TODOSxSebas  is an initiative from Sebastián Corbat’s family and friends to try to get him a marrow transplantation. Sebastian is  37 years old and he have a genetic affection called  XLP. It is a rare almost always fatal disease that affects only boys. To date only about 100 families and 400+ boys have been diagnosed worldwide. Because of it, 4 of his brothers had already died. Now hi has aplastic anemia, a complication that afects 3% of the people with XLP and if he doesn’t get this bone marrow transplantation, he can not sourvive. We need to get 974.000 USD to cover the expenses for his travel to Boston to get the treatment. The objective is to get it in the least amount of time as posible to make this 1 year procedure in the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston, USA. With the treatment he has 75% chance of survival. We thank you all for all the help you can give us by:

• Donations: there are many ways to do  it, for more information go to the web site.
• Diffusion: we made some math and with 450.000 people, donating U$D 3 we will get to the amount that we need. Help us with diffusion through the facebook group or ussing the hashtag #todosxseba on twitter.

The entily organizing team of the SABF, his friends and family, we thank you all for your help. For more information you can send an email to info@todosxseba.com.ar

Products we buy tend to be for its immediate consumption, only a few of them are for long-term use and, what’s more, new and better versions constantly burst out.  Companies offer us a large amount of products to be used and wasted, resulting in severe damages for our environment. This last has generated critics from movements and institutions that defend the environment, mostly on what refers to the responsibility of those who provide us with products, its inputs, raw materials, processes, etc. This last explains why, in the core of companies, people have started to think what RSE implies. But now; what does it mean to be a responsible company?

In these last years, consumers have started to get used to having some signs and detailed descriptions in the cover of products where we are told that it’s biological, ecological, eco-friendly and/or made with recycled materials. This last is part of the new strategies from RSE. This implies that companies who offer those goods have started some kind of change (either profound or superficial) in their environmental policies.

According to the International Labour Organization, RSE is the reflex of the way companies think and consider the repercussions of their activities over society and where they affirm the principles and values that rule their own methods, internal processes and their relationship with other members. 

RSE is a volunteer initiative that only depends on the company and refers to the activities that are considered to go beyond the simple law performance. RSE is a specific responsibility way that some companies have chosen to deal with the challenge proposed by the ecology. These organizations tend to have a direct contact with their customers and clients, becoming more “permeable” towards the demand of society. This way, companies bring up changes in the way they produce and/or direct money injections to finance eco-friendly programs.

I can provide two reasons (that are sometimes separately, some others together) that propel the development of RSE programs:

• Firstly, the good will of some entrepreneurs as conscious individuals regards environmental problems.
• Secondly, the use of these programs as part of the organization’s marketing. Informed consumers are now requiring green products and the company has to satisfy this demand of the actual and future market. In many opportunities, companies use this strategy as a way of adding specific value to their products that diference them from their competence. That way,  companies have to spread their campaigns to have an increase in sales. A good example of  this are the supermarkets that promove the use of recyclable bags with biodegradable materials and sell them in their stores.

On the other hand, some companies decide not to care about the RSE. They deny the environmental impact of their activities and accuse politicians and environmentalists to be conspiring against te free market promoting restrictions and regulation that block the company’s activities. An example of this is the oil companies that t have acted a as an important lobby against the theory of climate change. They continue with their activities because they consider that if they stop doing what they do, there will be always another agent ready to take that economic opportunity.

Now I ask you: Which are the consequences of being a RSE in the business world? The human and environmental systems are synergic, so the accumulation of good and bad practices generate effects that exceeds the sum of the individual acts. How to find the balance between the real needs and the future generation’s rights?

On behalf of all our 8th SABF Organizing Team, we want to congratulate you all for having accepted the challenge of filling in the application and sharing your ideas based on both the sub and central topic for this year edition: Global Objectives, Collaborative Actions.

During these three last months when applications were opened, we’ve received a large number of interest students willing to become SABF Participants; unfortunately, only 100 of those will be capable of assisting. Selected students will be chosen according to their opinion essays and profiles (compulsory requirements to be evaluated). We believe the number 100 represents the perfect equilibrium between having an interested diversity and, at the same time, achieving a high interrelation grade among participants.

