7 useful startup lessons learned at Webprendedor

“Chile is f***ing awesome!” the standing crowd repeated in unison. Coined by Fadi Bishara during a highly motivational talk, the phrase soon became the unofficial motto for Webprendedor. The Chilean digital entrepreneurship event culminated with a one-day conference in Santiago on Saturday after traveling all over the country last week, as you can read in our previous story “Why Valdivia, Chile Needed Webprendedor“.

For those who missed the event or are in need of a recap, here are the key lessons you could have learned from the inspirational speakers at Webprendedor.

1) Joining a startup is like falling in love

Britt Selvitelle was one of the first engineers at Twitter, where he worked for five years before leaving the company last month. His talk at Webprendedor was called “Startup Dopamine: Working at a startup is like falling in love.” Participants listened with interest as Britt recalled the excitement of working with Ev (Williams), Jack (Dorsey) and other at the company.

The perspective of working within such a dynamic team, he explained, got dopamine and norepinephrine flowing through his system. Britt likened the experience to the feeling of a first kiss. After a while, oxytocin took over the body, creating a lasting bond and preventing burnout.

You may be thinking it’s quite obvious; after all, who wouldn’t be excited about joining Twitter? However, let’s keep in mind that things were quite different five years ago. The company Britt joined was then called Odeo and had been working on podcasting. As he recalls, most people he spoke to didn’t really get the point of its new product “Twttr“. Yet, Britt knew from the butterflies in his stomach that he was part of a team on the verge of big things.

For Britt, anyone joining the right startup should feel like falling in love, but the comparison also works the other way around. “Don’t work with assholes,” he warned the audience – probably in the same way that you wouldn’t want to date one.

2) Find a co-founder who shares your vision

Britt’s experiences of joining a startup are equally pertinent for those looking to launch one. You need to find people you can trust that share your vision; that was what Alexa Andrzejewski did to find her co-founder.

Alexa told the conference the story of her food recommendation project, Foodspotting. She explained that she shared her initial idea with many people until she finally met Ted Grubb at a networking event in 2009. The pair immediately clicked and Ted became the co-founder and CTO of what went on to become a fast growing startup, registering one million app downloads in August.

As Blackbox‘s founder Fadi Bishara pointed out, this is why it’s so important for wannabe entrepreneurs to share their projects. As we heard from Webprendedor participants, Chileans are often afraid to disclose ideas they’re working for fear that someone might steal them. Yet they shouldn’t worry about this, said Fadi, as ultimately it is execution that makes the difference rather than the idea itself.

As the creator of the Cofounder Network, Fadi believes it is worth the risk as it is the only way to find people who share your vision and can work with you to make it a reality. If you’re looking for a co-founder, you should look for someone you trust and respect, a person who shares your values and whose personality and skills complement yours, Fadi added.

Fadi’s Startup Genome initiative recently conducted a large scale survey asking more than 3,000 to find the “secret” of success (see our previous story “The Startup Genome Compass launches to help startups avoid failure“). Given his research, we can trust Fadi’s conclusion that “it’s all about the people” is certainly a significant success factor.

3) Creating a startup has never been so easy

Many Webprendedor’s speakers emphasized how easy it is to create a startup compared to a decade ago. Today, programmers and developers can use plenty of tools that weren’t available at the time. According to Britt Selvitelle, the cloud application platform Heroku is emblematic of this change and deploying an app is now much more simple.

It’s also increasingly easier to scale thanks to the cloud, Britt explains the audience in a telling anecdote. When Justin Bieber joined Twitter in 2009, he recalls, his team was hugely excited yet also somewhat concerned as to whether the platform could handle the spike in traffic that the singer’s presence would draw.

So when talking to a friend working at Instagram recently, he was surprised to hear the different experience which played out when the teen pop star started using the picture sharing platform a few months ago, immediately triggering thousands of new sign-ups. Instead, Britt heard, Instagram’s host Amazon contacted his team offering additional capacity in advanced of the user spike.

Even better, is the fact that many of these tools are inexpensive or often free while product creation is a faster process than ever before. As PBworks‘ founder David Weekly noted in his workshops, it is now possible to launch a viable and well-designed product in just one week or even one weekend (see our previous story “Meet David Weekly, The Nerd Who Loves People“.) As a consequence, startups require less capital to get started with bootstrapping a great option. In many cases, money from your friends and family can go a long way and keep you going until you break-even.