#worldofstartups

[startupletters]

Helping Ideas Grow in Myanmar

This week in World of Startups will be a little different. Instead of interviewing a startup, I'm interviewing a combined incubator and startup community - in Myanmar. Formerly known as Burma, this country has been practically closed off from the rest of the world until very recently. It is a country where about 10% of the population have phones (no, this is not the smartphone penetration) and about 1% internet access. This is maybe not so surprising when I tell you that a simple voice only SIM card can cost you $250 (down from around $500 last year). And the only (government run) mobile network has coverage that is spotty at best.

But things are changing. Last year Ooredoo from Qatar and Telenor from Norway became the two first international telcos that were awarded licences to build 2G and 3G networks in the country. They are currently busy getting up and running, and their networks will launch later this year. However, Ooredoo is not happy with only getting people online. After all, what are they supposed to do online without content relevant to them and in their local language?

That's why they last month launched Ideabox, in collaboration with Silicon Straits and Pollenizer. In brief, Ideabox is both an incubator but also a startup community. One of it's main goals is to help the locals realize that starting a high risk company can be a viable career option. And then give them the tools and support needed to succeed.

Earlier today I met with the co-founders of Ideabox Myanmar, Kaung Sitt and Julian Gorman. Gathered in the Ooredoo Myanmar HQ they gave me the full brief on why, what and how they are launching Ideabox.

According to the two, there are startups operating in Myanmar already, although it's no Silicon Valley by anyone's measure. The concept of a "startup" is not something that is widely understood in society. And for most of the technical talent graduating from universities in the country, starting or joining a startup is not even on the radar. For them, getting a stable and fairly well paid job with a big corporation (or in the government) is what they are aiming for.

And the fact that startups are not on people's radar is something the Ideabox team has experienced first hand. For the first few events they hosted, they almost literally had to go from door to door knocking to get people to come. One of Kaung's initial roles was utilizing and expanding his network of entrepreneurial minded people in Yangon, and personally inviting people to show up to events. Last month they co-hosted the first edition of Code for Change Myanmar, incidentally the country's first ever hackathon, and it was a turning point for them. It was the first event they hosted where people outside their first-degree networks showed up. I guess that is the equivalent of a young startup getting their first signups from "random" visitors to their website. An amazing feeling indeed.

For potential entrepreneurs in Myanmar, there is plenty of "low hanging fruit" waiting to be picked. A part from a few big international brand names, such as Facebook and Viber, the country is lacking the long tail of services. The language and local alphabet is also a barrier for most people to adopt international products. And that is apparent in the early startups happening in the country. So far things like POS systems, marketplaces and keyboard startups have gotten most attention from local entrepreneurs.

Also some internationals have noticed the low hanging fruit, and have rushed to get in early. It should not surprise anyone that Rocket Internet (who have made copying successful business models in new markets their M.O.) already entered Myanmar in 2012. Still, locals have the benefit of knowing both the language and culture better than any foreigner can grasp in a short time. They know what the people of Myanmar want, and it may not be the same as in Germany, Malaysia or even Thailand.

For now Kaung and Julian have seen entrepreneurs tackling problems within Myanmar, but think that within a few years they will witness international minded startups coming out of the country.

[startupletters]

40 000 Indie Online Stores, Powered by Tictail

This week we meet Carl Waldekranz, co-founder and CEO of Tictail. Their teams in Stockholm and New York have been working relentlessly over the last three years to create a platform where non-techies can set up their own online store in no time. The result is more than 40 000 indie stores, selling anything from porcelain to iPad covers.

In the interview you can learn more about their background, why "Stockholm is one of the best places on earth to start a business" and how they have managed to keep the organization flat and nimble as the size of the company grows.

Tell the story of how Tictail got started and where you are now. What is your next milestones and vision for the future?

Tictail started in my kitchen. While I was still working as an art director at the design agency Identity Works we started meeting up over the weekends. We would stay in my apartment and hack non-stop, friday to sunday. Every month we would take half our salaries and invest them in our joint savings account, this became the starting capital of our business. Six months later we quit our jobs and launched the first store, my mothers porcelaine business Bymutti.

In a way she’s the perfect benchmark customer for what we want to create… She’s passionate about her product, she’s a great artist that has perfected her porcelain skills over years of hard work. She’s great at her job but she knows nothing of e-commerce. With Tictail we wanted to create an ecommerce platform for all the people that don’t care about e-commerce; the designers, the artists - the independent entrepreneurs.

Since Bymutti we’ve become the home to more than 40 000 stores around the world. As we look at 2014 and what happens next it’s about connecting those stores to create a unique customer experience - a community of indie brands and boutiques.

