Hi there! I'm Jose Bermejo .
I'm thrilled to be interviewed by OyeStartups. Thank you so much for the opportunity to share my journey!!
My purpose is to push human progress through innovation. To achieve that goal, I'm building StartupBuilder.MBA as a step by step process to validate + plan ideas. Aiming to help 10,000 entrepreneurs, the goal is to help them validate their ideas before spending too much time and money so that we all can benefit from their success and quick innovation path.
I came up with the idea with the inputs of several things: firstly, I was a startup mentor in a University, and I realized the entrepreneurs were almost always making the same mistakes, not following best practices about lean-startup, innovation, research, decision-making. Secondly, after comparing the startup ecosystem in the USA and Spain (I'm from Spain), I've realized that in the USA there are tons of opportunities to have mentorship, incubators, and have guidance on the startup process, but not in Spain and the rest of the world. So I came up with an idea to democratize access to mentorship worldwide: growthseeker.io. But it did not work. With the same foundation, I pivoted the idea to StartupBuilder.MBA and tried to pack lots of best practices, resources, and guidance to help founders worldwide accelerate their startup journey.
After the failed experience with growthseeker.io (for the ones interested, here is a podcast and a recent interview about it ), I had a good knowledge of what were the main problems the founders were facing, GrowthSeeker.io helped me to perform the research after talking with more than 70 founders. So I came up with a new solution: startupbuilder.mba. Right I continued working on idea validation, validating the rest of the 5 critical factors (the ones I help to test with StartupBuilder.mba) to get initial traction.
I already had a prototype of the product in Coda.io that I moved to Notion.so. I took some screenshot, built a pre-sales landing page, and soft-launched it with some blog posts, Twitter announcements, and social media screenshots. The first value proposition was oriented to build a business plan, but it did not work (0 conversions in the early 48 hours). I pivoted the value proposition to validate ideas, and it started working right away. Before launching the product, I made almost 2K$ of sales. Once I reached 500$ in sales (the KPI I set to validate the idea) I build the product. Then I released the product on the promised date, November 18th. Now I'm working 20% on evolving the product, 20% trying to have feedback, putting a community together around the product, and the other 60% promoting scale growth.
It was growthseeker.io. I had to close the community. It took too much time to make the decision and realize that it was not going to work. It would have been better to fail faster and pivot faster to launch this new product that seems working.
10 hours/day plus most of the weekends. A typical day starts around 7AM working and having some calls with Europe; then I go CrossFit for my daily workout dose for 2 hours. Once I'm back from crossfit, it's all in working until 7 or 8PM that I spend time with my wife to recap the day, have dinner, view a series together, and prep to rest.
On weekends I work but in a more relaxed way. Usually, one day of the weekend is to make plans with my wife. The other I work but more relaxed than during weekdays/
I'm still too close to answer this question. But I'm happy with the awareness I'm creating to help people not be afraid of failure, make a change and help others in that way. Humanity needs to push innovation with more founders working on new products (hopefully validating before building!!).
Building in public is working very good. Twitter is my first acquisition channel. Then publishing consistently in IndieHackers posts like milestones, how I validate or talk about failure helped acquire customers.
I still don't consider I launched it. IMO "launch" is relative. Each founder/maker has a different perspective of what a launch is.
If publishing a landing page and having the first customers is launching, I've launched it. Still, I consider that idea validation. Now, after validating, is when I'm working on a future launching. To be ready for a hard launch, I consider the next things to be ready:
I consider still far from all this steps. I'm Work In Progress for the real launch!!
I used Betapage to soft promote StartupBuilder. PH will arrive when all the things in the last step are ready. I'll test Betalist soon.
So far Betapage is working great, providing a great ROI. I'd use it again.
StartupBuilder.mba is a digital product (a Notion.so template with guided steps to validate ideas) + validators community. Now that I'm still getting initial traction, I have a simplified offer with a low price lifetime deal. It will soon change, as I will separate the digital product from the community to scale revenue with the community and raise the product's prices. More changes will come as I get traction.
I think it was to make a value proposition work and have the audience ready to pay for it. I'm including here GrowthSeeker.io, as StartupBuilder.mba is a pivot. So I spent 5 months to figure out a Value Proposition that work. And that's not the best scenario. It should have been way less (weeks, as I defend in my product). That's one of my big learnings, the faster we "fail", the better!
In the near future I'll continue working on improving the product and scale the sales at the time to build a consulting business to help SMBs and founded starps with strategic guidance on innovation and GoToMarket.
The initial acquisition channels are twitter and indihackers. Still very soon to talk about what I've done as I did not do too much promotion but build in public and share an article on how I validated my idea. I have some acquisition channels detected thanks to sparktoro.com tool (the tool I use to detect digital channels to test) that I will test shortly like reddy, hackernoon and others.
Besides, I'm building partnerships with other digital product makers to sell bundled products and with universities and incubators as an acquisition channel. Partnerships are an essential part of my GoToMakert plan.
To be honest, that's still not working. I'm struggling with having product feedback. I created 3 channels, and I let the customers know the channels by sending them emails and posting in the community. These are the feedback channels I've built:
I'm considering invetivate customers in some way (gifts) to have more feedback.
I't been an amazing learning journey! Here are some things I've learned, but there are many more!
Plenty of thoughts on this question! I'm glad you ask!
As in the podcast, I like to emphasize the importance of not being afraid of failure. Failure is growth. It's easy to say and hard to do. I've been there, I understand, I feel it.
But try to face the launch as one of the most fantastic learning opportunities you will have to grow, build your brand, and connect with amazing people!
Don't stay too high in your expectations; don't stay too low either. Just try to give your best, add value to your audience, be genuine, helpful, and consistent.
I believe that you'll get a "positive" outcome at the end of your trip, regardless of the outcome that you thought you'd have!
Jump in, go for it. You'll learn a ton.
Related Interviews