The #1 Reason to Apply for Start-Up Chile

"So...what did you think of Start-Up Chile?"

When you've been through it, the answer is easy. It's a great opportunity. Investment with few strings attached, and no equity taken? It's hard to find a better deal throughout the world, and impossible to find anything else comparable in Latin America.

Ask most participants two or three months in, however, and you'll get a different answer. Watching your savings dwindle while you wait for the reimbursement process to approve your expenses and give you back your money would work on anyone's nerves.

What's the best part of the program then? I'm sure that 99% of the participants over 2 years would tell you the same thing:

The fellow entrepreneurs all around you.

Some might be your competitors. Others are breaking their backs on projects that couldn't be more different from yours. But regardless of background, language, or passport, you learn more from the fellow entrepreneurs at CMI than from your co-founder, team, or any higher education courses.

For example:

Those are just a few of the topics dissected in "tribe meetings" where  veritable experts in their fields share their experiences and answer your startup-specific questions. Add to that a private Facebook group were ideas, tips and knowledge sharing bounce around a mile a minute, and you can't help but learn something valuable every day.

You do have to invest a lot in order to move your life to Santiago. You spend time on tramites (the Spanish word for "bureacratic errands" that is so unique to the region that there's no translation). You toil over reimbursement forms only to have some expenses rejected. You invest about 10K of your own money (that you hopefully get back) to get to and set up life in Chile before you see a single Chilean peso from Start-Up Chile.

  But you see an impressive ROI when you and your small team do amazing things in your startup thanks to a couple Facebook posts or a 45 minute roundtable discussion.

  So is Start-Up Chile worth the time, the move, and the initial investment? Absolutely. Applications for Round 7 open on March 11th, so start getting your startup's story ready for the judges!

Why This Startup Is Gung Ho for Movember

In April our startup lost a great fan. His death was a major shock and blow to the whole OmbuShop team. He was so full of life and optimism, a true mentor and a believer in what we were doing.

This loss is one of the reasons we're taking Movember very seriously and hoping to raise as much money as possible. Movember aims to bring awareness to men's health issues; its participants seek out sponsors in their "race" to grow the best moustache in town (or in the world, more like). 

From the Movember site:

It's hard to keep life from distracting us from one of the most important things: our health. I am 100% guilty of that and have my own issues because of it. It's not until things are bad - and I mean really, truly bad - that we stop everything and start paying attention. Unfortunately it tends to be way too late. 

Listen Up Entrepreneurs

Working day and night on your startup? You should be more conscious of your health than anyone. That drive so common among entrepreneurs pushes us to work more, rest less, and put everything that isn't about growth on the back burner. 

You can't fix health problems like you can fix a bug in your code. Go out and exercise. Pay attention to your body's signals. Make sure you have insurance so you don't find yourself in a situation in which you feel like you can't go to the doctor. GO TO THE DOCTOR if you need to. I can’t think of many things worse than working this hard and not being able to enjoy the results later.

Support Movember

Ernesto, OmbuShop's CEO and my main squeeze, shaved off his beard on November 1 and is already raising money. As you can read on his Movember profile, Ernesto's personal goal is to raise awareness about lung cancer and hypertension. All donations great and small make a difference, so help Ernesto and the OmbuShop team reach our goal of $500 by donating today!  

(Here's Ernesto with a past moustache; this time we're going for more!)

You're Too Close - Getting Feedback on Your Startup

You're an awesome listener. Your friends come to you with their problems, especially relationship problems. They know they can count on you to give it to them straight because you see things clearly. The advice you give makes sense, mostly because the problem is obvious to you, as is the solution. 

The Relationship Feedback Problem

But when it's your relationship and your problem, it's impossible to see that obvious solution. When friends give you the very straight-forward advice that you should change your situation, it's so hard to consider objectively. You're too close to the situation. You've invested a lot of time, energy and your heart, so chucking out everything to make room for something new is just too hard. 

Feedback and Your Startup

Feedback about your business goes the same way. You work your ass off on a really great idea, creating an awesome product with features that are going to change the world. You've got the perfect plan on how to scale it, and you spend countless hours perfecting the details before presenting it. Your friends and family are all about it, which of course encourages you even more.

Then you have a chance to present your business or idea to other people in your industry, and they have a lot to say. They don't understand x, you should absolutely change y, you really ought to pivot completely. All those hours you spent on that one feature? "I wouldn't pay for that." 

Maybe you hear that constructive feedback and suggestions and you don't explode into a tirade of "you don't understand my vision!" But your pride starts to take over and so you discard what they have to say, thinking "it's just that one guy's opinion; it doesn't mean he's right."

