How to finance your business idea? Vladimir Oane talked about it at TechLounge Talks.
Vladimir Oane, the co-founder of uverVU, is just 30 years old and needed no introduction when talking with students in Politehnica University.
He started coding in 2002 because he wanted to do something else than he was doing in school. “My strategy was: let’s break my head in business, I can afford it, I’m only in my second year of college” said Vladimir.
First, it was Metromind. Then, together with other co-founders, he presented the uberVu idea to SeedCamp and got a funding of 50.000 Euros. Today, 50 people are working for uberVu, they have their biggest office in Bucharest, and their official headquarters is in Boston where they also have their management team.
During their SeedCamp experience they’ve met a lot of people that wanted to help them develop their product and give them feed-back. “We didn’t know how to ask feedback – the problem with meeting 10 smart people is that they will give you 10 different feedbacks and tell you 10 different things, which is not necessarily true and ok for you.”
If it were to have the same amount of money now, he would just focus on delivering the product: “I would really focus, focus on shipping as soon as possible a product and get adopters.”
“Nowadays is really hard to receive seed money with just an idea, you need at least a prototype. After getting the money, you have to prove that you can provide the product and show that you understand your client.”, Vladimir added “Anything that is like – I have 3 customers, I have several endorsements – will definitely help.”
Where can you get funding? Incubators, crowdfunding, family and friend, and VCs, but most importantly potential clients.
Some incubators can connect you with clients, like SeedCamp did for them, but you need to do more than that – “You have to hassle, call clients, learn and understand their needs – it’s not like in the movies… Funding should not be your problem, shipping is” concluded Vladimir.
More ideas to remember from Vladimir Oane:
• Nothing speaks better than a functional product – its unacceptable to do it otherwise.
• You need to ship and to validate that stuff – you need to have something that works.
• Your biggest quality needs to be empathy – empathy towards the client.
• Validate you idea as much as possible, even before writing your first line of code.
• People don’t doubt you can write code, they doubt what you do can solves problems.
Credits: photos by Ioana Vasile, notes by Elena Coman, edited by Madalina Oprisan
