Startup and the Canvas methodology, which motivated us to start interviewing ISRs from different companies.
“A business model describes the rationale of how an organization creates, delivers, and captures value…”
As we learned more about how business was conducted we realized that locating a new ISR wasn’t the main problem — it was probably generating new sales for them — but Qualoo wasn’t designed for that.
We decide to abort Qualoo by July that year, influenced by a very sad situation for me. My father, doctor for 30 years, had just had a stroke and his healthcare center, treating more than 2 thousand patients per month, needed desperately a business turnaround. Here I go back to Excel!
Expect the unexpected.
What would be short-term consultancy, required about 18 months of considerable work and energy. Thankfully, the medical center took off and opened up for us the opportunity to develop a new attendance management software, called Qlinics.
Launched in the beginning of 2013, it had positive effects in business operations straightaway. However, acquiring new customers was a different story. By this time, I had already read most of David Skok’s posts and although I was fascinated with Qlinics, but it’s economics were suspicious. Regulation and the cost to reach out to new doctors were insane. It seemed to us that Pivoting was the best option, and that’s what we did.
One more time.
We didn’t give up. During the first semester of 2013 we rebuilt Qlinics from the ground up and renamed it Quantifique, targeting now not just healthcare providers but service providers in general.
Quantifique reached more than 100 unique users at its peak, gathering around 600 users by the end of the year. By this point I had already read valuable books, such as Behind the Cloud e Predictable Revenues, Chrossing the Chasm(must-read! PDF no link), attended two specializations in law and had also gone through most of Curseras’ entrepreneurship courses. Homework was done…
But we still had no revenues (except for a consultancy service I made on my own and shared entirely with the company). The main problem we were facing was that since Quantifique was created for service providers in general, after some time the specific needs of each vertical started to erupt and several customizations were required by different users. A SaaS is a multi-tenant software, remember? That means that it is the same software offered through the internet for everybody. For the second time we had to make a very tough decision. We chose to keep on fighting.
Dive deeply into your market and refine your value proposition (it will take some time)
The development of any tech related startup, depending on how innovative it is, follows a very investigative process. Although there isn’t a single rule of thumb to do that, there are several techniques to help you on your way. Like all good detectives, it takes time to be able to notice each small detail. For us, it took two and a half years. But we had finally understood what was going on and had in mind a unique value proposition. Squidboss was born!
Finally, in the right direction.
We noticed that a significant amount of companies still had processes and pieces of relevant information being managed outside their formal systems. Many of these evolved into a customization, which is often expensive, or into several Excel spreadsheets. Obviously, as the world gets more and more dynamic, it will no longer be possible to organize every business process through a single solution, restricted to only one scenario.
Our answer to that was Squidboss.
“Squidboss is a web platform that allows you to build your own business app focused in business management and processes automation with point and click operations.”
In mid 2014 we went from 3 to 7 cofounders and we carefully scrutinized the SaaS and PaaS markets and their verticals. We structured some of those information in a report, which later became an ebook. In the second semester we succeeded in creating the Squidboss cutting-edge database, but we never knew if it would actually work. By the beginning of 2015, we got our first seed-investment, speeding up our work. Although, by the end of this first semester, it got really clear that Squidboss wouldn’t be able to continue without more resources (Check this framework for understanding why startups succeed)
What now?
This is the moment where we look at everything we’ve done and realize how far we came, by ourselves. However, after a certain point, I realized that we needed to go one step further to make Squidboss a reality. Therefore, I decided it was time to drop everything, put my backpack and come to the land of Uncle Sam. If there is any place in the world where these three years of experience and learning are worth something, is here.
Do you want to learn more about Squiboss? contact us!
Go!
Email: rodolfo@piertech.com.br / Whatsapp (USA): +1 (240)743 0692
