Codecamp November — Cluj-Napoca
For the November edition of Codecamp in Cluj-Napoca, we partnered with Ready for Startups and put up a track dedicated for startups, entrepreneurs and communities. We took part to six great talks ranging from investment, growth & marketing, to pivoting and being part of local communities. We also had six pitches in total and a talk about failure and embracing it.
Startup your company’s culture — Paul Chirila
Paul talked about why wherever you work, you should want to consider “upgrading” your culture and mindset to be similar to a startup. His experience growing Around25, Ready for Startups & CleverWash, talks for itself. But before telling you what he shared with us, I want to make the same point as he did: think twice if the startup culture is for you.
Do you really want to startup your company’s culture?
I got out of the talk with a lot of ideas in mind, and even with the experience of working in a startup and watching how startups work, Paul still stated a lot of helpful facts. So what can you or your company do to be more like a startup? Be transparent, have trust, believe in your team and most important, have a purpose. Startups are unpredictable, their future is nothing close to secure and their work can take a lot more than the regular hours per week. But you can see the results in progress: in a startup, you can see progress and work for it, because you are motivated by what you are doing, this is what you wished you for. In an established company, you can also see progress and get motivated by seeing things change, people working for a cause, growing a team and finding purpose in what you are working on.
Local startups pitches
DeliverMe — Time is money. And going shopping usually takes time. This is why DeliverMe gives you the opportunity to pay someone to buy and deliver your shopping list. Their application is up and running and they are also looking to develop further more on functionality, marketing and overall structure.
CleverWash — CleverWash is the answer to every driver/car fleet in busy cities. It centralizes and manages all car washes available nearby, for you to get your vehicle clean fast and at a fair price. They aren’t only making technology for the driver, they also built a CMS to put technology in the car washes, for easier management and paying features.
Can you imagine FastRides in Ardeal? — Leo Abu-Saa
FastRides — “Can you imagine FastRides in Ardeal?”. Maybe after watching this pitch, we can. This startup is bringing the benefits of car sharing in your city. You can schedule rides as a passenger or as a driver, so there can be less in traffic and travel with your colleagues or newly met people.
NeMutam — There is a lot buzzing around rents in Cluj lately and this makes searching for a new apartment a real pain. NeMutam is trying to help everybody have an easier life, by filtering and centralizing all the apartments, also showing duplicates (and featuring the best offer) and ignoring fake answers. Also, the technology behind this website is pretty interesting, using a lot of web scraping and maybe AI in future development.
The Roller-Coaster called investment — Dan Sturza
Dan talked to us about a very important part of startups that is usually ignored: how do you get investment, so you can constantly run your business?
Networking is key! — Dan Sturza, Fribourg Capital
Taking money from others is easier and easier. A startup usually goes from angel investments, to seed investments, then maybe Round As, Bs, and so on. But all these processes take time and they cover a lot of stuff for new comers: everything from term-sheet clauses to explicit conditions that cover up both parties. Structuring your equity and making your startup “investment ready” is also very important. You need to do your homework, prepare your pitch, know your competition, your go-to-market strategy, your revenue streams, etc. Also, you might want to think about “smart money” — what can these investors bring extra to the table — experience, network, culture?
Connecting startup communities — Rubik Hub
Rubik is not only a hub, in Iasi, it is also a community. They have a strong team that presented us the benefits of working together as communities to bring feedback, help and diverse mindsets to grow faster and overcome different obstacles.
Give before you get!
They featured two local startups that came to Cluj for feedback, to prove a point about the power of growing together.
Competitive Business — Competitive Business is a startup that wants to help other business: it tracks public information from diverse sources (like social media, their sites, news, etc.) about your company’s competition. They came to Cluj to find an answer to this question:
“What public information about your competitors would you pay for?”
Werit — Werit is your very own fashion adviser. It manages clothes from lots of websites and combines them in outfits, so you have less decisions to take every time you need to dress up. But each great product, needs a great marketing plan. So..
How can you reach relevant buyers and convert them to use your product?
Long way to growth: startup growth vs. established company growth — Gabriel Dombri
Talking about marketing, Gabriel has a strong experience in this domain, and shared with us the secret of growth in startups: there is no secret.
There is no 5 step recipe to growth in a startup!
You can’t market a shitty product, and you can’t sell a shitty product without the market. This means you need to understand your buyers, validate your product and follow a few simple steps.
- define the customer.
- find the customer.
- reach the customer.
- acquire the target customers
- convert the target customers
- satisfy your customer
- amplify the trend
A startup will have unusually huge growth. A startup is confused about what the product is, who the customers are and how combine these two to get money. And this is what makes it tricky. But people overcame these before, by bringing awareness about their product, taking action towards the problem they are solving and providing value to their customers.
Don’t be afraid to pivot — Mircea Vadan
Mircea previously had a startup. It started as a interesting thing with great potential: they had a good team and got funding. But they got some things wrong: like the target customers and market focus. UseTogether’s product was open to the public, and they wished it was the solution to everyone’s problem. After seeing some metrics they realised it wasn’t really like that, so they pivoted: they changed their target customers, they brought to the table a clear need to be solved and these changes also meant a greater density of potential users. There are lots of startups pivoting, because of many reasons — they usually zoom-in and focus on one big feature, or zoom-out to cover more usability; maybe the customer segment is wrong, or the used communication channels.
You still need to validate the product after pivoting.
Pivoting really helps you to get closer to two answers: Problem Solution Fit & Product Market Fit. It’s basically a structured course correction designed to test a new fundamental hypothesis.
Breaking a startup — Adrian Lupau & Radu Orghidan
There’s no secret anymore than almost 90% of the startups fail. We say it’s nothing wrong to fail as long as you learn the lessons. Breaking a startup is designed especially for celebrating failures and learning. And, boy, there is a lot to learn!
Failure is the fastest way for learning a lesson.
The speakers talked to us about various experiences (mainly focusing on NoteMari — Radu, and CallerQ — Adrian) that eventually failed and taught them a few lessons. We mainly heard about wrong markets, tricky decisions, not living up to the hype or not validating the product before building it.
Overall..
Codecamp was a great experience. Speakers, startups, mentors, investors and enthusiasts were all connecting, networking and most important: getting feedback. We’ve learnt a lot, we’ve met new people and we felt awesome, in our own ecosystem, talking about our interests. See you next time!
