Julio Alonso - www.weblogssl.com

Wednesday we had the first guest speaker Julio Alonso (you can read about him on merodeando.com) that talked about his startup experience (www.weblogssl.com). I believe I learnt a lot from his speech and I will try to report some points I particularly liked. I have also appreciated that the class was very interactive and I wished I could stay more after the end of the time.

Career swap

He was in the consulting business since 10 years when he decided to leave his well established profession for a completely new and apparently crazy venture. I said "apparently crazy" because at that time being a blogger was considered a hobby but not a profession. The first lesson I've learned from him is that in order to create a startup you need to be extremely brave. You need to foresee a yet undiscovered opportunity and bet your career on it. However, this was not a total leap of faith for Julio. He decided to leave his previous job only once he had already experimented the feasibility of the new business and he probably already had a sustainable stream of revenue from his blog. He also mentioned that it is very important to be sure your family supports your choice. Especially during the first years might be a dark period in term of revenue, free time, and stress.

Content VS Technology

Another point I liked was his suggestion related the balance between content and technology. If you want to create content you need to take care also about the technology. So, content and technology go together. And, he said, if you really want to do only one... it is better you go for technology. What does this mean? This is my interpretation... you cannot create content without having developed also a set of technical skills. Lets take movie maker companies as example. They produce content, but in order to do so they master also a wide set of technologies that let them create and distribute their products (i.e. special effects, lighting, cameras, pre and post processing, etc.)

Flexibility

This point is much more related to something I read between the lines. And this actually could have been a good question for Julio. He started his career as professional blogger and slowly his profession moved into that of a blogger manager. Today he handles something like 40 blogs and 200 content writers. Looking back at the day you started your personal blog, did you imagine this profession as it is today? Did you have to change your aspiration during the path?

Turn parachuters into church parishioners

I am not sure if this was the exact expression but I believe it gives the idea. Parachuters are those blog readers that find your website from a search engine. They are interested to a specific topic and use keywords to find it. Once they have found the blog, they read what they want and leave. On the other hand, church parishioners are those who are interested to what you say and from time to time come to visit your page, leave comments and contribute to the creation of a community. Julio explained that, in order to create a sustainable business, the main challenge is to turn occasional visitors into community members.

Of course Julio talked about many other things during the presentation but those above are the points I particularly liked and I believe could be applied also to my dreamed venture.

Thank you Julio for your valuable hints.