Talk a bit about advantages or challenges faced by startups in Stockholm or in your industry?

I think Stockholm is one of the best places on earth to start a business. It’s a small test market with a highly progressive population - people are very savvy with the web and eager to try new things. You can launch a service in english entirely and still enjoy a very high adoption rate. Infrastructure is fantastic, it’s easy to get around the entire city and you enjoy high speed stable internet everywhere.

There's is a great design and engineering community thriving in Stockholm but with a much more balanced demand than in for instance NY or SF. And while there aren’t that many startups in Stockholm, some of the biggest success stories are based here. Companies like King.com, Spotify, Klarna, Mojang (Minecraft) creates a hub which attracts both VC’s and gather talent.

What is your biggest learning (so far) as a founder?

There are only two things that matter; team & focus.

Tell a story about a challenge you faced and overcame.

As we’ve grown Tictail we have worked very hard to maintain a flat organisation in which innovation can happen anywhere. However as more people join it’s been challenging to ensure that the product continues to move towards the same direction.

To create entrepreneurial freedom we decided we would break down the organisation into smaller cells of 3-5 people, mimicking the size of a new startup. Each team would autonomous, including both engineers and designers and have the freedom to decide which features to prioritise. We then implemented an OKR framework setting goals for the company, for each team and for each person that everyone could follow on our internal wiki. This aligned teams on quarterly goals but maintained a fantastic culture driven by entrepreneurship.

What books (or other sources, methodologies, philosophies) have been influential in how you approach running Tictail?

It’s a cliche but I found Lean Startup to be really good. Enjoyed Lean In a lot. Currently reading Good to Great which makes a lot of sense so far. On a personal level I really liked The Fountainhead.

What are you currently looking for (partners, employees, funding, other things etc)?

We're always looking for good talent. For the Stockholm office we're looking for designers and engineers. For New York we're currently looking to fill Brand Design and Community Management positions.

[startupletters]

How Harmonia is helping teams work better

In this week's founder interview we meet James Adam, the founder of Exciting, the company behind Harmonia. It is a bootstrapped venture that was spun out of the development collective Go Free Range in London in August 2011, but is now based in Austin, Texas.

So what is Harmonia anyway? It is task management focused not on completing projects, but to keep teams and companies running smoothly. This creates happier teams that can focus on what matters and gets more done. In James' own words, "Harmonia helps teams get better by sharing responsibility for repeating, day-to-day tasks". You know, invoicing and taking out the trash. The boring stuff.

Tell the story of how Harmonia got started. What is your next milestones and vision for the future?

Harmonia was born out of necessity, as so many good products are. Before starting Exciting, I co-founded a development consultancy in London called Go Free Range, where everyone was an equal owner and had an equal say in how the company ran. However, this left nobody explicitly responsible for a lot of the non-development tasks that a business needs to achieve, like chasing invoices, updating the website, paying taxes -- even watering the plants in the office.

I knew that I didn't want to become solely responsible for these tasks, but in the spirit of equality I couldn't ask anyone else to take them on either. I also didn't want any single person to become a knowledge silo about aspects of the business; the team must be able to survive the loss of any individual. In software development terms, we call this “increasing your bus number”. We would have to share the responsibility fairly and equally, in a way that took up as little energy and effort as possible. And so, the first version of Harmonia was born, and I've been iterating on it ever since.

The next milestone for Harmonia is really pulling together all of the philosophy and thinking around how Harmonia helps teams, and refining the way this is communicated to prospective users. Once our “pitch” is in place though, there’s a lot more I'd like to add in terms of functionality: integration with other tools and more powerful email options, just to name a few.

My vision is that Harmonia becomes an important but almost invisible member of lots of small-to-medium teams who want to spend less time worrying about administrivia and more time focussing on creative work. I want Harmonia to be both a helpful assistant to those teams, and a philosophy and process that helps make each team stronger and more coherent. I strongly believe that self-organising teams are more effective than traditional dictator-delegator-driving hierarchies, but you can't just remove traditional organisational structure and not replace it with anything. My vision is that Harmonia, and other tools that Exciting builds, will provide strong processes to fill that hole.

The task management space is very crowded. What makes you special, and why will you succeed?

That’s a great question, and an important one.

Most task management software is “project-focussed”, but Harmonia is “team-focussed”. What I mean by that is that most software in this space is about capturing the tasks required to deliver a specific project, breaking down and discussing requirements or user stories and so on.

Harmonia is about all the tasks and chores that are peripheral to the project work a team does. Paying bills, keeping the office tidy, organising team lunches -- all these tasks aren’t directly related to project work, but they still need to be taken care of for the team to keep running smoothly.

