The Clevergy´s Journey. A startup logbook. Month 0
Hello, world!
Welcome to the first chapter of our new blog. It is our first month, so we have not fully defined our values (we hope to do that soon). But if we have one thing clear in Clevergy it’s that we are not afraid to share what we do and how we do it. We think that explaining our ideas, processes and how we do things will never be bad for us: in most cases, it will inspire people to help us. The community responds to you when you are open with them. I guess it’s that magical word that we call transparency.
Our aim with this logbook is to tell everybody about our journey. The journey of a startup from scratch. Specifically, we want to focus on the tech world, since it is interesting to talk about the thousands of trade-offs that you need to consider to successfully advance.
Something you learn after years in the tech world is that the most important thing when you are starting is not the idea, nor is it the deep knowledge of the topic of your startup:
The most important thing is the team you have and the skills they bring to the table. While the strategy you create with this asset is important, the ability to responsively and actively iterate solutions and new ideas is invaluable because you will be growing and adapting hundreds of times.
Month 0
Month 0 in a startup is like when a writer has blank page syndrome. You have hundreds of ideas but you need to start somewhere.
Ultimately, we’ve spent our time in some pretty great ways:
- Winning a startup contest. WHAT AN INCREDIBLE TEAM WE HAVE. Last Monday we participated in the first edition of the #ConnectingEnergy event, Naturgy’s startup incubator, and our project was chosen as the winner! 🎊. As a result, we are going to have the opportunity to pilot our tool for Naturgy.
- Building a strategy. For us, having a strategy behind the mission of the company is crucial. We will talk about this strategy deeply in another post in the future.
“Good strategy almost always looks this simple and obvious and does not take a thick deck of PowerPoint slides to explain. […] . A strategy is like a lever that magnifies force. Some fundamental sources of power used in good strategies: leverage, proximate objectives, chain-link systems, design, focus, growth, advantage, dynamics, inertia, and entropy.“ Good Strategy/Bad Strategy: The difference and why it matters.
- Building our first prototype. How amazing it was! To have a lean mindset is awesome. Just weeks after really beginning of the company, we put in production the features of our first product last Friday. We wanted something to test with real users and to get fast feedback and metrics. Doing something fast is not the opposite of doing something well. For us, the important thing is to create an evolutionary architecture and not lose focus on the fact that quality is non-negotiable.
How do we create this prototype? We have chosen a sample dataset from a user persona we think is the best to experiment with, and built a dockerized React app and put in a managed serverless GCP service (Cloud Run). Regarding technologies, React and Kotlin debuted as languages in Clevergy.- Hiring. Is there something more difficult in the world than hiring in tech? Unlikely. We are fortunate that our people and our culture help a lot. Hire slow-fire fast, because we want to be sure we are creating the team and culture we want. BTW, if you want to join this beautiful project, ping us, we are hiring!
- Talk with universities. When you are building over the state of the art, nothing better than talking with people who know more than you. In our case, we are talking about possible collaborations with universities because we think there are several win-wins we can achieve together.
Stay tuned for the next edition!
