These series of guest posts are written by the teams attending the Tetuan Valley Startup School 2013 Spring edition. This post is from the JaMetroTard team, formed by Clément Arnaud.

With this post, I will try to give you an overview about the French Startup Ecosystem.

I will go through 5 examples for each category to illustrate:

1) The current context

2) Trendings of startups

3) Incubators

4) Investors (BAs, Super-Angels, VCs…)

Everything written here is just how I see and feel about the current ecosystem in France and especially in Paris.

Previously, I worked as a trainee at QuantumWave Capital, a boutique investment bank specializing in the mobile internet.

The CEO, Robert Marcus, is the author of the book The Fifth Wave: A Strategic Vision for Mobile Internet Innovation, Investment and Return.

I had the opportunity to get to know more about the French Startup scene.

Current context

According to a study about the best startup ecosystems, Paris is ranked 11th in the world, far behind Silicon Valley. While in Europe, Paris is ranked second, after London. Major barriers identified in France were: the lack of investment and tax incentives.

What about the French Startup?

Jolicloud: The new computing platform built around your life in the cloud
Captain Dash: Using big data we’re shaking up the marketing world. CaptainDash is a Saas platform that produces interactive and visual graphics.
Withings: Helps you turn on your well-being with our smart products and apps. Empowering you to take more care of yourself and your loved ones.
Allmyapps: App Store for PC: download and install Windows apps, discover our best recommendations, save and update all your software online.

Syllabs: Technological startup specialized in semantic solutions for the Web.

Finally, I would add Pricing Assistant, who just won the Startup Competition at LeWeb London: The company monitors online retailers’ rivals, sending alerts when prices change and allowing them to adjust their prices automatically in order to stay competitive.

Incubators/Accelerators

Le Camping: A unique six-month Program. 3 months of acceleration going from an idea to demo, 3 months of growth making the demo into a real business

L’Accélérateur: The French Y-Combinator! (At least they try)

Founder Institute: The World’s Largest Startup Accelerator, with a mission to “Globalize Silicon Valley” and help founders build enduring technology

50 Partners: French Accelerator funded by 50 successful entrepreneurs dedicated to support the selected Startups.

And a new one,The Family: Accelerator, whose mission is to support early stage startups from [0] to [1] through education & unfair advantages.

Investors

To introduce this part, I would like to quote LIAM Boogar From Rude Baguette : Unlike the Silicon Valley, in Paris, you don’t run into a VC on the street, which means it’s hard to make headway when raising a round for your startup.

We have in France, some famous BAs like Marc Simoncini (Ex-CEO of Meetic, Jaina Capital), Jacques Antoine Granjon (Vente Privée)or Xavier Niel (Iliad, Free).

Kima Venture with Xavier Niel and Jeremie Berebie. In their portfolio, we can find great startups like Kwaga, Freshplanet or iAdvize.
They also invested in Sparrow acquired by Google in July 2012.

Partech International: Headquartered in Paris, with offices in San Franscico and Berlin. They have been one of the first investors in Dailymotion.

Serena and Otium Capital, who invested in the Famous “La Fourchette“, “El Tenedor” for the spanish market.

Finally, Isai, a group a 70 entrepreneurs. They invested, for instance, in Blablacar who connects drivers with empty seats and people travelling the same way.

Conclusion

Paris is obviously a good choice and has a good ecosystem. Quite expensive for a startup, but the business oportunities are probably worth it.

More…

if you want to know more about the French Startup ecosystem, you can follow Rude Baguette on Twitter (in English) and check it you Techlist Paris.

DISCLAMER: This is just my 2 cents about the French Startup environment, there is nothing exhaustive.

These series of guest posts are written by the teams attending the Tetuan Valley Startup School 2013 Spring edition. This post is from the Hamlet-GO team, formed by Lorena Martí, Jose Luis Hidalgo and Ernesto Martínez.

The beginning of a project is something hard. You start with this incredible idea in your mind and you are just thinking about how to make it come true. If you are more in the technical world there are many questions that come to your mind in terms of programming language you are going to use, the servers and bandwidth that you will need and this kind of problems that, in fact, are not easily solved in early stages of the project.