So Harmonia is actually complementary to whatever project software a team is using; that software focusses on the delivery of the project, and Harmonia helps the team run happily and smoothly so they can keep focussing on that project.

Harmonia also helps build the foundations for a great team culture. By encouraging everyone to contribute equally to supporting the team, it helps promote empathy between team members, and can break down negative “us-and-them” perceptions that arise in many teams. If everyone can see that the CEO has to take out the trash just as often as the intern, that’s a powerful statement of everyone working together and helping each other. That’s the kind of team that people don’t want to leave.

What is your biggest learning (so far) as a founder?

My biggest learning so far is how much non-development work there is when building a product. Really, the development and feature work is a small fraction of the effort required, when you start to think about messaging, copywriting, design and UX and so on. It can take weeks of effort just to figure out a good headline sentence for your homepage!

I love developing software and I don't want to lose sight of that, but I knew that it was important for me to get stronger in these other areas, and so it’s all good exercise that will pay off many times over in the future.

You recently moved from one of Europe’s hottest startup cities (London), to one of the most up and coming ones in the states (Austin). What motivated the move, and what has your experience been so far?

I actually moved to Austin to live with my partner, after living apart for two years. We met in London and lived together there while she worked on her PhD, but she came to Austin for a postdoctoral position at the University of Texas. Two years of living apart was more than enough, though, and so after two years of flying back and forth a lot, I gave up our apartment in London and moved here in the summer of 2012.

I miss a lot of my friends and extended network in London, but Austin really is a great place to be right now, especially for software development. There’s a really strong community of people working in all aspects of technology, and I’m meeting a lot of really interesting people with new ideas and fresh perspectives that I can draw. Plus the weather is amazing, and the food is outstanding too :)

What have the pros and cons been of being a solo founder?

The biggest pro is probably that I can work quickly on an idea without having to figure out how to convince anyone else of its merit. This is particularly true when the idea is more like a hunch, and has nuances that can be hard to communicate.

The biggest con is the flipside of that: there’s nobody to act as a check and balance for ideas that might be bad, or at least might not be the next most important thing. Another con is not having that other person to keep you focussed and motivated; it’s all too easy as a solo founder to become distracted.

Tell a story about a challenge you faced and overcame.

A recent challenge I’ve had with Harmonia is improving the messaging on the landing page. I come from a strong development background, which is all about problem solving, architecture, and clarity, and the original homepage reflected that style of thinking. It explained exactly what Harmonia did, and how you could use it.

Unfortunately, that’s not the best way to really attract someone to a product. Instead of selling them on what the product does, you have to find a way for them to relate to your product on their own terms: you have to talk to them about a problem that they have, and then introduce your product as a good way for them to solve that problem.

My challenge was that thinking in this way doesn’t come naturally to me. I’m a decent writer, but not very experienced at crafting the kind of short, poppy sentences that you need when a prospective user is glancing at your web page. And so, while I knew that this was a crucial part of determining whether or not Harmonia was going to be successful, I really struggled to make any progress. I would stare at blank editor windows for hours trying to summon the right phrase.

What I’ve learned is that the best way to solve problems like this is just to keep trying. I recognise now that it’s natural for my first three, five, ten, or twenty attempts are going to be garbage. The key is to stick at it -- keep working through ideas, even if you know they aren’t perfect, because sooner or later you will have gone through and cleared away all the really bad ideas, and what you’ll be left with is one or two that actually aren’t as terrible as you thought. And then you can start improving on them.

What I learned was that it’s OK to have bad ideas. In fact, it’s important to have them and to accept them, because then you can put them aside and consider a different one that might be better.

What is your advice for people about to finish college or grad school, and wondering if they should join a bigco, an existing startup or do something on their own?

I’d definitely recommend getting some experience working in a team, either at a startup or a more established company, because developing skills around working well with other people is really important even if you do then strike out on your own. Before I became a solo founder, I worked in three different teams: two as part of a larger company, and one that I created myself, and the experiences I had there were invaluable. I learned a lot from everyone I worked with, even when working with them was difficult, and I can’t imagine I’d be where I am now if I had never done that.

As an experienced developer, I am sure you have been approached many times by non-technical people with an idea they want you to join. It is fairly obvious these days that an idea alone is worth next to nothing. What can these non-technical people do to somehow to get you more excited about their vision? What would it take?

That’s another great question. I guess what I’d be looking for in a non-technical person is what they would be bringing to a partnership beyond just the idea. Are they great at selling the idea to people? Do they have a good understanding of the market they are hoping to enter? Are keen to learn? Those kinds of questions.

