How to Bootstrap (my experience with Adegga)

How to Bootstrap was a presentation I did at Reboot together with my good friend Thomas who did a great job of putting my bootstrapping experience in context.

I had a great time talking about my journey building Adegga. During the presentation I share some funny and not so funny moments of that journey so far. I hope you enjoy the video:

February 11, 2010 | Filed Under adegga, bootstrapping, video | 7 Comments 

Boostrapping my flights to Switzerland

I’ll be travelling to Zurich and Geneva next month for LIFT. Travelling to the 2 cities in a couple of days can be quite expensive so I’ve spent some time on flight search tools and ended up saving 160€. Here’s how I did it.

lisbon_zurich

My initial idea was to travel from Lisbon to Geneva via easyjet and then take a train between Geneva and Zurich (and then return via the same route). This trip would cost 170€ for the flight plus 100€ for the train. That’s 270€ for each person and since I’m not travelling alone that would set us back 540€! It was apparently the lowest-cost option but I went searching…

I started at skyscanner which is one of the most complete flight search engines online. It’s available in 20 languages and has a very good user interface. But my favourite search engine is much simpler one.

The Spanish startup Trabber is a great but simple service that searches more than 40 travel sites and has been fine tuned to provide one of the best user interfaces ou there. A good example of this simplicity is the ability to move back and forward one or two days using just links and making it simple and quick to search nearby dates:

trabber_screenshot

The ability to Another feature, Search nearby airports, makes it easy to search for low cost flights (low cost airlines frequently travel to less known cities and nearby airports).

With this feature I was able to find the Basel Mulhouse Freiburg airport which is not far away from Zurich (where I wanted to go first). With Trabber I was able to fly direct to Zurich (actually Basel then train to Zurich for 70€ + 20€) and then 2 days later take the train to Geneva for 50€ (saving one way) and then finally a flight back to Lisbon for another 50€ (via easyjet again). That’s a total of 380€ for the two people. We ended up saving 160€!

By spending some time thinking smart and by making some sacrifice (not flying directly to Zurich) I am able to save a good amount of money that will certainly be a useful resource during the rest of the trip. That’s bootstrapping and it can be applied to creating a company or flying abroad!

Update: In Basel and Zurich I’ll be staying at the tiny but cheap and central EasyHotel. Photos here.

January 24, 2009 | Filed Under bootstrapping, travel | 9 Comments 

Rebooted

Reboot was once again a great event and Thomas was the great curator helping people to make the event happen. One of the key to reboot’s success is the hard work of finding interesting people with interesting ideas from all over the world. Reboot is already legendary conference and testimony to that is the fact that one day before the conference start, there was still no program online and yet 600 people payed and showed up to what was one of the best events I ever attended.

With a starting presentation saying loudly to everyone: “Share Your Shit” and a nice little notebook sleeve / scarf (instead of the normal computer bag) I think the whole spirit of the conference opened up and even first timers understood that this is not your average conference.

A lot of Portuguese joined me and Pedro this time in exploring reboot. Moses Mehraban, Daniel Barradas, Bruno Figueiredo, Bruno Afonso and Jorge Oliveira were the Portuguese group and I must say we had a great time together.

reboot10

Reboot is too big and diverse to condense in a single post. Instead here’s a list of interesting / relevant stuff I thing it’s worth mentioning:

Connected objects: Rafi Haladjian presented his strategy to connect physical world objects and the virtual world. They started by creating Nabaztag, the first smart rabbit and have been moving on into even more interesting ways of connecting objects. His company - Violet - will soon be launching a bunch of different programmable modules that want to transform the way we relate with our objects. A project to follow.

Working for free: Working for free Peter describes his experiences in helping local business survive by providing some work for free. Great presentation that started with a 3 min long music!