You can think of approaches to guess how your system and application will be and how they will behave, but none of these will be as good as the firsts you’ll get once you measure them in the real world.

Of course we can see the example in the techie world but, what about the interface design? The interface is, like any other part of the problem, a subject of study and a fact of the final success of an application. We have to face a few problems in the design of a user interface.

First of all, we have to think of the functionality. It’s easy to say but as far as you haven’t got a real prototype of the different screens of your application, you won’t have a real thought of what you need. With that we mean the controls you need to fulfil the whole functionality of your product. So, although the final objective of the software is quite clear for you, you may not be aware of how many different screens, buttons and information fields you need to accomplish that. And it is not a matter of your functionality what you have to keep in mind, there is also the general purpose functionality that nowadays everyone expecting to find in your software: going forth and back with navigation buttons, modal windows asking if you are sure to do several actions and so on.

Closely related to it, you have a finite space so, until you are not sure of the amount of items you need to paint on the different screens, you won’t be able to dispose them in the right way. In fact, we have the four screens paradigm that make us think different versions of the same window depending on the device that we are accessing from: cell phone, tablet, computer or television (these are the main sizes of the paradigm).

Finally you have to keep in mind the amount of time that takes a user to accomplish one task. Usually, the number of screens, information needed and clicks will be the key for success. That is so important that there are a bunch of good practises in web developing called Three-click rule where there’s a maximum number of clicks that shouldn’t be exceeded to reach every part of the site. That idea can be applied to every interface.

So at the end you have to keep a balance with the amount of windows, the amount of visible controls in every window and your functionality.

To tackle this problem we have to include as part of the design what is called mockups. This mockups are just a collection of fake windows in which you have to draw the containers of information and the controls and also, the connection between them so, although there’s no code behind that, you can simulate the navigation workflow. Only when you have all the screens and their size you can think of a proper layout for them and count the number of clicks to reach the needed functionality. Is in this part of the software design when you literally see that, having three buttons or links in a menu seems quite fine everywhere, but a ten button bar displayed all the time will take half of the screen, which is crazy especially if your screen is not a big one.

Mockups are usually the first step and they are more focused on functionality but it is a former step to design because it can help taking design decisions of the front end. For instance, you can decide if certain elements will be visible all the time, they will be in scrolled/rolled menus or they will be in popup windows.

Reworking on that balance of the number of screens and their items in your application will make a great program out of a normal one. At the end, it all reverts in a better user experience. We all know that successful webs and apps are these that can make what you want in less steps. So if you want a good software user interface, follow this basic rule: sketch it and keep it simple.

References:

- Multi-screen world reference: http://xquire.com/designing-for-the-new-multi-screen-world-infographic/

- Three-click rule: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-click_rule

- Mockup: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mockup#Software_Engineering

- Mockup samples:

(1) http://blog.gbanga.com/2011/07/balsamiq-oil-for-your-ui-salad/

(2) http://docs.moodle.org/dev/Mobile_app

(3) http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2009/05/13/shameless-self-promotion/

These series of guest posts are written by the teams attending the Tetuan Valley Startup School 2013 Spring edition. This post is from the CookRocket team, formed by Carlos Zoido and Javier García Sogo

According to lean methodology a startup is an organization designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model. As the primary objective for a startup is to validate its hypotheses, it’s imperative to get things working as soon as possible to reach their potential customers, outline the problem and focus on the solutions.

In your race against time it’s very important to have the right tools to optimize your work, be able to iterate with agility and measure the results in a reliable way. Even if you are a small team (as we are) there are several tools that can save you lots of time. You’ll hear about thousands of resources that can help you in your entrepreneurship adventure but here we’ll talk about the ones that have been more helpful to us:

Bitbucket
Always maintain a functional version. If you are working in software development a repository is mandatory not only to store your application’s versions but to make all the team work on the same source code database. Bitbucket has provided to us great free tools to host our source code and track all the issues that appear.

Google Drive
Write your documentation in a dynamic way. We have used Google Drive not only to store all the documentation about the project that we write collaboratively but to make the slides for Tetuan Valley itself. It’s great to work in documents when the team is working in different operating systems!

