How to launch an American Startup
and why you can’t be a prophet in your own land (unless you're French)
In 1989 I learned a lesson that is coming in handy 25 years later. I promise to tell you what it is, and that my rambling will make sense. But being a bit of a storyteller, allow me to diverge for a moment.
In 1989 I was a few years out of college, living in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen, a filthy, heroin syringe-ridden neighborhood in the west side of Manhattan. I had just landed what would become a career and life-changing job working for a Spanish filmmaker, Pedro Almodovar.
Almodovar was making outrageously funny and wonderfully inventive low budget films about predatory women (Matador), drugged-up nuns (Dark Habits) and gay love affairs (Law of Desire starring a young Antonio Banderas). His films were far from mainstream; he was labeled an enfant-terrible and Spanish society was virulently divided in their opinion of his work, of his outspokenness on gay rights and of his highly aesthetic crudeness. They either abhorred what he was depicting, or they considered him the gale force wind needed to blow out the remaining stale stench of the decades long Franco dictatorship. Either way he was becoming a figure of cultural relevance. That year when we became friends and he persuaded me to move to Madrid and start working with him, though a controversial figure at home, he was largely unknown outside Spain. My job, though not precisely defined as such, was to help change that.
Being the only English-speaker in the company (there were only 5 of us), I was basically the point of contact for any interest coming from abroad. I was a spokesperson, translator, travel companion, teacher of word processing, celebrity liaison, negotiator, procuror of funding, and everything else “international.” In my spare time I was also supposed to sell his films to distributors around the world.
And that last one wasn't easy. Whatever interest there was for him in Spain, it wasn't translating abroad. We were making some sales here and there. The French — always the cultural harbingers - were buyers, as were the Koreans for some mysterious reason, and the Italians as well. But in general it was a struggle.
And then he made his breakthrough, Academy Award nominated film, Women On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown.
It was unlike any of his previous work. No explicit sex scenes, no drugs (other than some spiked gazpacho) and no fringe characters doing twisted things. It became a monster hit at home.
Suddenly the big U.S. independents like Miramax were after it. Hollywood agents came knocking, as did big studios and Hollywood stars who wanted to remake it.
But most surprising for me, all of a sudden my phone started ringing; the Germans, Scandinavians, Japanese, Latin Americans... They were all calling, asking - actually begging - to buy the distribution rights to the films that a few months earlier we couldn't have given away.
Something changed, and it wasn't just the success of the latest film. Distributors from around the world who were previously unconvinced, interpreted the interest from America as a signal to join in. The Hollywood machinery drives tastes and trends worldwide; if it was good enough for Peoria, it would be good enough for Prague.
But more interesting still, when recognition from America was bestowed on Pedro, local attitudes towards him changed almost immediately. The divisiveness receded. It was that recognition, and not the local accomplishment which served as the catalyst for his celebrity. The same thing happened to the actors in Pedro’s repertoire, Javier Bardem, Penelope Cruz and Antonio Banderas.
Now, some of you reading this will take offense at my suggestion that decision makers around the world are incapable of, or unwilling to be independent thinkers and trendsetters. I would prefer it if it were otherwise. But I believed then, and still believe today, that this is the state of affairs in today’s Hollywood-led world of entertainment.
I think it’s all the more true in the Silicon-Valley led world of technology innovation. What happens in America matters most. There are pockets of independence, no doubt. Israel for example or perhaps Sweden. But even then, most companies incubated within those environments, must eventually face their American moment to be truly successful.
A sociologist should help us understand the reasoning for all this, but the lesson I learned in 1989 was that the only people who are prophets in their own land are the Americans. For everyone else (a few exceptions admitted, and the French being a category unto themselves) “making” it in your local country doesn't cut it. You must make it first in America in order to really make it at home — and then everywhere else.
Fast forward 25 years. This is how I am applying that lesson.
I love technology as much as I love film. My siblings and I spent our early childhood in Colombia, but being there didn't stop our parents from ensuring that ours would be an early adopter family even in the late 1970's. We treasured our TRS-80, our Apple II and our Atari console. We learned Basic and we learned not to fear the changes brought about by technology.