Pitch Early and Often

It's true: it is that one guy's opinion. But crowds of other experienced entrepreneurs might agree with him. That's why it's important to pitch early and pitch often. Get people to give you feedback about your idea. Discuss your business model so you can have others point out its flaws. The more you hear what others have to say, the more open you'll be about the future of your own business. The more open you are, the more likely you'll find the correct path that leads you to success. Don't let pride get in the way of making changes that could make all the difference!

Listen With a Discriminant Ear

While you're out there getting feedback, don't forget to be discriminant about whose words you take to heart. If you listened to every single doubt someone has about your startup ("But you'll never compete with Giant Successful Company, so why bother?"), you'd never be an entrepreneur. Pay attention to people's experiences and backgrounds, whether they can provide real insight or just love to hear themselves talk. 

The most important person to elicit feedback from? Your target customers. They'll tell you what works, what doesn't, and hopefully that key element that'll convert them from visitors to clients. Take every opportunity you have to pick their brains, from the idea's inception to your MVP's soft launch, and especially when you're thinking of making big changes or building a major feature. This is the feedback that matters most; it just might save you a whole lot of time and money.

Why I'm Wandering into Web Design + Vanesa Souss' Illustrations

Recently I've had to dive unknowingly into the world of design for a project. Startups aren't always fortunate enough to have a full-time web designer on the team, so there are times when you start to pick up new skills because, well, someone has to do it. So here I am, discovering just how tricky things like CSS can be.

It turns out that I'm fascinated by it all as as I try to navigate Web Design For Newbs. While I used to consider web design a ridiculously foreign concept, now I'm having a field day with fonts, color palettes and Photo Shop (all the while cursing the fact that I'm still such a beginner).

My newfound curiosity also has me paying a lot more attention to the designers around me. I've learned lots already from the wonderfully adept guys at Ombu Shop, and my Twitter feed is the best source of fresh infographics and imagery right at my fingertips. (Pinterest is lovely but can you say "productivity killer?")

Today I came across Vanesa Souss's illustrations and was just blown away. They're playful and imaginative: simply beautiful. I had no idea Vanesa held this talent among so many others. We met working together on a client's video; her skills during the entire production were exemplary. The finished product complete with her animation knocked everyone's socks off. 

Here are a couple of my favorite of Vanesa's illustrations. More can be found here. 

Why The Best Content Kicks You in the Face

You create a Tumblr blog, and someone starts following you. Tumblr lets you know with an email that says "So-and-So started following you" in the subject line. You open the email and it says "Sweet." or "Whatever!" And it's signed Love, Tumblrbot.

Tumblr has thrown out formalities, just like so many other web startups have done. Company emails say "Hey!" or "Thanks!" No one who writes "hey" would ever be accused of sounding too corporate.

Corporate is out. It's done. Even most serious companies where the men still wear suits have websites that are easy to use and fun to look at. And corporate copy and content is (thankfully) on its way out too. 

A new era of copy and content is here. It's copy that has a real voice. It's content that isn't afraid to be out there, to be confrontational. And it's the stuff that goes viral. 

Take The Dollar Shave Club's video that drove so much traffic to the site Tuesday that the site went down. The video is funny, ridiculous and very clever. I love that the company's not afraid to use "fuck" to describe how great their razors are. Let's face it: it's a powerful adjective. 

And then there's the slogan. Shave Money. Shave Time. It makes sense as a slogan if you just read it. But read it aloud and you realize it's a kind of silly way to pronounce "Save Time. Save Money." So you have a play on words plus silliness. Far from corporate, very memorable, and really effective. 

I look at website copy that talks about solutions, quality and guarantees. All I can think is "of course you're going to say that about your company, but how do I know it isn't all bullshit?" 

Corporate copy seems like bullshit because it sounds insincere right out of the gate. The new era of copy and content that strips away the bullshit and talks to the user like a person is the stuff that'll sell products and land customers that actually care about your company's success.

Too Long; Didn't Read

Not long ago, actor Ralph Fiennes claimed that Twitter and its 140 characters are contributing to the decline of the English language. He said:

"[Language] is being eroded — it’s changing. Our expressiveness and our ease with some words is being diluted so that the sentence with more than one clause is a problem for us, and the word of more than two syllables is a problem for us."

It will be a long time and a lot of research before anyone can speak to whether that's true or not. To defend Twitter, you can point to the many extremely clever tweets or simply say that the site's ability to connect more than 200 million users and disseminate so much information makes it above the question of "eroded language."

But one thing is certain - thanks to technology, text messaging & web 2.0 (mainly Twitter & Facebook), writing styles have definitely become more concise, goal-oriented and time-friendly (which could also be thought of as readers' time-friendly). 