Flurry
Start measuring from the beginning. One of the most important things that we have learned in Tetuan Valley is this mantra: measure, measure, measure… Flurry helps you not only tracking the behaviour of the users with your mobile application but giving you the tools to measure your user acquisition efforts as well.

Heroku
From the very beginning you’ll want to deploy your idea on the Internet, and maybe it becomes successful and you start acquiring users and customers and interactions; at that moment a really scalable deployment platform as Heroku can save your business. With just a couple of clicks you will be able to jump from a basic installation to a fully distributed application prepared for heavy traffic loads.

MailChimp
Almost any application may interact with its users through mail. MailChimp can save you a lot of headaches becoming your free online mail service until you reach a critical mass and can afford one of your own. This awesome service also offers you much more than just a mail server: create lists, build campaigns, track results,…

We hope you will find this recipe as delicious as we have. Bon apetit!

Tetuan Valley Startup School’s 8th edition officially came to an end. The 6 week program provides budding entrepreneurs with valuable knowledge to develop their ideas into real businesses. The close was marked by a Demo Day that illustrated the valuable knowledge teams learned while participating in the program.

When?

This past Wednesday, May 22, 2013, marked itself as a milestone for 9 new statups.

What?

The 8th Edition of Tetuan Valley’s six week program had come to an end. Giving us another Demo Day to put in the books.

Where?

Madrid Emprende’s Vivero en Carabanchal provided the location for the Demo Day, giving the teams a fresh breath of entrepreneurial spirit.

Who?

The teams, press, investors, mentors (in their black shirts), and friendly faces filled the room while the techies set up all their nifty gadgets and the presenters shook off last minute anxiety.

For the entrepreneurs this moment marked the end of a 6 week journey. During this time, they took simple ideas and turned them into concrete business models pitching, testing, and changing all along the way.

Why?

Because the world deserves to know about these ideas!

The presenters and teams did a great job pitching their ideas and wowing the crowd with protoypes.

Their ideas are as follows:

Planterbot, a planter box that can be controlled from anywhere in the world with the app/internet platform, presented by Angel Pasamontes.

CookRocket, an recipe platform that pulls all the best recipes from blogs around the sphere in on place and provides users with more information, was introduced by Javi.

Rollcard, an app that puts a new spin on the business card by making them electronic, meaning your information is always up to date, pitched by Javier Olaguibel.

Printie.es, an online marketplace for 3D printing designs, exhibited by Carlos Edo.

JaMetroTard, an app that informs users about metro delays, shown by Clément.

BasketEditor, an application that allows coaches to map out plays. Alberto Hdez displayed the add-on idea of creating a content store to give coaches easy access to plays, skills, and drills to help their teams succeed.

Let’s Study, a platform that matches businesses with the best free coding website for their project, that then provides statistics for employers on the their employees progress, pitched by Isreal Gutiérrez.

HamletGO, a tool that aids multimedia projects through organizational facility, presented by Ernesto.

Psidium, a platform that saves lawyers time by helping them organize and update clients on the status of their case, shown by Francisco Caraballo.

A huge round of applause at the end congratulated all the teams on the progress they made with the Tetuan Valley School. The graduates were then rewarded for their hard work over the past 6 weeks with the customary orange Alumni T-Shirt.

What’s Next?

Now that the alumni have completed the course they will continue to grow and scale their businesses. While the school may be over, Tetuan Valley is always there for its alumni and will offer them continued help an guidance along they way with its extensive alumni group. The Valley will also aid in the next 6 months by offering the startups free office space in the Vivero Carabanchal.

Digital Fabbing, more than prototyping.

These series of guest posts are written by the teams attending the Tetuan Valley Startup School 2013 spring edition (TVSS8). This post is from the team, formed by Angel Pasamontes.

Up until a short while ago rapid prototyping machines were used almost industry wide to make that its name says: prototypes. But nowadays low cost CNC machines and 3D printers like RepRap open a new way to make viable products.