Our Team of Juries will be evaluating your essays along the following 21 days so you’ll get your results in approximately 3 weeks.

One way or another, we wish you had an enrichment experience while applying and that you could learn through the process.

Once again, thank you all for sharing your ideas with SABF and trusting us.

We wish you all the best.

The “Super S” Snake looked something like this:

This anecdote would have remained unremembered by me if it hadn’t been for a new way of thinking about another “Super S”.

We made a little meeting with SABFers selected for the World Business Dialogue this past March 2012 in a shopping mall in Buenos Aires. As we were talking, we saw two guys sitting in the table next to us, using a program I had never seen before. Two of my friends are IT engineering students and they recognized the program they were using. They explained it’s called Wireshark and that the guys were using it for seeing the bits running through the web at that time, at that particular place. I was amazed, this was all completely new for me, but the most concerning part was how to refrain people like those guys from looking through my data in case I wanted, for example, to log in to Facebook.

“You need to add an S to the URL after the http, that way they can’t see what you’re writing” one of my friends added. “So that’s it, you just write “https” instead of “http” and your session is protected?”. As my friends nodded, I thought…There was the “Super S” again, rescuing us… from hackers.

HTTP – Hipertext Transfer Protocol -, in plain English, is a protocol that enables computers to talk to each other, in this case, about web pages. For those of you who are asking yourselves exactly what a protocol is in this context, the answer could be resumed in a set of rules that regulates the data transmission between computers. HTTP is not the only protocol used in the Internet, there is also for example SMTP for e-mails, and many more. Now, HTTPS (“S” standing for Secure) on another hand, is a mix between the HTTP protocol, plus another one called TLS. This protocol ensures and indicates that you enter a “secure session” whenever you use it.

Let’s say you enter you web browser from your PC and write http://www.facebook.com. Your browser is acting as a “user agent” , because its role is to be an intermediary between you and Facebook and asking the server to send him the information to enter Facebook. Now, when you write https://www.facebook.com what happens is that your browser initiates a secure session through the TLS protocol, and then follows the HTTP protocol normally.

I should note that probably the Facebook example is not the best one to quote here, because HTTP runs automatically anyway in many pages where you have to log in via writing your password. For example if you enter PayPal.com and you log in, or you upload your credit card numbers, you will note that the URL changes automatically from HTTP to HTTPS. But in those pages where you are entering data you would not want anybody else to see, you should always chek that it is running on HTTPS, and if it is not, you should add that “Super S” that will make your session “secure”.

Last but not least, here are a couple more tips to surf “safely”:

• Using the stealth mode on your browser. This way, the data entered will not be saved. This is very useful whenever you use somebody else’s computer. Find out how to set it with the browser you use more frequently (for doing it with Chrome for example, you need to press Ctrl+Caps Lock+N and a new window will open with the stealth mode already activated.)
• Avoid connecting through public wi-fi networks, that don’t demand a password. They are less secure because the information that circulates through them is not encrypted, and therefore it is way easier for hackers to access your information. Connecting to public wi-fi networks versus the ones with passwords is like the difference between sending a secret letter to a friend in English, or in a special code that only you and the receiver know how to translate back to English.
• There are webpages like www.lastpass.com where you can save all the different passwords you use in the Internet, and then you can choose one that gives you access to the rest. That way you don’t need to remember all of them. If you want to read more about password apps, you can read this article.

You can’t say nobody ever told you! Add an “S” to the HHTP protocol in the URL of a page when you don’t want others to have an easy access to it- specially when entering important data such as your credit card number, your password for login in to accounts you have, etc. To delve more in this topic, you can also watch the following video

Special thanks to Esteban Ordano for guiding me through many of the concepts I included for this post, and Augusto Castellano for illustrating my anecdote.