Obviously as a self-selecting solo founder I’m predisposed to favour my own ideas, instead of looking to other people to bring the idea, but what I’d be looking for most of all is a prospective partner who’s going to complement my own skills and work just as hard as I am to turn that idea into a viable company.

What books (or other sources, methodologies, philosophies) have been influential in how you approach running Harmonia?

I'm very influenced by the core ideas of agile development (iterating, making small changes, using real feedback to drive next steps). One of the reasons that Harmonia features a sprinkling of randomness when making assignments is that the real world isn't predictable either, and so it’s excellent exercise to get used to not being able to predict what tasks I might need to handle on a daily or weekly basis. There’s no telling what the future might throw at your team, so learning to adapt and be agile is fundamental.

My PhD was focussed on emergent behaviour, and so that’s another area of thinking that has a strong influence on how I approach problems. If you can produce a very simple set of behaviours, and replicate that across a number of agents in the same environment, you can see higher-level behaviours that are both adaptive and robust to change. Harmonia can be considered an expression of that: a simple process and set of behaviours that makes a team more robust and adaptive.

What are you currently looking for (partners, employees, funding, other things etc)?

At the moment, I’m looking for beta users so I can gather as much feedback as possible and help hone Harmonia into a really great tool for teams. I’m mostly focussed on small companies that are open to the kind of responsibility-sharing that Harmonia promotes, but there’s no reason why teams existing within larger companies can’t see some of the benefits too, and I already have some beta users in that position. I even have some people using it to manage chores in their households, which is another really interesting environment.

You can reach out to James on Twitter @harmonia and @lazyatom.

[startupletters]

Tearing Down Language Barriers: The Story of Unbabel

This week we meet Vasco Calais Pedro, co-founder of Unbabel. Being the CEO of a current YCombinator company that is growing rapidly every week, Vasco has a lot of insights and experiences to share. He talks about how they built their very diverse team, how they got into YCombinator, doing things that do not scale, and his vision of Unbabel becoming "the de facto human quality translation engine of the web" within the next few years. This is the story of an ambitious team that made its way from Lisbon to Silicon Valley and are going full steam ahead.

Quick facts: founded August 2013, 5 founders & 3 part time employees, 2959 freelancers (and counting), $420 000 funding to date.

Tell the story of how Unbabel got started. What is your next milestones and vision for the future?

Unbabel started during a surf trip in the south of Portugal. Both João Graça, our CTO, and me have PhD’s in Natural Language Processing and would often discuss language related problems. During that trip, the team started thinking about how Machine Translation, despite showing huge promise and demonstrating big improvements over the last decade, was still not able to reliably solve basic communication issues. We kept seeing translation mistakes that were fairly simple for humans to solve. We thought that if we were able to make it really easy for people to correct the mistakes, it could be pretty powerful in helping people overcome language issues.

We prototyped a few solutions and tested them with landing pages. Encouraged by the results we started building the product that is Unbabel today: a platform that combines automatic and human translation. Since then, we've been growing our community of translators and finding customers. That is our next milestone, demonstrating that we can deliver affordable translation, with quality, fast. We are well on our way towards that goal. We have more than 30 paying customers, more than 2600 translators and are growing 15% per week.

We imagine a world where I can write this text in Portuguese, my native language, and you can put it in your newsletter in your native language (that I don’t know what it is) and each reader receives the text in their inbox in their own native language, and none of us even knows what was the original language or the target languages, it would not matter. Language will not be an issue, we will be communicating, sharing a story, an idea, that’s what really matters. Today, without the english language that unites us, this would not possible. And how many people are we keeping out of the conversation because of this? The fact is that the majority of the world doesn't speak English.

The reality is that, unless you work with language, translation is, for the most part, an obstacle between you and your customer, or your target market. For most people in the word translation is a nuisance that prevents them from doing what they really want to do, which is to reach out and touch someone who speaks a different language. Our vision is to make translation...disappear. That is, to make translation so seamless that you won't even realize that it is happening. You will be able to simply communicate.

What do you have that all the other language translation startups do not?

We combine the humans and technology in a unique way. On the one hand, Unbabel combines Machine translation with distributed Crowd post-editing. That is, each text is translated first with machine translation, then split into small parts and then each small part is edited by a several people in sequence until it is perfect.

We're building a proprietary MT engine and creating a new interface for translators to be more efficient. We aim to actually enable our translators to work from anywhere as long as they have a smartphone.

We believe in being where communication happens and let translation be an enabler of communication. With that purpose we released a translation API, we already deliver translation by email (where the average knowledge worker spends 20% of their time), and plan to build integration apps with platforms like Zendesk, Gmail and Salesforce.