Had Almodovar not appeared in my life, perhaps I would have never ventured into (or made it in) film. I would have happily gravitated towards technology.
When I turned 43 in 2007, after ending my 6 year stint as the Managing Director of Warner Bros. Pictures Int'l in Spain, that’s exactly what I was yearning to do.
One wife, three kids and three dogs later I am now both a technology entrepreneur and an investor in technology ventures. When filling out questionnaires, my kids still answer that I am a filmmaker (it gets them more kudos in school) but that’s mostly in the past.
I find that being both an investor and an entrepreneur is a dangerous combination. As an entrepreneur you have to have a certain amount of blind faith and recklessness in order to succeed. These are precisely the qualities that will make you a terrible investor. So I try to be just an investor; dishing out tough love and trying to keep my passion for any one company in check.
It’s like I'm a well trained pilot dressed in my uniform, sitting in the back of the plane. I try to leave the flying to the guys up front. But occasionally I visit the cockpit, chit chat politely, and perhaps ask about an indicator dial not displaying the right metric. But generally I leave the flying to them. It has served me well, and I've done well for the people that have charged me with investing their money in technology ventures.
But exceptionally, ever so rarely, and against my better judgement, I come across a situation that demands that I storm the cockpit, and grab one of the two seats. I know what I'm getting myself into — the time, the effort. But sometimes vicariously experiencing the thrill of of entrepreneurship from the back as an investor is just not satisfying enough for me. Particularly if the enterprise at hand is just begging for full immersion.
Taiga.io is such a beast.
I won't bore you with a detailed explanation of why this technology - an agile project management platform — got past all my defenses. Suffice it to say that those who think this is just what it appears to be — another project management tool — are in for a surprise that I am just itching to reveal.
I leave you with two sources of info if you wish to learn more; our blog and my partner Pablo’s recent presentation at a Google For Entrepreneurs event (be sure to turn on the English subtitles.) Neither reveals what we’re really up to…. heh, heh… not just yet.
Back at the controls.
Starting in March of this year, I was no longer just an investor, I was a co-founder and co-CEO of a startup and emotionally fully invested in its success.
On Sept 29 we launched Taiga.io and I was once again assigned a familiar task. Again I was working for a Spanish enterprise. Again I was working with a hugely talented group — as talented in software development as my former employer was at filmmaking. As software developers, my team has a reputation and are a known locally. But abroad we’re completely unknown. We also had no one running community management, so that has become my job, along with other things; procuring funding, fielding calls… you get the picture.
I've seen this movie before.
What follows is my playbook. I share it with you both in the hope that you might find it useful (particularly if you are are a non-US entrepreneur). Perhaps you can add ideas, perhaps you can criticize it as well.
A word of caution. I am no expert, and this playbook has been used exactly once. I don't know if it works generally. I expose it here only to illustrate what we are doing at Taiga.io
We're talking Internet here: You are not where you are, you are who you are.
Launching a startup is a suicidal act of faith. Why would I further handicap myself by labeling our company as a “Spanish” or “Nigerian” startup? I don’t get any brownie points for provenance. In fact, to me it feels that I am voluntarily relinquishing stature. In the real world, getting a new citizenship is near impossible. On the web you can just adopt whichever nationality you choose. So why not be American? It took us all of a nanosecond to decide that Taiga.io would be a US startup, and so it is.
When it comes to technology startups there are two lingua francas, the language of coding and the language of English. (I'll leave China aside. Even the most powerful technology companies in the world are still figuring out how to work in China. For the rest of us, China is as mysterious and unreachable today as it was in Marco Polo’s day.)
Being a US startup means having a somewhat myopic view of the world and focusing first on your home market: the US. So, at Taiga.io, even though we sit in Madrid, we decided that our first messages would be directed at the American subset of our target audience (our target are software developers & designers as well as startups).
The subset we chose has some of the most open-minded, most eager early-adopters of new technology. They also have a hyper-competitive, highly developed ecosystem just waiting to be fed information on new startups.
