Julio Alonso at “Iniciador”
March 4, 2010
ideas4all iniciador
Last February 10th, in another edition of Iniciador, Julio Alonso, founder of Weblogs, with 10 years’ experience as strategy consultant, spoke to us of his entrepreneuring experience, offering advice to anyone thinking of starting up a business.
Julio has a network of specialized content blogs (vertical or specialized publications on the Internet) with communities of users interested in the subjects covered. His other line of activity is consulting for companies in areas such as blogs, social networks and web 2.0.
His line of business, with over 37 blogs organized by subject (featuring the collaboration of over 200 bloggers), has over 14.3 million unique users every month and over 64.8 million pages viewed monthly. His blog has two types of readers he calls his family: The regulars (very well-read in his subject-matter) and parachutists (who are linked from google, an indispensable tool in creating new users).
Here are some brush strokes on the most interesting points of his intervention:
.- The risk of turning your idea into something real is something he considers inherent to any business project. Enterprising, he says, entails taking risks.
.- Tolerance to uncertainty is basic in this process and must be interiorized before one sets out on an entrepreneuring project.
.- Giving form to ideas, executing them while adapting, although that may entail having to charge your course of action, are steps we should not forget.
.- Start things at a small scale, test until confirming the market validates what you do, and then climb rapidly. A far from negligible piece of advice, given that many entrepreneurs become afraid and never manage to survive the early stages of activity; while others thing “so big” that their giant leaps seem to move them closer to a spectacular failure.
Risks in early stages should be very limited.
.- He who enterprises must know that being “multi-task”, having “multiple abilities”, being “multi-experienced” is an advantage because it allows us to surround ourselves by great professionals and make better decisions.
.- Knowing the market in which we operate is essential: who consumes our product and who is our competition. These are basic rules in any business plan, that are however often missing. It is a good idea to look back and review our project’s evolution.
.- Your company’s competitive advantage must be related to its capacity to innovate, evolve, and even change its initial model in order to adapt to what is demanded by the market; but we must remain realistic and not expect our company to cover each and every front. Making focus and flexibility compatible is essential.
.- Lastly, he speaks of something we were waiting to hear, something fundamental, a theory that has to be taken on by any entrepreneur: A PASSION for what we do and, of course, the ability to have fun while working.
And what about Social Networks? Are blogs, as an alternative, a threat?
“Social networks have an advantage in terms of demographic segmentation, but the fact that you can take your product to interested communities is a relevant factor in specialized publications that generic networks don’t have. They are, undoubtedly, complementary”.
According to Julio, an advantage blogs have is that each person can create his or her “own informational diet”.
And what about investors?
He recommends we launch our business without help because it is normal to have diverging objectives that force us to change our project’s strategy. If we are lucky enough to count with investors that are aligned with our own objectives while making capital and contacts available, as well as generating marketing capacity and transmitting confidence, we should feel very fortunate.
The ideal situation would be to work within a zero-cost structure, increasing our cost as we generate income.
And what about advertising?
Our entrepreneur and businessman believes in the Internet’s advertising potential, but accepts that Spain is lacking brand advertising because the right format or way of measuring results has not yet been found. There is a lack of innovation in this field.
Should we monetize, or as Julio says, pride ourselves on accepting donations?
“Some subjects attract a lot of interest but are difficult to make money with. Subjects with different potential advertisers than we are accustomed to. We must be enormously creative and observe the ability to create interest in brands.”
Do you compete in the traditional media sector?
He answers with a quote by Gandhi, “first they will ignore you, then laugh at you, then fight you, and finally you will win”.
He then convinces us with results:
“We have managed to generate better content. Cost structure models are lighter than in traditional media. We know that traffic is generated better than in traditional media, that the model works and evolves better. In terms of advertising, there is still much to do, and the traditional market has the advantage, but thanks to the potential of this new Internet industry, brands will become accustomed to new formats and different media”.
You can see a video of the event here.
Rocío Bravo from Ideas4all