You are an extremely diverse team, with members ranging from 20 to 38 years old and with different backgrounds. How did you form this team?

João and I met while we were researchers at Instituto Superior Técnico. We both felt strongly that the best way to change Portugal and the world would be creating awesome products and so when the opportunity came I convinced him decline a prestigious research grant he had been awarded and to join a startup with me. I hope he forgives me one day, when we can look back at what we accomplished. We went on to build two startups together, before Unbabel. In the last startup, we hired Bruno for design and UX and Hugo as front-end developer. Quickly we became more than colleagues. Overcoming the daily trenches of startup life quickly creates strong bonds.

At that time I already knew Sofia from Beta-i, a non-profit that promotes entrepreneurship in Portugal. I had been trying to get her to work with me for a while on other projects and once she decided to join, I felt we had a pretty unique team.

The most important part of a startup are the people you build it with. It is the number one reason for for failure of startup, but it is also the most important ingredient in the mix. We are both complimentary in skills, strong in technology, design and business and more importantly, resilient and resourceful. Having done a number of startups before, it is amazing what you can do when you get the right group of people together. I am really proud of my team and what we accomplished so far.

Talk about how you got accepted into Y Combinator, and what it’s like to be a part of it. In what way has it helped you?

First of all we applied! It took us a while to finish the application and we were really proud of it when we were done. Just being called in for the interview was huge validation considering less than 1% get called! We worked really hard for 2 weeks getting the demo ready and preparing for the questions. The interview was super intense, for 10 minutes there were questions about market size, technology, what we had done so far, who we were, it was super fast! We were selected because the market is huge and we have a great team.

There are two sides to actually participating in the Y Combinator, namely the program and our own experience as a team living in California. The Y Combinator philosophy is all about growth, the relentless pursuit of growth. All we need to be doing is talking to customers and building product. The Y Combinator partners have been helpful in key decisions and in keeping the focus and pressure up. Also, there is the alumni network which is very supportive, the brand - it’s a door opener to say we’re a “Y Combinator company”, and of course the other companies in our batch - we’re always surrounded by motivated, hard working, intelligent people, and that’s great! Finally, every Tuesday we have a group dinner with great speakers, who speak very candidly about how they built their companies and what they learned along the way. We’ve had the opportunity to listen to and speak with the founders of Eventbrite, Airbnb, Evernote, Homejoy, VMWare. It’s very inspiring and there are always key lessons to take home.

On the other hand, moving to California and living together has been a unique opportunity. I believe that one of the reasons that Y Combinator encourages teams to find a small space to work from and to live together during those 3 months is that when you spend 24 hours a day with someone it will quickly become apparent if there any major team issues. Living together has allowed us to to devote 100% of our time and energy to building Unbabel. We spend a lot of time “in our cave”, building product, discussing how to increase growth, how to tweak our business model, talking to users, to customers. We got a lot done! And I think we made an important piece of Unbabel history. We will always look back at these times together, cooking for each other, sharing a small house, working in the living room and maybe say “those were the days”!

How was it to move from wonderful charming Lisbon to the tech and startup Mekka of SFBA and Mountain View? What is the biggest difference?

I had lived in Silicon Valley twice before so I knew what to expect in terms of lifestyle. A lot of my friends and colleagues are here and I am used to the mentality and entrepreneurial spirit. Also, both João and I have strong ties to the US, we both did our PhDs here. So being here has been an opportunity to get back in touch with our network. That being said, the intensity of Y Combinator and the fact that we are living together in one small apartment amplifies pretty much everything. Being here as part of the YC opens doors, and augments our community and accelerates the pace of progress tremendously. Silicon Valley that are amazing for any startup: the business environment is very open to startups, to setting up meetings fast and getting stuff done, and in our case, our largest early customers are here, the large internet titans who have millions of words to translate. Maybe the key difference between Lisbon and Mountain View (suburbian stereotypes aside) is that sometimes it feels like everyone here is working on a startup, a product, a service. The conversations in the streets, at restaurants and bars are about value proposition, deploying new products, and that helps to keep us motivated. The hard part was leaving family, friends and routines behind, Skype helps!

How did you secure your current funding? Are there any special challenges when raising funding in Portugal/Europe vs Silicon Valley/the US?

Our fundraising was perhaps unusual when compared to my previous experiences. We started by trying to raise a small pre-seed round but investor interest was so high in Portugal that we found ourselves negotiating a potential series A before we had even launched the product. We had the good fortune of meeting with Alexandre Barbosa from Faber Ventures, who has been a truly exceptional partner. Faber led the round and, after getting into Y Combinator, we were in the very interesting position of not having enough space in the round for all investors. We were focused on investors that were the right fit for us and would bring a lot of value to Unbabel beyond and so we closed investment from Faber Ventures and Shilling Capital Partners in Portugal. We felt that at our stage they were the best partners we could have and every day we confirm that initial feeling. It is a great joy to me to see investors of this calibre growing in Portugal, it bodes well for our future. Raising in the US was a very different process so far, mostly because YCombinator gives you very standard terms for investment, which means a simpler process and basically no negotiation time.