The mobilizations throughout the world in 2011 have certainly set a precedent that will remain in the history of the beginning of the XXI Century. From the outraged from Spain, Occupy Wall Street, and even the Chilean student movement, we find a common factor, a discontent with a system that has now acquired a global character, marked by individualism and a material well-oriented vision, where power is not in the hands of people and with large inequalities. I don’t think there’s lack of resources nor of technology nor means to achieve a greater overall welfare. On the contrary, I feel there are injustices lying deep in the whole system: why do some people have access to certain privileges only because of their power positions while others watch them astonished?. We shouldn’t forget that the financial crisis was generated by investment firms who took extremely risky practices, speculating on the boom, caused by the relaxation on credit on the U.S. housing sector. It is fair that the rest of the planet is paying with higher unemployment, poverty and debt caused by this speculation? Did the companies involved loose? No, people lost. How should firms read this new scenario? What actions should they develop?

These two questions should be habitual among executives, entrepreneurs and directors of companies that currently run our economy. This is because the people who protest in the streets, or those that criticize our systems, will happen to become our new labor force soon or late. Still, we have to bear in mind the fact that they are also the new consumers, who apparently have a different paradigm of what it means to live in society. For these and other important reasons, companies have put their focus on events that are happening day by day on the streets.

Despite some firms see those events as risks, I can say they clearly represent an opportunity but, to be properly addressed as such, companies must undergo a major paradigm shift, a change of focus that should move from the financial utilities to the generation of common good or social added value. What do we understand for the concept of “a company generating common wealth”? For me, it means the following:

Losing the fear of being wrong will undoubtedly be the main action to take in behalf of stimulate our creativity. The renowned author Joseph Chilton Pearce said: “To live a creative life we ​​must lose our fear of being wrong”. Thinking of this advice reminds me of the famous athlete Dick Fosbury, who, in 1968 was crowned champion of high jump at the Olympic Games in Mexico after using a jumping technique completely different to the one used before. At that time, the rest of athletes mocked of Fosbury but after being crowned, history of athletics include in its pages the Fosbury Flop as a single technique in the practice of High Jump. 

How did Fosbury make this historical turn in sport? Simple, and this is where we found the second important point in motivating creativity: Changing our point of view towards simplifying and improving something. Fundamental then, is to think things upside down, turn them around and above all, keep track of all our ideas, although they may look crazy or surreal, ideas are all potential triggers of new ideas. I invite you to try, keep a written record of ideas in a notebook, reread them from time to time; you’ll see what today (THEY) might not inspire us at all, probably in the future new ideas will burst out.

Creativity is, at any level the motor for breaking old paradigms, or perhaps being the springboard to catapult to a new procedure, a new know-how. Till this moment I’ve emphasize three important points so far to encourage our creativity:

• Do not be afraid to make mistakes
• Always look for new insights
• Keeping track of our ideas

Now, I can only advise you not to stop reading. Reading feeds us with knowledge, and knowledge is the main fuel of creativity. Reading is an infallible tool and a powerful skill.
We all have the ability to create, and it is our responsability to clear our minds of all that contaminates us to re-encounter our creativity. It will be essential to dedicate time to disconnection. Allow yourself to turn off all the distractions that surround you for a while; great changes have emerged due to the creativity of man. The world needs many of these small changes to help us and help to create.

Do you think there are more techniques to stimulate our creativity? Which of the methods suggested is the most difficult to implement? – I invite you to watch and share with us your own techniques and opinions on this article.

This experience cannot be described easily. It is not a congress, nor a party, not a conference, not some sort of workshop, not a cultural exchange… I mean… it is impossible to link it to a single word or expression. It is the union of a group of students from different cultures, situations and problems, with varied interests and nurtured proposals, who come together to discuss and try to shape solutions to global issues.

But what really explains the difference of this experience is that “group of students”. Over these last couple of years, I have realized that these words fall short to define the group of young people that join SABF, because not anyone is able to participate. We are a group of people that wants to know reality, exchange experiences, understand how countries and societies work, try the contact with business and analyze its advantages and disadvantages. Young people who want to be leaders, who are ambitious with their professional future, who do not want to go through this world as anyone else. SABF lets any interested student participate in these type of experiences and I can assure you, it is worth it.