When approaching the market I was mindful of two very important things. The first is that I knew our product would stand up to the scrutiny of this very demanding group of users. Had I not felt absolute confidence in our product I wouldn't have taken as bold an approach. I was also mindful of messaging. When you have something good, it doesn't need to be pushed hard. I love “discovering” things on the web, and I tend to reject hard sells. I think people appreciate that. We all know that everyone has something to sell, we just don't want to be bullied.
I also tune out when people sell me features. At Taiga.io we knew we had the features people expected; either already built or on our roadmap. When we conceived of our product we weren't thinking about features, we were thinking about how we wanted people to feel when using our software. This allowed us to deliberately chose a simple message; using our project management tool would make you love your projects more. If the message is real and honest, and if the product delivers, you know you have something people will value. We felt this was true of Taiga.io
Sept 29. The day we launched
We launched in the early evening Madrid time, and we ended the day with a total of 334 Unique visitors and 33 sign-ups. 10% came from the US. I had no idea how they found us as we had done absolutely no marketing. I was very satisfied.
Sept 30. The first full day of our service
I spent the whole day sending out messages on Google+ to communities that I felt would be interested to hear about our service. I was keenly aware of not being spammy (I would eventually end up suspended from Google+ for 2 weeks, so my advice is be careful… I for one did not think I was acting improperly, but...)
I spent time messaging other networks; LinkedIn groups, facebook friends, twitter, etc. We ended the day with 563 unique visitors and 114 sign ups. 20% were from the US.
Oct 1 — HackerNews & ProductHunt — the Kingmakers
I am an avid reader of their RSS feeds, and always found myself interested in their curated narrative of interesting new ventures and technologies. I figured I would let those communities know about Taiga.io
At 6:48pm Madrid time On Oct 1, I notified our team that I had listed us on HackerNews. I asked them to go there and vote us up. We were having 5 or 10 concurrent users on our platform. I was looking for more traffic.
I realize now that asking our few guys to vote was a silly effort, as it would have yielded nothing. It was the hundreds of thousands of HN users themselves who would decide if we were worthy of being upvoted. And boy did they vote. By 9:08pm Madrid time, two hours after my first post on HN, this is what the Analytics was showing. And it went up from there. My wife and kids were wondering what my giddy smile was all about.
Traffic went up 100 fold. That day we ended up with thousands of sign ups. We hit number 1 on HacherNews, and the following day we doubled again. Over 50% of the traffic was now coming from the US.
ProductHunt kicked in and gave us an extra push. We would eventually reach their top 10 as well.
Being an Open Source tool, we quickly got into a positive feedback loop that got us to the top trending positions on GitHub where we have our repositories. GitHub was sending huge traffic our way. Getting to the top of the rankings at GitHub and staying there for the better part of the week was a source of unending pride for our technical team, perhaps the most meaningful accomplishment of our first week.
All these service are closely watched by news organizations around the world, and I can see in our analytics that blogs from around the world and international news editors who have picked up on our story were generally taking a cue from the response in the U.S.
The experiment was working. Making a ripple in the US does indeed send shockwaves to all corners of the planet. By the end of the first week there were only 19 countries in the world where users hadn't found our service. The US still weighed heavily with 35% of the traffic. We were on our way.
Week 2: Keeping the launch momentum
I have a three screen setup on my desk, and my Google Analytics sits open all day. I glance over to that screen constantly, looking for clues that may be revealed from the traffic metrics.
After the first full week, we now know that 10% — 15% of unique visitors to our site register for the service. It makes sense for us to work hard to spread the word about our service. We’re still unwilling to spend any advertising dollars on this effort so we have to find ways to get people talking about Taiga.io and getting organic growth through recommendations and good word of mouth. We want our current users to help us drive the message. But we also want to make sure we reach the many people as we can who would love our service and simply don’t know about it yet.
Sending out a press release
I started off the week by preparing a press release. I felt that the news of our launch, and our experience with HackerNews and ProductHunt was worthy of note. Our team had also made a cool video visualizing the traffic loads that our code had to contend with. The video has been a great ambassador and I agree with people who say that having videos to spread the message makes sense.
I rolled all that up into a press release and sent it out. I used 2 services Pressking.com and PRweb.com. PressKing was disappointing and I can’t say I’ll ever use it again. PRweb on the other hand, I knew well.
