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Partnerships: exploring new

features and business models


BARCELONA 2015

Product

UX/UI

Marketing

Tech

Wehey

www.wehey.co
Industry

Geolocated messaging
Founders and team

Co-Founded by Pelayo Puerta (CEO); Carlos


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.

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