Since 2009, I could not only meet a remarkable group of people (whom I’m still today in contact) but I have approached other new experiences such as the International Student Festival in Trondheim, Norway and the World Business Dialogue in Cologne, Germany in addition to being able to participate for the second time in SABF 2011. In all these experiences, the SABFers we met before and those who had not, struck up a close knit group instantly and allowed us to feel that no matter the country to which we travelled, we always played as the local team. The most important fact was that the other participants of these conferences recognized the union between SABFers and became interested in the SABF experience.

This group clearly has a differential, wanting to improve day after day and take advantage of both professional and personal opportunities. The attitude of constant improvement and humility and, above all, the passion for contributing in a permanent way for our Earth to be a better place gives birth to amazing synergy between all of us, a great outcome we’ve been maintaining along all these years (and we’ll keep on doing through the upcoming ones).

Opportunities exist. Do not let the train go.

Apply now and join the 2012 Sabf Experience! Visit www.sabf.org.ar before 6-5-12.

An anonymous quote says that “when the wind of change blow, some build walls and others build windmills”. Each one of us, at some point, has to face winds of change. Those winds can be stronger or weaker depending on many factors, but they will always come (sometimes without prior notice), and then we have to decide what to build: a wall or a windmill?

After finishing College, winds of change blew in my life. You know, the usual: your pass your exams, the ceremonies and hoopla of your graduation are over and you have to look for a job. In fact, I did that for a couple of month, but guess what? I was not lucky enough to get one, so I started thinking that I was not good enough for anything and, of course, that there were not enough opportunities for young people like me. Obviously I had built a wall.

In the following months, feeling depressed and sorry for myself, I started to look for job opportunities on Internet, and it was then when I realized that the calls for applications for contests, seminars, scholarships and jobs, were published in different websites, they were outdated and divided by field of studies. It was then my idea to create a blog that summarize all those opportunities on time, and the result was Todo Jóvenes, a 2.0 social project that published periodically (thanks to the help and support of young volunteers) information about scholarships, congresses, exchange opportunities, jobs and seminars.

Todo Jóvenes was in my life a windmill because, despite the fact it is a very simple and practical solution, it helped me to change my perspective. In fact, not only helped many youths to find the opportunities that change their lives, but it also showed me that large amounts of money are not necessary to change reality when you have the conviction and the will to help.

Let’s put it in this words: when you are motivated (you want to work) but do not know how to proceed, where to turn, and what resources you can use to find a job, a huge gap opens up between motivation and information, and that hurt us psychologically. So, just as we use Internet to communicate, to share photos, news and information, why cannot we use these new technologies to help each other find an opportunity that can suit our needs?

A couple of months after the creation of Todo Jóvenes, the World Bank opened an essay contest in order to share experiences related to unemployment. I decided to share my own story, and I was selected as one of the eight finalists of the contest. I traveled to Sweden to present my essay, and I was awarded with the Second Place. The experience was unique, because I took part of an International Conference organized by the World Bank in which I could share my ideas, and I spent a week with young people from different cultures that allow me to grow both personally and professionally.

Nowadays, in the world, winds of change are blowing. They bring with them crisis and ruptures, but opportunities too. Unemployment is –and it will be– a huge challenge for thousands of youth around the world. Not even Europe, until recently synonymous with progress, development and economic welfare, is excluded from this. But even in crisis contexts, I am convinced that always depend on us to build windmills. I am not saying it is easy, because there is not something like a “prescription” to create, innovate or being an entrepreneur. But there is not impossible, and it worth try it to help others and help ourselves.

First of all, if there is something particular about  these protests is that there is no common enemy behind them. Looking inside the OWS movement, some “occupiers” use their Ipads in Starbucks to update their Facebook and Twitter accounts on how evil big corporations are; others go after politicians in Washington that are democratically elected by their society; and those of them who point their fingers at their societies as a whole do not even suggest that, by doing that,  they are pointing their fingers at them too.