Internet = Mobile: I met Segeni Ng’Ethe who’s the Founder and President of MamaMikes, an incredibly useful service that helps immigrants to send gift vouchers for a variety of practical items to their families and friends in Kenya and Uganda. Vouchers can be purchased for groceries, bedding, and airtime (phone minutes) for mobile phones. I had a great time talking to Segeni and will make sure I see his presentation once it’s on video.

Experience: Andy Budd’s presentation on the topic Web User Experience was great. He pointed out a few clear examples of how the online experience should mimic some of the offline experiences we like. One example, when you go in a 5-star hotel you expect to be addressed personally. Andy talked about a few ideas on how to bring this kind of experience to a web experience. Very practical and useful presentation.

Nodal points: Jyri Engeström who created and sold Jaiku to Google is working hard on evolving the current generation of microblogging tools. On Nodal Points - The Emerging Real-Time Social Web Jyri talks about activity streams, flow of updates and more important filters through the social layer (friens). David Weinberger adds his points of view.

One final note:
Reboot is the place where your strangest ideas are well accepted and brainstormed. There are many examples but do check for example of how Marson’s started his SugarStat.com idea at reboot and has since moved it forward. If not just for that, this is a special event.

Other places to find reviews of reboot10:
Back from Reboot 10, Completely Rebooted, Share Your Shit : Impressions from Reboot 10, Copenhagen June 2008 and Reboot10 take-aways part 1

Copenhagen!
Copenhagen was as impressive as ever. Nice people, nice architecture, nice bicycles, easy city transportation, good design, beautiful neighborhoods and a lot more stuff that made me feel good. No wonder it’s #1 on Monocle’s top cities.
Copenhagen

July 3, 2008 | Filed Under events | Leave a Comment 

Vote for Adegga

TechCrunch, GigaOm, Read/WriteWeb and VentureBeat are organizing a competition and award ceremony - The Crunchies 2007 - to recognize and celebrate the most compelling startups, internet and technology innovations of the year.

We are going for “Best bootstrapped start-up” nomination. The Best Bootstrapped Start-up is for a company that has raised less than $100.000 from individuals, angels or others which fits us like a glove. Adegga is completely self-funded and has been bootstrapping a lot.

Crunchies2007

If you want to support us just visit the Crunchies and nominate us!

If you want to nominate us for other categories (Likely to succeed would nice) vote there. Thanks for the all support!

Congratulations to Webreakstuff for the design and development of The Crunchies.

Update: adegga didn’t make it to the final nominees but I would like to thank for the support of everyone that voted for us. Thank you very much!

December 6, 2007 | Filed Under adegga | 1 Comment 

Common Cold

A few (great) days in Copenhagen, the lovely danish weather and a lot of hard work have put me in sick mode (more exactly I have an Acute Viral Nasopharyngitis know as Common Cold).

November 26, 2007 | Filed Under day to day | 1 Comment 

Bootstrapping Adegga

I’ll be spending 4 days in beautiful Copenhagen next week working on a very interesting project (to be released) for a new client. What do you mean “a new client”?

Up until now Adegga has been privately funded. Mostly by it’s team. While developing Adegga is definitely my main concern nowadays and while it is growing and developing fast, it’s not yet paying for itself. To keep growing, Adegga needs some seed funding.

adegga logo

There are a few ways I could have chosen to get seed funding for Adegga.

  • Boostrapping: your own (organic) money.
  • Family, Friends and Fouls: friends money. Risky for relationships.
  • Angel Financing: from 20k € to 1 million €. Very good if you find a strategically interesting angel.
  • Series A Financing: normally for big valuations or to expand.

We’ve been approached by 3 different investors in the past 3 months. I really appreciate the interest in Adegga and think they can be of real value soon. For the next couple of months, where we’ll improve our product and grow our client base, we need some seed funding. I believe in bootstrapping as a viable form of seed funding a startup project. Web consulting is a (good) way to provide that funding.

The coming months will be very important as we roll out a ton of cool features we’ve been working on. Making sure we can keep up the pace and make Adegga a better product for our users is what I most care about.