Everyone who surfs the web, reads blogs, and browses social networking sites has a finite amount of time. This is our most valuable resource, and it's one we can't replenish once it's gone. So if every blog is an epic piece of literature, we're not going to have time to consume all the great posts or articles out there. At some point all you can say is TL;DR. 

So to get people to stop for a second, read your blog and understand that it's good content and worth coming back to or even sharing, it needs to be time-friendly. And the more good content you produce, the more you will prove to me that you're an expert in your field and someone with whom I want to do business. 

But if it's TL;DR, I'll never know what you have to say, even if it's golden. 

Your startup: part-time or full-time?

Night sweats and (more) sinking feelings. That's what you imagine in store for you if you leave the day job to focus on your startup more than just during off-peak hours. More time should invariably lead to more profits, but the thought of dramatically cutting down your source of steady income paralyzes you. What's the answer? Take the leap or play it safe?

The general feeling is that if you're not working full-time on your startup, you're dividing your productive hours and therefore your attention. And considering the enormous feat that is making a startup successful, it makes sense that scattered attention isn't going to cut it. Focus on making your business profitable or you'll watch it slowly fail. 

Not everyone would agree, though. Jason Fried has talked a lot about taking things slowly with your startup, making small moves while still working the day job and testing things out before that giant leap into full-time startup work. It's about not being dependent on other people's money, schedules, and expectations. When you control those things, he says, you're less likely to try too hard and then trip over yourself with bad decisions or rushed launches. 

In the end, it's up to the individual. If the stress of juggling a day job and a startup is too distracting, leading you to work poorly in both, you have to make a decision. But if you can handle both and hold on to that income that keeps you from becoming desperate for success, taking the time to test out your ideas could help you discard the bad ones. No one wants to invest his life savings into what could eventually need a lot of reworking. 

Lean Marketing

While working with a few Buenos Aires startups over the past few months, I picked up a few tips that, compiled together now, feel like they could have come right out of the Lean Startup handbook. Some of the most valuable to me have been:

Translating Nationality, Identity

When it comes to our nationality, what should we call ourselves? How should we identify where we are from if we haven’t been from there in a while? Does our place of birth define so much of us?

In the States, particularly once out of high school, the question of what city you’re from is essential when getting to know someone. Along with where and what you studied, it helps us locate you in our real-world circles. It doesn’t usually matter much, and the conversation goes on.

I never questioned the word "American" before moving to Argentina. I was lucky that the French word americaine was essentially the same but with a different pronunciation, and I didn’t run into any squabbles over what it meant while living in Paris. Fast forward to 2007 and I’m constantly defending the word to Argentines. “But we’re American too,” they protested. “In Spanish, perhaps. Not in English.” It did not make me popular, but stubborn as I am, I would not call myself something less accurate like “North American."

My solution was to embrace the word yanqui. I hated norteamericana, couldn’t pronounced estadounidense, and americana was just asking for trouble. I loved everything about the word yanqui: the spelling, the Río Platense pronunciation ("shjanky"), even the somewhat negative connotation. But it certainly draws its share of looks or questions. “You know that it's derogatory, right?" some ask. Others just smile, laughing along with me.

Is it possible to completely leave behind the country where you spent your first 23 years? Does my nationality taint every conversation with people I’ve just met? I say yanqui because I hear it as a bridge between the two cultures that I know. It says “I might be from there, but my daily education comes from being here. Thanks for having me.” (Photo of Avenida de Mayo via Matt Hintsa)

"This is Twitter, how may I help you?"

Like so many other things, I was a late-comer to Twitter. As a somewhat contraryteenager, I swore never to do what everyone else was doing. This spilled over into adulthood a bit, and so my entry into most social networking sites happened grudgingly at first and continued thanks to curiosity. Now I'm a full blown convert, and Twitter is my latest place of worship. (No doubt I will see you all on Google+ in a year or two.)