Just as there is no single enemy behind the OWS movement, the ultimate cause of these protests does not seem to be the gap between rich and poor. We all heard the “we are the 99%”. It is true that 1% of the US population controls 40% of the country’s income. And it is also true that these numbers are not as exceptional as they may first seem to be. But was it different before? Why have so many people remembered now to show out their anger with income disparity? According to the economist Joseph Stiglitz (In “The Globalization of Protest”), the reason is that the 1% is mainly composed by financial speculators that took down the global economy while paying less taxes – in proportion to their income –  than a low income worker. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman (In “A theory of Everything (Sort of)”) looks at the problem from another perspective. He argues that “employers are finding it easier, cheaper and more necessary than ever to replace labor with machines, computers, robots and talented foreign workers …which explains why corporations are getting richer and middle-skilled workers poorer”. Good jobs do exist, but they require more education or technical skills.”

Combining the two author´s opinions we conclude that the Occupy Wall Street movement originated thanks to the 1% who takes, unjustly in most cases, a big part of the cake, while the 99% are struggling  to get a good job in an increasingly competitive market. This explanation seems satisfactory with the naked eye, but if we look closer we will find a better one. In my opinion, the main reason why we saw these protests is not the rich-poor divide, the financial speculator’s behaviour, the struggle to find a good job or the sum of all these issues. The driving force behind these protests is an utterly lack of perspective.

While we frequently speak loudly about the 1%’s consuming habits, we do not tend to mention how the rest of the people lives. A Heritage Foundation´s study shows that 99.6% of poor Americans own fridges, 97.7% own a TV, 78.3% own air conditioning, 38.2% own a PC and 29.3% own video consoles. In other words, a 21 century poor American can afford buying a set of goods and services a 19 century millionaire would have given its fortune for.

Those students who have been “occupying Wall Street” are not angry because 22.7% of poor Americans can´t buy an air-conditioning. They are protesting because they got used to living with so much wealth surrounding them, that the mere possibility of lacking it in their future is completely unacceptable. They are protesting because they were always told that a university degree is all they need to get a “good job” with a “good salary”, while the true is those are two outcomes we must always fight hard to obtain. And they are protesting because the current economic crisis, combined with the exponential challenges presented by the job market, made them realize that life is not as easy as they previously thought.

It goes without saying that we should not compare today’s with yesterday’s wealth and turn to other topic after watching the numbers. But here is the problem: if we don’t start to value all the material wealth surrounding us, we will never be motivated enough to keep it and eventually share it, as we will always be unsatisfied  with our purchasing power and outraged with they typical scapegoats.

There are thousands of reasons why young college students deserves to make their voice heard. That is why there are places like the South American Business Forum (SABF), where we make questions instead of shouting at our leaders and we try to find actual solutions to specific problems. But when, as in the occupy movement, outraged is justified with slogans for the cameras, it lacks perspective and can even turn to be violent, is not only counter-productive, but deserves condemnation as well.

You’ve got your idea. You tell a few friends about it and they confirm what you were thinking: if you execute it, you will clearly become a millionaire. You lock yourself in a room and spend the next six months developing the product and everything related to turning your idea into a successful business (or just as tragic, you spend a few thousand dollars in someone to develop it for you). After six months, launch-day arrives. A day goes by and you don’t make a single sale. A week goes by, still not a single sale. After a month without a freakin’ single customer you realize what just happened: you worked for half a year on a product no one cares to buy. Good news: this post is about how to test your idea without even having a working prototype.

Even though the title of this post is “Validating your Idea”, it is actually not an idea what we wish to validate. We won’t go to people saying “hey, I got this awesome idea: selling t-shirts online.. what do you think about it?”. What we really want to confirm is our value proposition: the reason for which somebody would want to buy whatever it is we’re selling. We want to find out if there’s anybody out there who, just like us, sees something attractive in our product and are willing, at least, to use it. That’s what we mean with validation. In our example the value proposition might be “Buy basic, fine and quality T-Shirts without moving from your home”.