In general, the US feels more founder friendly than Europe, specifically when it comes to valuations and legal terms. It’s possible to raise a lot more money on convertible notes here. It’s also much more expensive to do business here so there are always two sides to each coin.

What is your biggest learning (so far) as a founder?

It is all about the team. Having the right people around you basically makes all the difference. I spend a lot of time making sure the team is happy and aligned. I’ve learned that team focus and happiness should be my major concern as a CEO. Nowadays it is accepted that it is ok to have technical debt in the beginning. It probably ok to have marketing debt in the beginning as startup. The one thing you can’t afford as a startup is emotional debt. If you let issues accumulate very quickly it becomes impossible to move forward. As long as we stick together, nothing will stop us.

Tell a story about a challenge you faced and overcame.

One of the goals during Y Combinator is to grow 10% a week at least. It is very hard to do that 12 weeks in a row. If you are able you get an exponential curve of growth. One week were falling behind on our weekly revenue goal and we needed to become creative pretty fast. The whole team brainstormed about what could we do to create revenue for Unbabel and we decided to try a hack.

Every member of the team enrolled on Odesk as independent translators and we applied to translation jobs by submitting Unbabel as a translator. We ended up getting a customer that wanted translations from Arabic to English. The problem was that we couldn’t handle Arabic characters yet in the platform so we created a google doc, asked our translators to translate on google docs and managed to meet our target and then some. It was a very intense couple of days and we did it in some pretty non-scalable ways, but it worked. Most startups try to do things that scale from the start. In fact that is the definition of a Startup, a scalable business. The little secret, which they drill into you at Y Combinator, is that you should be doing non-scalable things in the beginning. Early growth is a manual thing and that is what enables you to scale the right things at the right time.

Where do you see Unbabel in 5 years?

We will be the de facto human quality translation engine of the web. Millions of people will be using us, many of them unknowingly because our translation will be so embedded in each process it will have become invisible. We’ll be a large company, with a strong research component, where people are proud to work.

What books (or other sources, methodologies, philosophies) have been influential in how you approach running Unbabel?

Pitch Anything by Oren Klaff, was a good recent one. We follow the Lean Startup methods, in particular, we’re big on pretotyping (Alberto Savoia).

What are you currently looking for (partners, employees, funding, other things etc)?

We are a young company that is growing fast, so we are pretty much looking for all of them. The thing we focus on every day is growing customers and translators.

Our customers can be startups or large online companies (mostly), who need to translate from customer service emails, to their whole website content.

Our translators can be anyone who speaks two languages and wants to be a part of making the world a better place while earning some money making quick translations. We have more than 2.600 people in our community, but need many more in different language pairs, such as German and Chinese that have high demand.

You can reach out to the Unbabel team on Twitter @theunbabel.

[startupletters]

Making travel in Europe a breeze - GoEuro

In World of Startups this week we meet Naren Shaam, the founder of Berlin-based GoEuro. He is on a mission to solve the mess that is travel booking and planning when traveling across Europe. To do this GoEuro gives you a unified search for train, bus and flights between cities, towns and villages in a steadily increasing number of European countries.

When Naren first started working on the idea, people would tell him how crazy he was: “They told me that working with large corporations is difficult, getting contracts is hard and building large-scale technology will be expensive. I’m lucky to have worked with amazing partners and people who keep pushing the status quo every day.”

And indeed, with 45 team members from 16 nations, $4 million in funding from Hasso Platter Ventures & Battery Ventures and a few million more from Lakestar Ventures, it is hard to argue that he has failed. Especially considering that they started out barely two years ago.

Tell the story of how GoEuro got started. What is your next milestones and vision for the future?

I was trying to plan a four-month backpacking trip across Europe after University. I couldn’t believe how complicated it was to search on so many different websites to find whether it was best to travel by train, or if there might be a bus or even a low-cost flight. And all the travel sites focused on the large cities with airports - not many of the smaller places that I wanted to go to. So I decided to start GoEuro to solve the problem.

The vision is clear - to be the single place to come to find to the best information and prices when planning any travel across Europe. This year we will grow to be in seven countries and add many new travel partners.

Talk a bit about advantages or challenges faced by startups in Berlin or in your industry?

