Loogic English

A good piece of has arrived for Oportunista, the website for online promotions and discounts, that has recently received an investment from a group of various business angels including Gustavo Garcia, founder of BuyVip, and Albert Feliú of InfoJobs. The founders of the project, Rodrigo Giménez-Rico and Alexandra Klein, plan to use the funds to expand the list of businesses in the health and leisure sectors in Spain that are already present in the portal. They also plan to make significant usability improvements to the website and are set to come out of beta in September.

We first wrote about Oportunista.com last October and since then have had the opportunity to speak with the founders in various occasions and at events such as SeedRocket that have been important for them to meet private investors including the ones that finally bet on their idea. The project is quickly nearing a time when it can compete with other big players like Cuponeo, that we spoke of recently.

Today we came to know that the sales of cars in January of this year have fallen by 41.6% to 59.385 units, the lowest level since 1996. Without doubt, the automobile sector is going through a critical period, in line with the real estate sector. Reducing costs and improving the effectiveness of the advertising campaigns are now a priority for companies in these sectors. On the internet, perhaps they have the best option for both the things, the advertising on the internet is cheaper and can be more focuse to reach the target public. I can personally confirm this situation for the case of two clients from these sectors with whom we are going to start working.

In this line, comes a new portal developed for one of the most important domain names in Spanish, Coches.com, which was a property of Chris Chena and now belongs to the company Autodescuento. According to Carlos Blanco, the domain might have been sold for somewhere between 800 and 900.000 euros.
We talked of Autodescuento when we came to know of the investment by Marek Fodor and now we can see that this company is betting everything on this sector, with the idea that a chunk of the business of selling cars will migrate to the internet. Concesionarios.com and Financiatucoche.com are the other two websites of this company that we hope to pay more attention to from now on.

With respect to Coches.com, I think that it has a very good focus. Above all, I liked the search engine and the page that shows results with the filter system, and it has given me some interesting ideas for a project that we are developing.

They say that karaoke is the “national sport” of Japan, so I suppose that´s the reason Red Karaoke couldn´t avoid not being in this market - although it can´t be easy. The fact that there are no other Hispanic created projects in this country is very indicative of the difficulties involved, especially regarding language and cultural differences.

Red Karaoke Japan is the second international launch for the company, after the United States. For their entry into Japan, the karaoke site has included over 31,000 karaokes of which more than 10,000 are in Japanese and have been recently added to the web.

Red Karaoke assures that this is the first available free online karaoke site available in Japan. And to show interest in the country of karaoke, they have opened their own office and have a country manager for project management.

We will soon see the arrival of new Hispanic projects in Japan (or China) and I hope that the experience of Red Karaoke serves as a spearhead for other entrepreneurs in the network.

At last month’s Iniciador in Madrid, Luis Martin Cabiedes said that you have to be prepared because you never know when a project is going to take off (he used the word ‘explode’). In Spain, we have some interesting cases of projects that have ‘exploded’, perhaps the most striking is Tuenti (who decline to comment on the financial aspect of their business). In this group we can also include Trovit, Privalia and BuyVip. Other projects that we follow with attention and ones I can dare to say are about to take off include Red Karaoke (with its WSA competition), Minube (which just received an investment from Caja Navarra), and here is where I would also include 11870.com

I think 11870.com is about to take off and this radical redesign that they have launched could be the detonant.

After the initial shock of seeing the new design on the front page of 11870.com, I spent some time browsing through rest of the site (very much liked the design of the results page) and mostly in thinking how this redesign might affect the future of the website. What I realized is that we are looking here at a redefinition of the message that is conveyed to the new user who has just arrived on the site, the base of all this is a directory of businesses and hence it doesn’t make sense disguising it as a social network. A user who arrives at the site from the search engines or in whatever way has to be able to access all the content on the site, which is only possible in two ways, with a search engine and a directory.

For me, 11870.com is the ideal site to attract traffic from the search engines and relevant geolocalized content. Add to this the fact that the content is generated by the users, and they are continually generating comments which results in the content being updated with a lot of frequency. The new front page of the site should serve precisely to tell Google that it’s going to find a lot of content for indexing. Hence the conversion from a design that highlighted things to one that serves as an access to all the information available on the site.

Allow me to conclude with another novelty that seems to be quite important: now in 11870.com, it is possible to reserve a table at restaurants (agreement with El Tenedor), reserve rooms in hotels (agreement reached with Booking.com) and reserve rural rentals (agreement with TopRural).

Also commented by Jesus Encinar and François Derbaix.

Didac Lee gave a talk at last month’s First Tuesday in Madrid, and it really grabbed my attention when he talked of Scubastore, an online shop that sells scuba diving material all over the world.

Frankly speaking, I thought that this Scubastore project was just a hobby for Didac and it didn’t generate a lot of profit, unlike I supposed the other companies belonging to his group Inspirit. But the truth is that this shop of scuba diving products is tremendously successful earning revenues of 3 million euros a year.

As I didn’t understand how they had such revenues selling neoprene suits and glasses for scuba diving, I asked Didac Lee what was the secret of success of Scubastore, and I learned that the reasons for its success were quite clear. They started selling on an international scale in the year 2000. At that time, the dollar-euro exchange rate was very profitable for selling products from Spain to the US (Correction: the euro was put into circulation in 2002). Almost 90% of their sales are made outside of Spain.

Specializing and selling on an international scale has been the secret of Scubastore, something that can be achieved by many of the e-commerce companies that operate out of Spain. And one more thing to add: the website of this online shop is not shabby. Many people are of the opinion that to sell on the internet, ugly sites do better. This is not the case here.