How to do it

Asking our friends what they think about it does NOT count as validation. We will look into two ways of validating our value proposition: first in a quantitative way, then a qualitative one.

Let’s get back to our t-shirts. It’s clear to us, especially having laid down our value proposition, that we will be selling them online. Now we want to find out if people might be interested in buying our product. The problem is, we don’t have a product yet but in our imagination, and we don’t want to waste time building a store¹ (no matter how simple it is), nor contacting suppliers and doing other stuff, without first finding out if it has a minimum hope of attracting any customer. What’s the closest thing we can do to offering our t-shirts online and seeing how many customers we can get to pay us money? Let them pay us with their emails! This is going to be our hypothesis: if any user that arrives at our site gets interested in what we have to offer, they will at least be willing to give us their emails (in exchange for being the first to be notified we launch the real store). What we will explore now is how to carry an experiment to test this hypothesis, which will help us answer some really important questions. Among others: How many emails can we get? At what cost per email?

The Magic Combo: Unbounce + AdWords

In order to carry this experiment we will need two things:

• a website where we can introduce our value proposition and let users fill in their email address and send it to us.
• a way of buying traffic to that website

The former is called Landing Page: it’s where visitors coming from the traffic source we’re paying for land for the first time. Don’t worry if you’re not an expert web designer, there are various websites that will let you build a Landing Page without writing a single line of code. My favourite one, and the one I recommend, is Unbounce. Our site should have a title (our brand’s or product’s name), a short description (the value proposition) and what’s known as CTA, or Call To Action. The CTA is the action we want our users to do: in this case, we’re going to place an email field and a big and juicy button labeled “Submit”. A picture, if we have one, can help. It doesn’t matter that we don’t have a finished product yet: if we plan to sell an existing product, we sure can get a picture and use it (as in our t-shirt’s example); if we’re talking about something totally new, there’s always a way to illustrate it. Between the value proposition and the CTA, we should clarify that we’re getting ready to launch our venture, and that by submitting their emails users will be among the first ones to get notified when we’re ready. It’s very important to talk about the product as if it already existed to give our proposition some credibility. In order to do that, it’s also a good idea to register a .com domain right at this stage. Anyways, it’s not this article’s goal to dive deep into how to build a great Landing Page, so let’s go on².

With the first step covered, it’s time to get into the “buying traffic” part. Although there are several places to look at, for the time being we will focus just on Google AdWords. What we want to do is relatively simple: every time someone searches for “t-shirt” or any query containing that word, we want our site to come out as one of the top results. AdWords allows us to do that. We just need to create an account, design an ad (which will look just like the rest of the results), choose which keywords in a query will make our ad appear on top of the results, and set a daily budget. The cost is set on a per-click basis, so we are literally buying clicks. As with the Landing Page, it’s not the goal of this post to explain how to create a great AdWords campaign³.

The next step is to activate the campaign. As a consequence, the following flow will take place: a lot of people will go to google.com and will search “t-shirts” or some string of text containing that keyword. Our ad will come out on top, a percentage of the people searching will click on it and will end on our Landing Page. After reading its title and our value proposition, they will decide if they want to give us their email address. Every email we get counts as an actual potential customer. With this system up and running, we can go ahead and to answer the questions we are concerned with.

Validation

Following the previous logic, we will consider the percentage of people who submitted their email address as the percentage of people interested in our value proposition. Before activating the campaign we should establish a percentage that will define if our value proposition is, at least at this stage, validated or not. As a general rule, any number above 10% constitutes a really good result⁴.

Getting a first estimation of our Cost per Acquisition (CPA)

This percentage, or conversion rate, is not the only thing that matters to us. Let’s imagine we get an astronomically high conversion rate… of 50%. That would mean that out of every two persons visiting our site, one wants to be notified as soon as our product is up for sale to buy it. It sounds too good, but if we are paying $100/click, then acquiring each potential customer is costing us, on average, $200. In order to make up for that amount of money, we would need really big margins. This is an extreme example, but it shows crystal clear that the CPA is a variable we can’t afford to ignore; it is, in fact, one of the most critical metric we will get out of the experiment when it comes to understanding the feasibility of our project. And we will come back to it in the next article of the series.