This has been possible, in part, because of the rising of open source hardware developing platforms such as Arduino, which is a crucial piece at the RepRap’s project. At the same time Arduino’s programming language is based on Wiring which is also based on Processing. I expose this to point out the connection between different open source projects, from software to hardware.

Now it is possible to create a wide variety of products, such as those you can find in sites like Thingiverse, where most models are aimed to exist through a filament 3D printer. Also it’s easy to find some CNC cutting machine stuff to cut on. Most of these models have a poor design or its application is too specific or limited. But also there are many examples of quality models with high functionality, and specificity does not have to be a bad thing, as is the same as say customization.

Apart from the normative and legal considerations, digital fabbing processes can bring quality products, but it’s necessary to design new products to validate the digital fabbing techniques as viable forms of production, at least as a new kind of high tech arts and crafts.

The variety of products depends on design effort but also on the variety of materials. Now cheap 3D printers are limited to print three kind of fuse plastic: ABS, PLA and nylon and there is some progress on clay printing.

Professional sinter printers can make models with more materials, like metal. But all of them need specific and expensive materials, with a difference on price that goes from 0,02€ for cubic centimeter on RepRaps to 2€ on Zcorps, not to mention the price on metal.

At the moment, the best option to use different materials than clay or plastic is to use CNC cutting machines, like laser CNC cutters, expensive but precise, or CNC router machines, cheaper and not so precise (but don’t need CO2). It’s possible to cut wood, sheets of metal, stone, plastic, fabric, etc.

The rate of production of units per hour is lower than classical industrial methods, but supposedly uses less energy to do the same amount. Also there are things that classical, even artisan methods can’t or almost can’t do, such as complex forms with objects inside.

With this the possibilities are limited to imagination and market viability (and don’t forget legal and regulatory framework).

The products that can be developed and made with this technology and philosophy have some general (but not sacred) features:

Easy esthetic customization of the product, at pre and post production.

The printing of a new model doesn’t imply make new molds, and the only difficulty is to design it.

Users can modify and adapt easily the product to their needs.

Users can contribute directly to the improvement of the product.

Lots of its parts are standard or printable and are easily reusable, repairable and replaceable.

All these characteristics have success on existing open source products, as mentioned Arduino or Reprap, but also the recent Raspberry mega low cost PC. Does this success continue to the second generation of products? Time will say, but every day there are more and more projects going in that direction, and crowd-funding sites prove that it is happening. Some people would think “well, if it’s printable there is no business”, but not everybody wants to make things on their own, because lack of time or whatever.

For all these reasons and the lack of viable examples, this emerging world brings a perfect opportunity to create a new and amazing way to make new products.

www.wikipedia.org

www.reprap.org

www.thingiverse.com

www.raspberrypi.org

These series of guest posts are written by the teams attending the Tetuan Valley Startup School 2013 Spring edition. This post is from the Rollcard team, formed by Javier Olaguibel and Guillermo Aguirre de Cárcer.

The problem interview is the first step you should take in order to know if what you are trying to solve is something marketable or just a pain in your own neck, and if the risks (market, product and client) make your idea impossible to fulfill. Our experience with these interviews has shown that there is something that makes them even more important: the fact that it’s the first contact you have with potential clients.

For the first interview you are almost certainly going to know someone who you can interview, or if not, one of your friends or family members will know and give you the contact. It’s important in this interview to connect with the other person so that he doesn’t feel like you’re wasting his time. After the meeting he can put you in touch with colleagues of his (more potential clients for you to interview). From what we’ve seen, the easiest way to get someone to sit down in a meeting with you is when you call him on behalf of someone he already knows; it’s like having a certificate that says “what I have to say may be interesting for you.”

When we started doing these interviews, we tended to make very closed questions which basically leads the people to just end up telling you what you want them to tell you, which isn’t so useful. It’s very important to understand that this is not an interview to talk about yourself and your product (at least not until the very end of the interview), it has to be about the person you are interviewing and his problems. People love to talk about what they do and the problems they have doing it, so take advantage of that.

