Today I attended Madrid ProductHunt as I was curious about Transferwise and about the startup scene in Madrid.
There were in total 4 presentations about the following projects:
Having spent two years living abroad I had heard about Transferwise before and I was very interested in the product and the company itself.
Proud to have @TransferWise in @MadProductHunt w/ @nilanp & @cataflu 💪👏 pic.twitter.com/lNRZ0X8xpx
— Keyvan Akbary (@keyvanakbary) September 21, 2017
Nilan VP of Growth at Transferwise lead the talk along Cata a software developer in the team. The content itself was very interesting, specially due to the parallelism I could establish between their company and mine, Skyscanner:
- Both companies solve a real issue experienced by millions of people around the world.
- Both companies focus their growth strategy on making a great product and increasingly building features around it that help spread the word of mouth.
- Both companies give a great amount of autonomy to their technical teams, including promoting an internal open source policy.
- Both companies started with a really simple product online, Skyscanner founder put an Excel sheet online and Transferwise founders created a Skype chat and later put a simple form.
Alvaro Ortiz introduced Populate, a company building products to make the public data that governments publish more accessible to citizens through visualizations, normalization and tools that enable to query the data in a single place. He also talked about Gobierto a sort of SaaS for the government to enable effective sharing of the government data. Finally, he shared his personal take on what a startup could be, a lifestyle business and not necessarily an organization focused on achieving a big financial return on a venture capital investment.
The other two talks briefly introduced their companies and some of the problems they faced.