Founder Insider Series Part 2: Jetlore -Inspiration through Iteration
By: Erika Ghose
Jetlore (P11) has come a long way since their days at StartX. The past year was an exciting one for the company, having signed its first annual contract by converting one of their on-going pilots to revenue. Today, Jetlore serves over 20 companies and has been growing at over 50% quarter to quarter. The company has gone from proof-of-concept to a real business with several of the worldwide who’s-who in ecommerce as its customers.
We sat down with Montse Medina, Founder & COO, to hear about her experiences as a founder and the inspiration behind Jetlore.
Jetlore, in classic Silicon Valley style, started off with a technology. Montse and Eldar (Founder & CEO) were looking for ways to apply cutting-edge technology they’d developed to a real business problem. When their original direction didn’t work out, Montse and Eldar went out and spoke to potential customers, eventually finding a product/market fit for their technology in the field of dynamic, customized ecommerce content.
Jetlore had started life by applying semantic data technology to social data. But this original vision didn’t pan out — while the technology worked, there was no business behind it. So, Montse and Eldar switched gears and decided to apply what they had learned from customers to instead target product catalog data. They were pleasantly surprised by not only how well the technology worked in this new space, but also by how much customer appetite there was in the marketplace. The team quickly refocused and built a product to apply their technology to email marketing. Once Jetlore had a great product for email marketing, the company expanded applications to other marketing channels based on direction received from customers. While Jetlore’s market focus may have changed, what has stayed constant is the acute focus on building a technology company with a strong data science DNA and ability to process massive data sets.
Even with Jetlore’s trajectory of success, every company encounters tough times. But how do you know when to abandon or modify your plan of action? Montse believes that you need to be able to realize when enough is enough, and when things cannot continue to move forward. “If you get to a point where no matter what direction you walk there’s no progress, then that’s when you have to leave. And when your searching brings you finally to a viable path, building a business becomes truly exhilarating.”
“Building a business is also a very lonely process, and more demanding than one can ever expect. It’s important to choose the right co-founder who will be there to pick you up during the tough times. It’s also very helpful to surround yourself with other entrepreneurs with whom you can share how things are, especially during the down periods.”
“Specifically as a woman, everything’s magnified, mostly because of the initial skepticism that you get from being a female founder. It’s important to learn how to change this perception and gain respect from the audience within the first few minutes of any meeting. It depends on the audience and the topic, but it’s always about being knowledgeable and having authority in the domain.” Montse says that if her audience was an executive in a retail company, she would establish credibility through the knowledge of retail best practices. However, if her audience was a group of data scientists, she would establish her credibility based on her prior work as a data scientist. “When people leave from any meeting with you, they should always feel that they’ve learned something and the time spent was worthwhile. At this point people forget whether they’re speaking to a man or a woman, they’re more focused on the results of the meeting.”
StartX has been a part of Jetlore’s lifecycle for nearly 5 years now. Montse says that it would have been hard to become what they are now without StartX. She goes on to say that StartX provided the team with a community of founders who they saw fail, succeed, grow, and struggle. Jetlore’s founders captured and analyzed all of these experiences, and cumulatively, this helped them to evaluate every strategic move. “Generally, serial entrepreneurs are more successful because they’ve seen it all before,” says Montse. “At StartX, we had the advantage of having a community that has gone through a lot of phases and has seen a lot. If you don’t have the benefit of already having had first-hand experience, StartX certainly gives you smart perspectives on your possible paths and outcomes.”
“In entrepreneurship you may be working hard night after night giving it your all, but if you’re not doing the right thing, you’ll never receive a reward. Psychologically it can be very hard to accept the fact that you’re working so hard and you’re only getting negative feedback. This is perhaps the hardest thing to get through as an entrepreneur. But in the end, the process is just what might lead you to that successful pivot.”