What currently has my attention is the way companies big and small are using it to address customer service issues. Great marketing campaigns to get and keep clients are everywhere you look and changing the way we spend our money. But how good of a tactic is tweeting about your weaknesses alongside your strengths in an attempt to bring customer service to social media?  It all depends on how well you do it.  Grooveshark, for example, tweeted back at me with a joke when I blurted out my frustration at their site. The joke was relevant to the style of my tweet, it was personalized and they addressed my complaint directly. I was thrilled. The Men's Wearhouse has a team of people monitoring Twitter in order to respond to any comments/complaints that might have been broadcast into the Twittersphere. Their response to complaints is to tweet back a recognition of that complaint and to ask the person to call their 1-800 customer service number, and the tweet is "signed" by the name of the person who saw the complaint. This response takes the conversation off of the very public medium that is Twitter, but it's not all that personal, and it forces me to leave Twitter to get my problem addressed. The acknowledgement of the complaint is important; however, if the interaction with the customer began on Twitter, it should stay there via Direct Messages. Finally, while researching an Argentine startup, I found that their Twitter account was, at the time, a drawn-out defense of their service to one disgruntled user. I was embarrassed for them - such a complicated (and essentially negative) exchange in such a public place - and I just wanted to look away. I can appreciate the value of maintaining conversations over Twitter, but at some point it's going to hurt you more than help you.  Twitter can be a great tool for customer service; consumers expect to be able to communicate with companies the same way they're in contact with their closest friends. But if it's not done well, you'll end up tarnishing the good reputation you're working so hard to build and disseminate in the market. The key is to put a solid strategy in place for your company's Twitter account, be empathic in your dialogues with the public, and use a CRM (I like Highrise) to keep track of those unhappy customers. Play your 140 characters right and you may find Twitter to be an effective tool for both gaining new customers and for winning old ones back.

Wannabe

Loaded with a truly negative connotation, "wannabe" is that dreaded title for someone who wants desperately to belong to, to find her place in, or to fit into a specific group. It was the ultimate insult as a teenager, going hand in hand with "poseur." Undoubtedly something we aimed never to be labeled as.

When discussing the next Hacks/Hackers meetup that a few friends would be attending, someone asked if I was going. Why? I asked. That's an event for developers and journalists. How exactly would I fit in? "But you're kind of in between, aren't you?" "Not exactly. I'm more like a wannabe."

And it's true. Ever since software developers, PMs, and IT managers occupied the vast majority of the chairs in my English classes here in Buenos Aires, I've been itching to make things with code. They want to know why; why I'd want to sit hours in front of a computer like they do, or why I seemed to enjoy the company of nerds so much. "Writing code all the time changes you," one of my students said. (I should point out that this guy was MUCH friendlier in online contact than he ever was in person. Maybe he was speaking from very personal experience.) But I could rarely explain. I knew very little about programming, and when I asked people to break their projects down for me to try to help me understand how computing works, I was more lost than that island ever was. Wanting to understand how it works does not a developer make.

The same goes for journalism. I've always loved to write, but my formal training ended with two required English courses in college. Fortunately Sociology and Communications are two majors that require pages and pages of written assignments, but research papers are quite a leap from anything you find on your favorite online magazine. The day I discovered TechCrunch, however, was an important one. Here was this constant stream of news about the giants and the newbies of such a fascinating industry, one that was sweeping up other non-nerds in the excitement of game-changing technologies that, as Thomas Friedman put it, have flattened the competitive playing field. My free time dwindled to virtually nothing as I tried to consume everything I could from that site and others like it, and even now while I'm supposed to be on vacation, I can't stay away from the news for too long. 

So how does a wannabe reconcile with this status? Neither a developer nor a journalist, but fascinated by the tech industry and writing equally? I've found my place satisfying both interests in content creation for Internet startups. With so many innovative companies that need to spread the word about their products and services, the demand for good writers who understand the business provides me with consistently challenging work.

"Wannabe" isn't really an accurate word for me anymore. I'm helping developers with great ideas tell their stories in order to connect with prospective clients, future partners, as well as the media. I'm that cog in the startup wheel that works to get the word out so the nerds can focus on the code; I'll save programming for next time.

Excuse Me, Miss

It’s go time.

Having made the move from TEFL education in a foreign land to marketing in that same foreign land, I’m facing the inevitable: it’s time to start blogging. It’s a not-so-old adage: everybody who’s anybody has a blog. Always have thought of myself of at LEAST “anybody,” I thought I’d take another stab at it.

My previous attempts at personal blogging never went live - I couldn’t stand how self-obsessed those posts were, and I doubted anyone else would be able to stomach them either. Blogging at my last job was a very enjoyable way to stretch my writing muscles, but it was fated to be the least important (according to the higher-ups) of my numerous tasks, so it constantly took a back seat. 

So here I am for Round…who’s counting anyway. I expect it’ll be a mix of my musings on living in this equally awesome and ridiculous foreign land, lessons learned in my professional life (and oh, are there many), and hopefully a few funny stories as well. 

I’m Claire Pelletreau, I’m 28, and I live in Buenos Aires, Argentina. I work as a freelance marketing consultant for tech companies, and I’m working on a consulting service for English teachers new to the wild and wondrous world of Buenos Aires. You can watch as I swim and splash around Twitter (Read It Later has got to be the best plug-in ever invented) by following me at @clairepells. 

And away we go!