Let’s Ask Jose - Q & A with Navgar Founder Jose Brotons
In our third installment, Jose takes looks both backward and forward and offers advice for others with a vision.
MT: How has your company evolved since its founding, and what are your plans for its future growth?
JB: I started off by myself, trying to figure out what this product would look like. Through the Human Centered Design methodology I started to get enough clarity on what I wanted to do and a couple months later I felt that it was the right time to officially start the company. The first two people that I brought on board were Rachel (Head of Product) and Markus -
MT: - That’s me!
JB: - (Long sigh, then both laugh). Markus (Head of Operations). They had both been team members at Product Madness and we knew each other well. It was a relief to see that they were excited to work with me again 🙂.
However I wanted to make sure that we crafted the best possible team. I had heard a lot about the Predictive Index and we started using it directly on us. The Predictive Index is an amazing tool to understand behavioral motivations and it really allows you to understand each other and the team much better.
We devoted a substantial amount of time in those early months to start thinking about the culture that we wanted to set up and the behaviors that we wanted to hold ourselves accountable to. This led to a lot of deep - yet very interesting - conversations.
We finally started to hire our new team members, yet we were very careful in selecting them and making sure that we all felt comfortable working with each other and enjoyed the perspective of potentially spending a lot of time together. This is when Juan (Backend), Rapha (Frontend) and Sebastian (Product Design) joined. Our latest hire has been Tanner, another ex- Product Madness member (CS and QA)
I absolutely love the team that we have put together.
As far as growth goes, we are going to start raising capital in the coming months. We are a small team and seeing the reaction of companies to what we are building is exciting, but the speed at which we can go is limited by our size. I believe we are onto something here and I want to make sure we capitalize as much as possible on it.
MT: What advice would you give to someone who is just starting a business, based on your own experiences?
JB: Make sure you have a lawyer, an accountant and that you use Navgar 🙂
Jokes aside (a lawyer and an accountant are in fact good investments), I would tell budding entrepreneurs to:
Try to validate their idea as much as possible - talk, talk and talk with as many people as will listen to you. Apply frameworks like Human Centered Design to understand those needs better. It is much cheaper in this phase than down the line.
Build things quickly and get emotional feedback on them. Frameworks exist for this as well. At Navgar I built an initial version of the application on Appsheet. It was practically unusable due to all the coding I had to put into it, however people got excited when they saw it.
Try to work off of hypotheses. A correctly stipulated hypothesis follows an IF THEN statement. IF X is true then Y should … Try to isolate X as much as possible and ensure that it is directly related to Y. You also need to understand how you plan to test it. If you cannot test it, then the hypothesis will not help you much.
Limit what you are working on. Here at Navgar we try to break down our Strategic initiatives in Quarterly chunks and we do not want to have more than 3 of them. This allows everyone in the team to be aligned on what we are doing and everything that we do has a final objective. As an entrepreneur the grass will always be greener on the other side of the fence and unattainable unicorns will always be lurking in the background, staying focus is a way to ensure you defend your team’s and your own time and time is money and money is one thing startup’s don’t usually have.
Finally “Keep banging your head against the wall”. You will have a lot of naysayers, a lot of down days, but when you get to those, remember the conversations you had, why you believe in the product and plough on.
