The result of a summer coding sprint of the Bundlr team: Matching Bags & Shoes
Tags: matching bags and shoes
Lean Startup Braga
The folks behind the Lean Startup Braga meetup invited me to speak about startup metrics the other day. As you probably imagine, Bundlr isn’t the leanest of startups, but I had a great time overloading the audience with all the metrics we monitor and challenges we face.
Fortunately, they also invited Celso Pinto (quantitative marketing FTW) and Francisco Costa, who have clearly more experience with this sort of things.
The best was getting to know some of the people behind the Braga startup scene and the Factory Business Center (thanks Tiago for the tour). Now I’m working on an excuse for them to head South and visit Coimbra.
Tags: lean startups, braga, events
Life at a startup: quotes
- “Does anybody know how many months can we skip social security before they pawn my house?”
- First hire, after 6 months in the company:
“How’s that thing called again? Oh yeah, Bundlr.” - Google Analytics - Right now 0 active visitors on site:
“Let’s go home folks…” - “OMG, yesterday we doubled our signups! Wait, is it a bug in our dashboard? Yeah, it’s a bug…”
- At a fancy restaurant:
“I’ll have the children’s menu, please.” - “What the hell is convertible debt?”
- “How does this code here works?”
“Don’t touch it!” - “When will you finish X?”
“This week.” (For the 4th week in a row) - “Our website is down, why is nobody complaining?”
- “We got one RT… victory dance!”
- “And the new version is live! Oh wait… rollback, rollback!”
- “Do you have some kind of startup discount?”
Tags: startups
But then I had to kind of laugh and my response was “You don’t have to worry about me.” I said, “I get more out of life than anyone else I’ve ever met. I’m having a great time, I’m not gonna die and I’m not gonna go to jail. This might scare you but I’m actually not afraid to die, I’m petrified of being bored and knowing what’s gonna happen tomorrow. You’ve given me every opportunity in the World to chase my dreams and most of my motivation is to make you proud.”
Tags: startups
On startup hubs
Those around me know how much I’m into building a startup hub in Coimbra. It’s something I recurrently thing about: what could be done to turn this city into a more attractive place to start a company? I have a long list of things to do:
- meetings to between startups (already doing it)
- workshops
- organize trips to other hubs
- bring relevant mentors to Coimbra
- make intros to recognized investors
- broadcast news about local startups
- and so on…
But the more I think about it, the more I believe the best strategy is just to work like hell to build a successful company and then invest a lot locally. Invest in all the awesome people I’m getting to know here in Coimbra.
So, back to work…