What has worked best for us is to take a list of things that we want to know, but ask them as open questions or include them casually in the discussion, and then… LISTEN. Let them talk and pay as much attention as you can to things like how they currently solve that problem, which vocabulary they use to talk about it, how do they define your product, possible suggestions they have, etc. From these conversations you can extract how to get to them (your channel), which words you have to use to get their attention (Unique Value Proposition and High Level Concept), who your real competitors are, and much more.

At the end, if you succeed in making the interviewee feel like he has contributed to the result of the product he will be much more interested in becoming a real client once you’ve hit the market. Finish the meeting asking permission to call him back once you’ve finished the product to meet again and show him a real demo. If he agrees it means you have at least gotten his attention, which is the first step towards selling, all while validating your business model in the real world.

Another edition of Tetuan Valley is coming to a close, so its time to present our (almost) graduates and teams. Here they are! Also, don’t forget to check them out at Demo Day.

Alumni:

Projects:

These series of guest posts are written by the teams attending the Tetuan Valley Startup School 2013 Spring edition. This post is from the Printie.es team, formed by Daniel López and Carlos Edo.

Are you a web developer without design or front-end skills? Do you want to make a website prototype in a fast and easy way? Well, thank the guys at Twitter because they have the right solution for you.

Twitter Bootstrap is a responsive grid-based front-end framework. Made by nerds, for nerds. To help them do awesome stuff on the web. In order to get it working just need to include the CSS and Javascript files to your HTML and start to use the specific classes for buttons, tables, navigation bars, etc. One of the main and most useful features is the 12-column responsive grid that makes it really easy to define the layout of your site.

It revolutionises website wireframing in the same way 3D printing is improving hardware prototyping.

Created by @mdo(Mark Otto, designer) and @fat(Jacob, engineer) at Twitter. It is built with LESS for an easy customization and works in every “modern” internet browser (even IE!) as well as on smartphones and tablets.

Of course Bootstrap isn’t the only one available, Foundation or Less Framework could also be good choices. But none of them have as many options, addons or themes as Bootstrap. And, what’s most important the great community that keeps improving them and adding new ones.

Bootstrap Resources

Out of the huge amount of resources available for Bootstrap I’m going to show you here the ones that I found to be more useful.

Bootswatch: Free and fine-looking themes for Bootstrap. As easy as changing the CSS default file for the themed one.
Bootstractor: Templates for common uses. Landing, blog, 404, contact…
Bootstrap Buttons: CSS generator to create beautiful and custom buttons. Just copy the code into your CSS file and use the “btn-custom” class to give a button your custom look.
wysihtml5: WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) text editor.
Bootstrap Form Helpers: Anything you may need for your forms, specially for register forms. Country, phone, language, currency…
MagicSuggest: Suggests and tags combo for searches. Absolutely awesome.
Messenger: Beautiful and highly customizable alert plugin. Multiple locations and themes.
Twitter Bootstrap Tutorial: Finally, a great tutorial to fine tune your Bootstrap.

If you feel this isn’t enough for you, for extra resources you can go to The Big Badass List or run a google search for something more specific.

I hope you find this useful, it really has been for us. Thanks to Twitter Bootstrap we could cut a lot of time in front-end development and it really looks much better than anything we could have come up with. Maybe if you have a qualified designer in your team you could rely on him/her for the final website, but it would still help you to try new layouts much faster than other options, and it looks much better too!
P.S: No, we didn’t get paid to promote Bootstrap, we just love it so much!

These series of guest posts are written by the teams attending the Tetuan Valley Startup School 2013 Spring edition. This post is from the Let’s Study team, formed by Israel Gutiérrez and David Oñoro.

As Richard Felder so brilliantly introduced in his remarkable articles about engineering education, learning is not listening to the teacher speak in a crowded classroom, in silence, trying not to let your imagination fly in another direction, focusing on every aspect of the argument. Learning happens when you get your hands dirty: facing a problem, trying to solve it, discussing with your peers, struggling to get a solution or at least a hint that drives you there. What I try to define is simple: you do learn something by practicing just the very thing you’re trying to learn. I want you to translate this learning-by-doing metaphor to the entrepreneurship field. Do you think it fits? I really think so. At the end of this article you can tell if you’re of the same opinion.

