Loogic English

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.

1) It must have been a very difficult decision that of changing the name of a web project after more than a year of launching and when it’s already relatively well known.

2) I liked Properazzi, but it’s true that it’s a complicated name. I like Enormo even more though. Without doubt, Yannick Laclau knows how to choose a good name for his projects.

3) Enormo is already available in 30 countries. When a model is tried and tested and the growth is based mainly on traffic coming from Google, launching the project in other countries is a natural way to expansion.

4) I love the lack of design. It’s as if they had done the design thinking according to my taste. And take a look at the advertising, where is it? A fantastic integration of Adsense Premium, that other vertical search engine companies focused on real estate classified ads, also appear to be achieving.

5) Seasonal advertisements is an option which has been added recently I think and that competitors Trovit and Nuroa don’t have as yet. Since Idealista acquired a stake in Rentalia and included it in its content, this option will end up being offered by all the vertical search engines.

6) Now that they have changed their name, wouldn’t they also have considered diversifying in other subjects? Especially, the theme of classified adverts for jobs seems to be working well for other search engines of this type.

I think that the first time I heard of Luis Marti­n Cabiedes was in the blog of Carlos Blanco a few months back. Since then, Luis Marti­n Cabiedes has turned into a reference for all of us who are involved in the internet business, especially for the investors and the venture capital scene.

In person I didn’t meet him until he came to Iniciador of the month of December. He seemed to me a simple person who doesn’t like to stand out, but one who knows how to be surrounded by good contacts around him.

If we google Luis Marti­n Cabiedes, the first result that appears is that he was the President of Baquia, something that shows his great involvement in internet projects, but the thing he is most well-known for in the business world is for being the Co-President of Europa Press and now continues to be a stakeholder and advisor of this group of communications.

But for us what stands out the most is the great activity that he is carrying out in the last few months as a business angel, above all for having invested in projects of which we talk with frequency over here, some of which are: privalia.com, sclipo.com, bubok.com, trovit.com and nvivo.es.

About the investments realized, I cannot say if they will go on to be very profitable for him, but I do believe that he has made a very intelligent selection of projects mainly for the diversification of themes and models. Pay close attention as I believe it’s worth it to analyze the investments made:

Privalia: e-commerce model, fashion theme. I understand it’s a project that is already generating profits making the investment a profitable one from the beginning.
Sclipo: web 2.0 model, video theme, still not generating profits but could have a great potential for a sale or for further rounds of financing.
Bubok: e-commerce model, editorial theme, still hasn’t been launched but could have a growth and profitability sustained for a long term.
Trovit: search model, classifieds theme, already generating profits and could go on to be very profitable on its own through contextual advertising.
Nvivo: social network model, music theme, with a strong growth in number of users and very interesting with respect to further rounds of financing.

About the profitability of the investments of a business angel, one should think that there are many ways of obtaining it, the most basic being that the project invested makes profits, through sale to another company, and also one in which investors keep very much in mind an exit in a second round of financing obtaining important benefits.

Read the original article in Spanish.

I’ve been awaiting this news for quite some time now. In July of this year, I wrote that Trovit was one of the three most interesting hipanic projects to invest in, and now we get the confirmation with investments from La Caixa, Luis Martín de Cabiedes and Nacho Gonzalez Barros (founder of Infojobs).

Until June I didn’t realize the great potential of this vertical search engine. When I was able to see how well it functioned, I thought that this project shouldn’t take long to find financing. Now Iñaki Ecenarro, founder of Trovit and the whole team would have a lot more resources to grow this service that already accounts for more than 2.5 million unique users per month.

Also I would like to emphasize that one of the investors in this first round of financing for Trovit is Nacho Gonzales Barros, who after the huge success of Infojobs, continues his career as an entrepreneur at the helm of Salir.com and now also as a business angel it seems. Looks like we are going to see more successful entrepreneurs investing in projects they find interesting apart from starting their own new ventures after successfully selling off their first company. In this sense, Albert Armengol is the best example.

My congratulations to the team of Trovit and now I eagerly await and hope to share the news of investments in Festuc and Eyeos so I can bring out the magic crystal ball again to bet for three new companies in which to invest.

Update: the investment has been of 600.000 euros.

Read the original article in Spanish.