Gonzalez (CTO) and Jorge A. Soto (Android Developer). With Saul Remis (iOS Developer); Nuria Rodriguez (Art Director)
Smartsea
www.smartport.io Industry
Marina and Yatch club tech and content
Founders and team
Co-founded by Pau Casas Griera (CEO) and
Pablo Valdeolmillos (Head of products / CTO). With: Laia Tutzo (COO); Andreina Sard (mobile engineer); Marc Hervera (lead iOS Dev); Paola Terzi (UX/UI) Incubator
Bemobile Lab
This is a case study of two startups that were
on different industries, and facing apparently unrelated business and technical challenges. A strategic analysis brought a new perspective for their actions and more importantly a new perspective on which kind of partnership strategies they could rely upon. The first one, Wehey, created a geolocated messaging app. They were looking for new ways to offer their services to businesses in order to generate revenue. The second one, Smartsea, had created the Smartport app a interactive guide on marinas and yacht clubs and they were exploring how to create content and information for their platform to engage their users.
What were they focusing on prior to Google
Launchpad? Before the Launchpad program, the two startups were focusing on the following challenges:
Further inspiration on partnerships
Why Key partnerships are as important as
cash School for startups \\ Get expertise without spending cash or giving out equity. Corporate Partnerships Matter Less Thanks to APIs Harvard Business Review \\ Why APIs provide most benefits of partnerships without much of the drawbacks. Slack is killing email The Verge \\ How a simple chat app changed corporate communications by becoming a neutral integrations platform for every business app and service. How Corporate Partnerships Accelerate B r e a k t h r o u g h Te c h n o l o g i e s - M I T Technology Review - Video roundtable on how Unilever innovates. In the land of P2P travel tours, partnerships could be key to Trip4reals success Novobrief Investing on long term rewards through key partnerships.
Wehey: in order to keep their geolocalized
messaging service free for their users, they wanted to create paid services for businesses. The way they were testing this before Google Launchpad was by creating sponsored messaging channels. Despite this being a quite straightforward business model, scaling it might prove difficult. Smartsea: Within their mission of bringing smart technology to marinas, one of the main challenges they were focused on right before the start of Launchpad was connecting marinas with their visitors, providing them with useful information about the marinas to make their experience more pleasant. The solution they had come up to provide such solution before Google Launchpad was to create themselves all the content with relevant information about each marina and their services, which despite being very useful for users, could become hard to scale and maintain. What feedback did they receive from mentors? In trying to articulate their content generation strategy, Smartsea received an interesting piece of advice. Both Franc Carreras and Tommaso Canonici suggested that instead of Smartsea being in charge of gathering all information and putting out content about each marina, that they enabled their users in generating the content and providing the support themselves, in a P2P fashion. However, the defining part in which Franc, Tommaso and Edu Forte concurred was that instead of Smartsea developing all the technology to support these services for their app, that they should talk to Wehey in somehow implementing their Geolocalized messaging services onto the Smartport app.
On the other hand, When Smartsea
approached Wehey and asked to collaborate with them in integrating Wehey onto the Smarport app, a technical question was raised as for which was the best way they could provide such services. Wehey had not developed its product with integrations in mind, but while this could cause some technical challenges, it soon proved to be the way forward. What did they discover during Google Launchpad? Relying on other companies services, technologies and expertise is a great way to being able to focus on what really defines a company and its core business. Successful businesses tend to be outstanding at finding out which parts not to do themselves, and finding the right partner to do it. However, finding the right organizations to rely upon is far from simple. Traditional business alliances can sometimes be successful for decades, but getting there requires a lot of work and often even luck. Fa c to r s s u c h a s m a k i n g s u re b o t h companies have similar interests and expect similar outcomes, both in the short as well as the long term are very inuential. Finding the right partner is not only a matter of having complementary technology, but also having complementary business models and corporate visions. What is their new focus or action plan following Google Launchpad? Google Launchpad brought inspiration for both Smartseas and Weheys action plan: Wehey found that additional to their own app, providing their services as a backend tool allowed them to monetize the service by empowering other businesses integrate
their geolocated messaging services. This
approach would generate revenue for Wehey by providing concrete services, as well as shifting the challenge of nourishing user communities towards those paying to implement their messaging services. Smartsea big breakthrough was not discovering something totally new, but rather knowing which things to prioritize. On the features side, becoming a user generated content platform and on the business side, exploiting the benefits of partnering for technology. These two approaches mean that their effort could focus on empowering their users community and creating new services, rather than creating both from scratch. How can I use this in my startup? Exploratory partnership An exploratory partnerships is when two or more organizations rely on each others expertise and doing to achieve a common goal, or research a field of common interest. Success or failure depends on many complex factors, but having similar motivations - aligned incentives - is usually a good place to start. Partnerships vs APIs In todays technology ecosystem, providing services through APIs (application Programming Interface) is very common. APIs allow organizations to rely on the work of other organizations without having to negotiate with them complex partnerships agreements. API based partnerships allow for greater exibility, and allows businesses to focus more on their core, by relying on others through their APIs.