The advantages are that by being in travel we are playing in a mature and big market. We have lots of room to grow big and there is a lot of room for many players to innovate. Our challenges are also that its a big legacy market and getting government rail and dispersed bus market to build a superior technical product with you can be tough sometimes and just takes investment and time.

What is your biggest learning (so far) as a founder?

Learning how to scale the organization and building a great team is extremely important as the startup grows. But keeping an end vision in sight everyday and pushing yourself more when you think you are working too hard is going to make or break your startup

What have you read lately that help guide your decisions as CEO?

No time to read! But seriously, spending time, particularly at the weekend, to read key industry thought leaders helps me a lot.

What are you currently looking for (partners, employees, funding, other things etc)?

We’re fortunate right now to be well funded and have some great names supporting us. We are hiring, and believe that you should always be looking for people who share the vision and can add to our company.

We are in the process of integrating new partners, and have a pipeline of work in adding many more in the coming months. It’s a really exciting time for us - we know we’ve got tons of work ahead, but we’re in a great position to succeed.

[startupletters]

Be My Eyes - Lend Your Eyes to the Blind

This week we’re meeting Thelle Kristensen, co-founder and CEO of Be My Eyes, an app providing crowd sourced help for the blind using video chat. After receiving 1.8 million DKK ($330 000) funding from the Velux Foundation last year, their distributed team (across Denmark) of 5 is now working hard to get the final iOS app ready.

Tell the story of how Be My Eyes got started. What are your next milestones and vision for the future?

Hans Jørgen Wiberg, being visually impaired himself, got the idea about a video service for the blind utilizing the great cameras in smartphones. He pitched it at StartUp Weekend Aarhus in 2012, which is where I met him for the first time. We were really passionate about the idea of a network helping the blind. Although we didn’t see a big business opportunity, the idea was too good to just let go completely. We kept in touch with regular Skype meetings with everyone chipping in voluntarily with the skills they had. We made a simple site about the concept, making prototypes to spread the idea and seeking funding.

In the summer of 2013 the Velux Foundations noticed our efforts, and they decided to back the project. Since the fall our distributed team of 5 have been able to put more energy into the project. We’re now beta testing with blind people in Denmark hoping to launch on iOS in the spring, which is the next big step. The big vision is being able to provide help for the blind ‘at the touch of a button’ from a global corps of volunteers.

Talk a bit about advantages or challenges faced by startups in your industry?

It’s always hard to realize an idea that doesn’t have a lot of immediate business value, but can provide a lot social value. I think it’s very positive that more and more services in the space of do-good initiatives comes from the people on the ground - people who have themselves experienced the problems that they are trying to solve. But it’s very challenging to raise funds for such projects. Here crowd funding has made a big difference, and it also provided some of the initial funds to Be My Eyes and proved to the foundation that funded us that people were genuinely interested in the project.

What is your biggest learning (so far) as a founder?

Vision provides a direction, money can make some things easier, but it’s all about the team. It’s a cliché, but very true!

Tell a story about a challenge you faced and overcame (somewhat related to BME or other ventures).

The initial plan in the case we attracted funding was that our first iOS developer should be able to go full time on the project, and I go part-time on the marketing side of things. At the time when we had the funding in place he had other plans - he was having a baby and pursuing another job. We had counted on him joining, and his change of plans had us a bit shook up. Not knowing many developers we had talks with a big app development company, but ultimately decided to have another iOS engineer to join the team and have been very happy about that decision.

What are you currently looking for (partners, employees, funding, other things etc)?

Right now we have the team in place and got funding to make it happen - tips on app launches or partnership proposals are appreciated.

Be My Eyes and it’s founders can be reached on Twitter @bemyeyes, @thellek, @hjwiberg, @simonbs, @khebbie.

[startupletters]

The Currency

Quick facts: Launched in 2014. One man team. Based in Lisbon, Portugal. Bootstrapped

In this week's interview, we meet Pedro Pinto from Portugal. He is the creator of The Currency, a social news website for cryptocurrencies (such as Bitcoin, Litecoin, and so on) and the future of money.

Tell the story of how The Currency got started. What is your next milestones and vision for the future?

I’ve been following the evolution of the cryptocurrency ecosystem for the last year, and I saw a lot of people suggesting that there should be created a social news website focused on cryptocurrencies. So I decided to give it a shot and build The Currency.

My goal is to see The Currency become the best place to stay on top about what’s happening in the cryptocurrency world.

Talk a bit about advantages and challenges faced by startups in Portugal?