I am pretty sure you are familiar with entrepreneurship conveying a learning process. As a startup founder there’s a business model you’re trying to find and refine in an iterative process. You are not looking for just any business model out there, but a unique one, a model that works, a scalable model. Facing a so complicated venture, you are likely to need complex and sophisticated tools that help you test your business hypothesis and continue to the next step. There are a great variety of them: methodologies like customer development, lean startup philosophy, the empathy map to understand your customer, visual tools like the business model canvas or tons of literature about metrics to measure your business health or even vanity. They are all really phenomenal tools that will help you think deep in your business, plan and design your strategy, provide you with a list a subsequent steps to follow.

But if you just stick with that it’s like listening to the teacher in the classroom: you may think you are learning a lot, developing your business, planning and measuring. But the point is that you have to get your hands dirty, and do things. At some point, keep reading and applying tools and methodologies, being great for your personal learning, is preventing you to do things and act upon your business objectives. It’s your business the one that has to learn. And, similarly to Mr. Felder’s concerns, you have to do things: talk to your customers, build your product, measure how it goes and learn in the process. But don’t get stuck in the tools and methodologies, just do stuff, push forward. It’s just you the one who is going to achieve victory or failure. Failure most likely. But keep learning by doing; doing things you feel you have to do to achieve your goals, since sometimes we are wasting our time on too much planning and designing.

Hopefully you may have caught the idea I am trying to transmit. Please, do not think I am commanding you to do everything without planning and using no tools blindly. I am just suggesting that, sometimes, it is better to act over trying to learn something from the other’s experience. And sometimes you may feel you are doing it the wrong way, and you will be actually be doing things catastrophically bad. But most likely you’ll realize of your mistakes and turn around. You may fail, but you will keep learning in any way.

So, what do you feel about learning by doing? Should it be transferable to building a startup by pushing, by imposing your own will? I hope you keep learning, and keep doing, and keep pushing, and keep struggling. And may, just maybe, the force be with you.

These series of guest posts are written by the teams attending the Tetuan Valley Startup School 2013 Spring edition. This post is from the BasketEditor team, formed by Raúl Jimenez and Alberto Hernández.

In Basket Editor we work for basketball coaches. You know, being a coach is similar being an entrepreneur, you start a new adventure every season, and your team is your start up. Your will is to make it grow as quickly as possible and as much as you can, because you’re going to need wins to stay alive. So every summer you get an idea of what are you looking for with your team, and you start building.

First you try to find the right guys to make your idea happen. They will be your partners. You need to trust them, and you want them to have their roles clear. You won’t have a techie, a marketing guy etc, but rebounders, defenders, hopefully big time scorers…

There will be investors, and they’ll want to see something good or otherwise they’ll say good bye. Just like in a startup, the fools, family and friends credit won’t be enough to reach your goals. The sponsors want their money to be worth spending and the fans pay their tickets every game… expecting a good show. What if you coach kids? You gotta be ready to face some of the toughest investors you’ll ever face, their parents! They trust you with their sons and daughters, so you better be careful.

At the same time fans are your customers, and even if some of them are loyal no matter what happens on the court, with others you will go through all the acquisition process and you’d better work hard to keep them as long as you can.

You get used to pitching, also, as quite often you need to sell your stuff, to your players, to the management, to the fans, to the journalists… Are you afraid of an “elevator pitch”? Try explaining some of your team’s fans why did you lose in a rivalry game…

Like in sports, in the start up world there are so many experts who will give you their advice. They know your business, they’ve been there before right? But it is not so easy to find out whose ideas are right. Sometimes those ideas will be extremely valuable, but sometimes will be contradictory and you’ll have to decide if you’re going to listen or not.

My coaching experience tells me that in case of doubt, you have to believe in your own idea, tell everyone else to stop talking, and just do your thing. There’s no worse feeling than failing with other’s ideas. And if you fall following your gut, well, you will just stand up and try again. They say it’s not about how hard you can hit but how hard you can get hit, right? I think coaches and entrepreneurs can share that saying… Sometimes you just have to follow our admired Jason Fried: “Don’t believe them. That world may be real for them, but it doesn’t mean you have to live in it”