An Experimental Work Camp in Spain: Speeding up the Development of a Startup
What does a Startup do when challenged to come up with an internationally appreciated online service in the midst of a depressing Lithuanian autumn?
At “PriceOn” we decided to pack our laptops, leave the falling leaves behind and surprise everybody by departing for the ever sunny Spain. For the next month or so you can find us hacking full-time in our experimental new home, a villa in the little cozy town of Benissa, located in the province of Alicante.
This, then, is the first of a series of posts in which our “Startup tourism” experiment is explained, and our Spanish adventures reported. Before that, however, you may be curious to know “what’s in here for me?” and why our Startup should interest you at all. So here goes.
BEFORE WE CAME TO SPAIN
For those of you uninitiated to the world of “PriceOn”, we are an innovative discount search and price comparison system, providing the smart shopper with customized price information in all the consumer goods categories. Be it online or offline retailers, we are able to collect, process and communicate all their price information independently of the retailer’s willingness to cooperate (which is, of course, highly welcome and preferred).
“PriceOn” is a happy brainchild of Jurij Laneckij and Andrius Poznanskis, an entrepreneur and a programmer. Jurij and Andrius were classmates in one of the high schools of Vilnius back in the 90’s.
Our native Lithuania served as a testing ground for “PriceOn” which is by now a popular online tool used daily by hundreds of thousands of local shoppers, as well as a winner of national web business awards for best app and best start of the year. However — and this is actually the reason we are currently bathing in the Spanish sun — “PriceOn” is now ready to go international.
BUT RENTING A VILLA IN A SPANISH RESORT? WHAT’S UP WITH THAT, YOU ASK?
The thing is, our product development team of nine is currently hacking the code for what we call The PriceOn 3.0, a new and improved version of the service to be popularized among consumers internationally. With “PriceOn” v3 we hope to revolutionize the smart shopping habits worldwide. That’s the ambition.
Time, however, was scarce. The weather was getting…well…Lithuanian. And deadlines were getting in the heads of the developers. Not in a good way. And that is when Jurij “The Man with the Plan” Laneckij proposed his big idea.
“We go to Spain and rent a nice place near the beach,” he said without a hint of a smile: “According to my calculations, the change in workplace environment will result in a 50 percent rise in efficiency, whereas our travel related expenses for the month won’t surpass 25 percent of what the team earns. It pays off.”
We thought the guy was joking. But here we are having our daily swims in the Mediterranean,comparing prices in local supermarkets (as we are all too accustomed to do), and hacking day and night with a hope that our families and friends back home are neither angry, nor jealous.
We like it here.
So PriceOn is now officially in love with Spain. And we hope the Spanish will return the feeling once we introduce the PriceOn 3.0. to their market. At least this is one of the options we are considering for our first major international move. And this is another important reason why we chose Spain for our experimental sojourn.
Wondering whether it would make sense to take your team on a working holiday of this kind? In the next posts we will cover the practicalities, costs and the results of this exciting business experiment.