I still can't make up my mind as to whether it was worth the $300 we paid. Not because of PRweb’s service which I think is terrific. I’m just not sure that what I thought would be newsworthy and worth highlighting was considered as such by the news editors (or interns) whose unfortunate job it is to plow through the thousands of press releases like ours sent every day. After 70,000 impressions and 1,561 “full release reads” I am left with the impression of being everywhere and nowhere at once, buried deep within the archives of news aggregators…
The country-by-country approach
Blogs are the natural allies of every startup. They can be wonderfully specific in terms of audience, and they are generally run by people who truly love the field(s) they cover. Getting noticed by them is tough, but if you have something that is really core to what their audience wants, you stand a good chance of rising above the noise.
We decided to start an ongoing process of finding the right, highly trafficked blog in each country to help evangelize our message. My experience doing this has been very rewarding. It is also very time-consuming as you really want to spend time with each blog, and understand what they are about. In the process I've discovered blogs I’ll continue to follow regardless of their interest.
Once I find a match, I pursue them politely, but relentlessly. Some of the ones that have been increadibly helpful and driven traffic to us include:
Barrapunto
A Spanish site read by developers. Our perfect audience. Because it’s local to Spain, and our developers have relationships, there is a deeper interaction, some gossip, not all of it productive, but generally Barrapunto has been great sending us traffic from Spain
Webrazzi
I sent a pitch to the editor.
Erman Taylan, a Product Manager & Writer, got back to me the next day and the following day, Monday the 13th of Oct they had placed us on their front page.
The results were outstanding. Traffic from Turkey accounted for almost 25% of all traffic for the whole of that week.
I also realized that my metrics were valuable for Webrazzi. I volunteered all our information so they can see the effect of their story in terms of viewership and signups. No doubt they lerned something about their own users in the process.
Gigazine
Japan’s Gigazine is in the top 150 blogs worldwide. We got on their front page on Oct 15, and 20% of our traffic since then has come from Japan. Given who they are, I found the response somewhat muted from a traffic point of view. But like HackerNews, when they feature a story, it gets picked up by many other Japanese outlets.
La Ferme Du Web
Also a perfect fit for us, FDW has been in our top 10% of sources, sending steady French traffic to us.
I could name many others, but my point is that nurturing these relationships is absolutely key. Sites such as these really are the perfect evangelizers. I continue to enjoy the interactions with the editors and writers who occasionally respond to my messages and agree to feature us. Over the coming months I can see a continued and sustained country-by-country effort to spread the word about Taiga.io in conjunction with the highly placed blogs in each region. It’s get-your-hands-dirty type of work, but it pays off
Other sources of traffic
When I look at the list of top sources, aside from the sites I have already mentioned, I have to mention the importance of some of the more obvious names. Reddit, Gizmodo, Twitter, and Google + have been critical. Facebook is less important for us, but that of course will be different for others.
Other ways of getting noticed
I mentioned earlier that in the US there is a highly competitive field of players that feature startups. Some will charge you for listing. Most of them are free but will offer to charge you in order to cut to the front of the line. Given the traffic that some of these sites have, and depending on budgets, it may be worth paying for expedited service. We have chosen not to pay, except in a very few instances:
Startuplister.com
Startuplister offered a very valuable and very reasonably priced service for listing Taiga.io on about 40 other services. Before I found Startuplister I had done work manually to send the Taiga.io listing to another 60 or so directories. I wish I’d found them earlier!
Some of these directory services really are worth mentioning. Startupli.st for example and alternativeto.com are both sending us steady traffic.
Many of the sites that startuplister and I activated will take time to list given our unwillingness to pay
Some final words for now:
Like I said, this is an ongoing process and we're just getting started. What I hope to have communicated is that the world truly is flat as Thomas Friedman pointed out some years ago.
I read an article on Forbes recently, it’s almost a year old now and in it various people speak about the relatively new phenomenon of building a global web startup from day 1. Entrepreneurs today really have no barriers to contend with. The open question for me is whether startups can launch consistently and successfully without first getting some degree of notoriety in America.
I’ve chosen Medium to publish this article because I would like to start a conversation and learn from everyone’s experience. I look forward to your comments.