Comparing two or more ideas

These metrics I just described are not only useful to analyze an idea in and on itself, but also to compare several ideas. If we are trying to decide which of the various ideas we wish to pursue, these are two numbers we can’t overlook in the process of reaching that decision.

Getting out of the Building

Up until now we have covered a fundamentally quantitative method. In spite of its virtues, sometimes it might be insufficient or even unworkable. In order to understand why, let’s return to the example of Cena Plus: restaurant owners don’t spend their days googling “web based reservations system”. Specially before such a thing even exists! More often than not, we have no choice but to talk to potential customers. And that’s a good thing, because those conversations always give birth to ideas and knowledge we could never get from mere statistics.

When we were building Cena Plus, we didn’t even know that a concept like the one I just described existed. And having very limited funds, we had no intentions of paying someone to build the site without knowing if restaurant owners would be willing to use it. The first thing we did was to go to restaurants one by one asking to speak with the owner or whoever was in charge and conducting a short survey (of course, after describing the product). These surveys were just a bit useful, but we were not getting any commitment from restauranteurs. And lacking a product or concrete proposition, we were not taken too seriously. Meanwhile, we remembered how somebody (I can’t recall who it was) described the best market study: I go to a potential customer, I show him my product, I ask money in exchange for it. He says “no”, I go back to the drawing table to iterate.

One of the early Cena+ sketches

Bearing in mind this definition, we changed how we faced restaurant owners. We had already designed our wireframes (sketches), so we went once more restaurant by restaurant with little folders containing 3 things: a promotional flyer, the printed wireframes (yeah, that’s right) and a “pre-agreement” stating that the signing parts would work together. While we were telling the owners about our proposition, we would put the printed wireframes on the table and guide them through the different screens so that they could get a good idea of what we were talking about. When the “tour” was finished, we would explain that launch-day was coming soon and if they signed the pre-agreement we would give them the service for free for a set period of time. The pre-agreement was not really a legal document, put it was a way for us to get some commitment from restauranteurs and to become more confident about the idea of someone actually using our site (or else, no one would have bothered to sign anything in the first place!). When we signed the 20th pre-agreement we just took our wallets out, commited 200% with the project and the real development began.

Besides confirming there was a market for our product, those interviews taught us a lot about how restaurants handled their reservations, which aspects of our proposition they liked the most and which the least; and we even ended up doing several changes to our designs based on what we learnt. As Steve Blank says, “getting out of the building” and talking face to face with potential customers is one of the most important and enlightening things an entrepreneur can and should do in the beginnings of his adventure.

Conclusion and Next Steps

With these tools you can already begin investigation whether there’s people out there interested in your value proposition and learn a bit about them. Now, let’s get to work! I hope you will find the courage to pick those ideas you have been thinking of lately and test them. If you have any doubt, I will be glad to answer it in the comments. Otherwise, see you in the next post, where we we’ll see if the idea has potential to become a profitable business (people might like our value proposition, but if the financials don’t work…).

Notes

1. Or coding an app or designing what we have in mind. ↩
2. To cover that, I suggest you do some research on your own, the web is full of wonderful resources. If what you need is some inspiration, in this link there are 35 examples of good designs, each one of them with comments on what was done right and what could be done better. ↩
3. I recommend reading the Google guide to this product before you activate the campaign. If you’ve never used AdWords before, it’s pretty easy to get a free ads coupon (generally worth between $50 and $100). You can get one of those when you register a .com domain with godaddy, for example. ↩
4. This percentage is known as Conversion Rate. We should note that to start drawing some conclusions, we should get a relatively big data set. Personally, I feel comfortable with a minimum of 100 clicks (and I become even more comfortable with more than 300). This will also define our budget. ↩
5. The general formula to get the CPA is= Cost Per Click (CPC) / Conversion Rate. In our example, $100 / 50% = $200 ↩