Portugal is an amazing place to live, and the cost of living is low compared with the most part of the places in Europe and United States, so it’s a great place for people who want to bootstrap a startup. And there are a lot of talented people creating interesting products. But the ecosystem is really small compared with other cities like Berlin or London, so if someone wants to join a startup is difficult because there aren’t so many job opportunities.

The main problem is that due to the economic crisis in Portugal the access to funding is very scarce. So the margin of error is really small, it is difficult to attract the top talent and to grow the team. Usually the only way to survive is to stay small or look for funding outside of Portugal. For example, in the last 2-3 years some Portuguese startups received funding from Seedcamp, which is a great signal that we have talented people here pushing in the right direction.

What is your biggest learning (so far) as a founder?

My biggest learning so far is that is very easy to fall in love with an idea, so don’t let it crystalize in your head. It’s crucial to test your assumptions as soon as possible and get early feedback.

Have you faced any challenges yet, and how did you overcome them?

A year ago I was looking for a technical partner to test some ideas that I had, but it’s really hard to find the Right One. Probably is more easy to find the love of your life. So I decided to learn to code in order to be able to prototype my ideas. These last months focused on learning to code were extremely challenging and this journey gave me a new perspective. I’m far from a pro, but now I’m able to build some of my ideas and I’m learning valuable skills.

What books have been influential in how you approach running The Currency?

Here there are some books that I love: “Rework” and “Getting Real” by the 37signals team, “4 Hour Work Week” by Timothy Ferriss, “Lean Startup” by Eric Ries, “The Design of Business” by Roger Martin. Right now I’m reading “Antifragile” by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, which is completely changing the way how I see the world.

What are you currently looking for (partners, employees, funding, other things etc)?

Right now I’m trying to see if The Currency gains enough traction in order to be able to dedicate 100% of my time to this project.

[startupletters]

Fliplingo

Automatic translation of your tweets using near real-time human translation (Tweet)

Quick facts: Launched in 2014. One man team. Based in Chiang Mai, Thailand (for now). Bootstrapped.

In the third edition of #worldofstartups we meet Matthieu Aussaguel, the founder of Fliplingo. He is French born, but considers himself a Citizen of the World. To launch Fliplingo he decided to leave the European tech hotspot Berlin and relocate to Chiang Mai in Thailand, an area favored by many digital nomads.

Tell the story of how Fliplingo started. What is your vision for the future?

When I moved to Berlin last year, I really wanted to take part of what was happening there, listen to local bands, buy from local brands and get to know local startups. I thought that even if I couldn't speak German, I would be able to communicate online directly with them on Twitter or Facebook. But that proved to be a big failure due to language barrier. As a non German speaker, I couldn't join the conversation most of the time.

When I met some of the Twitter accounts owners who did reply to me in my language, I realized that they were also frustrated because they were missing opportunities just like myself.

My ultimate goal is to help people getting content translated the easiest way you can think of. We have access to such amazing communication tools these days but it's still a painful and unreliable process to overcome the language barrier.

Talk a bit about advantages or challenges faced by startups in Thailand. And why did you relocate to Chiang Mai vs staying in the "startup hotspot" Berlin?

Launching a startup from Chiang Mai was scary. I feel like I'm the only startup guy in town. But moving here was still the best decision I've ever made mainly because I've increased my productivity a lot. I can live a comfortable life, leave all frustrations aside and focus on my work. Chiang Mai is a place where English is not always an option to communicate and you've got to find other solutions. I've met very interesting people here who are passionate about languages and every time I meet them, I get inspired. I could have stayed in Berlin but there were just too many distractions that I couldn't focus on the core of my product. All my light bulb moments happened here, when talking to people or just riding my motorcycle around town. I don't think being a tech hub helps until you need to grow.

That being said, I'm planning to go back to Berlin for a longer time once I find product market/fit. Berlin is definitely a better place to raise capital and build a team. It's also a lovely city.

What is your biggest learning (so far) as a founder?

Building a product takes a really long time. I originally planned to build it in 3 months but it took me 6 months in total and I'm still not entirely satisfied with it. There are so many things you have to think about and manage. I was used to work in teams where every member had a specific role but this time, I had to handle every aspect of a project myself. It is stressful and tough sometimes but also very rewarding. I've learned so much as a person from it, I love it!

What are you currently looking for (partners, employees, funding, other things etc)?

I'm currently looking for someone who is good at partnerships, marketing and most importantly someone who is passionate about languages. If the traction keeps growing, I'm also going to need to find a Ruby developer.

To reach out to Matthieu, tweet him @fliplingo or @mattaussaguel.

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This post is part of the #worldofstartups section of Startup Letters, where I feature a new and interesting startup every week. Subscribe to Startup Letters to recieve more like this, plus #goodreads and #resources for entrepreneurs.