November 17, 2007 | Filed Under bootstrapping, day to day, entrepreneurship | 3 Comments 

Printing, scanning, faxing and bootstrapping

I was looking for a printer. Nothing fancy. Just printing.

Like with the chair I told a few friends about that. Eventually one of them told me that he had one and was not using it anymore. So I have a new hp officejet 6110 printer.

hp officejet 6110

While looking at amazon’s hp officejet 6110 page for features I saw this nice warning.

amazon there's a new version

It lets you know that you can still buy the product but that there’s a newer version available. Amazon delights everyone with this small customer satisfaction details.

April 17, 2007 | Filed Under day to day | Leave a Comment 

Looking for an office chair

I’m looking for an ergonomic office chair.

I’ve looked around at some reviews and I particularly like 2 chairs. The Herman Miller Aeron Chair and the Steelcase Leap Chair. Both are a bit on the expensive side but I’m willing to consider them if they’re the only option to spend a few hours at the computer each day and still have my back in 30 years.

herman miller aeron chair steelcase leap chair
Herman Miller Aeron Chair and Steelcase Leap Chair

The Aeron costs around 500 to 750 € (on ebay) and the Leap is probably cheaper but it’s hard to find prices on the Web.

Other options include this IKEA chair which despite being a tenth of the price of the others, is (I’ve been told) pretty comfortable.

Has anyone bought any of these chairs ? Are there good other options to consider ?

Update: I’ve got a new office chair! A phone call to a good friend with a big office space full of not-used chairs was enough to help me do a bit of bootstrapping. I’ll test this one and see what my back thinks. Thanks for the recommendations.

April 10, 2007 | Filed Under day to day | 9 Comments 

Starting up

I’ve quit SAPO and will be starting a new company.

When I was hired to work at SAPO I had only a small idea of the kind of opportunities that working there would bring. As a person with a passion for the Web I had the secret wish of working there.

The last 2 years have been some of most valuable and interesting in my work life. I learned a lot while working on a couple of cool projects and much more by interacting with the people that make SAPO a reference in the Portuguese Web.

But I feel that the opportunity to start something new has come. On the practical side I have no kids, no big house to pay, no expensive car. On the business side there are so many things to do, so many problems to solve and too little time to solve them.

I don’t know if I was stuck in (what I hope to be) a local max. What I know is that I’m not the type of guy that likes to be in the comfort zone. I feel much more comfortable being a thrill seeker than a fear avoider. Seth’s is right when he says that Safe is risky - Safe is a mistake. You cannot grow without taking some risks.

What’s next
I’ll be working on the projects that I have been planning and developing. I’ll finally have more time to focus on these projects. First of all I want to finally finish Adegga and prepare it for launch. Then we’ll see what happens.

I want to go to more conferences. I’ll be at Reboot 9.0 in June. For the first time as an entrepreneur. Going to conferences like Reboot, LIFT or SHiFT has been one of the best decisions I’ve made in my work life. Through this events I’ve met amazing people. People with whom I share experiences, knowledge, websites, ideas, posts, comments, links, photos, stories, wine tastings, business models and a bunch of other stuff that is essential to the way I think and work.

I’ll be starting my own company working on stuff I love. Because as Thomas said: Why the fuck you would want to work for somebody else’s passions is a really big mystery.

Update: Obrigado. Thank you all for the support! It’s good to know you all out there.

April 2, 2007 | Filed Under day to day, entrepreneurship | 29 Comments 

Markets are conversations

“Most marketing programs are based on the fear that the market might see what’s really going on inside the company.”

This statement is from the The Cluetrain Manifesto and represents the way marketing is done.

Thomas Madsen-Mygdal used it in his latest presentation called Welcome Back on the Town Square. It’s a great presentation on how marketing is evolving and the new transparent customer/company relationship.

If you have a project / company you should read this, your customers will love you for it.

January 19, 2007 | Filed Under day to day | 1 Comment 

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