Alberto Torrón - todotaladros.com

Today we had Alberto Torrón, part time entrepreneur and founder of todotaladros.com. Everything started from a personal problem of his friend Javier Gomez, which wanted to start a personal activity in order to continue to pay taxes for the wife's retirement program. They decided to create a small shop on ebay and sell electronic tools. Soon they realised that there was a good market opportunity and they decided to create an e-commerce website. They also decided to differentiate the activity by creating other websites that sell different type of product. The advantage of this differentiation is that they could target different niche markets with different websites, but thanks to the same nature of the business, increasing only partially the level of work required.

Today they are still small but they enjoy a healthy business and a steady growth. Their value proposition is based on the following 5 key elements:

Cheap

They offer very competitive price. They buy stocks of products from the Internet and try to keep the cost of ownership as low as possible.

Fast

They really want to excel on this element. They make sure that the product is sent as soon as possible. They believe that a fast delivery is among one of the key elements of customer satisfaction.

Guaranteed

All products are covered with the European warranty. Moreover, if the customer is unsatisfied can ask for full refund.

Reachable

This is simply amazing... if a customer calls the support service would be surprised to talk directly to the entrepreneur! However, this can be achieved because the business is still small with few transactions a day. Despite the small number of daily sales they can still have a good income thanks to fact that the average product cost is high and the margin is good.

Secure

The money transaction is handled directly with the bank and other intermediaries such as paypal. Also, they tend to be extremely flexible in terms of payment methods.

Below some key suggestions he gave us:

The relationship with suppliers and partners is critical. He seems to go beyond the professional relationship by considering their partners as real friends. As such he knows he can ask for help on particular subjects and he is willing to give help on others.

Considering the web interface he said that it should always respect the K.I.S.S. (Keep it simple, stupid!). As Jesus said last time, we should design an interface for people that pay only partial attention. If they still can achieve and find what they want you will probably are going to be more successful.

When he created his startup he decided to use his own capital. This demonstrated to partners and suppliers his full commitment to the venture. On the other hand Jorge Mata told us that a professional VC would not recommend the entrepreneur to put his own capital. This is because he knows that the entrepreneur will be willing to even "sell pizza" in order to recover his investment. It looks like that we are in front of a strategic decision when we decide to put our capital on the venture. Does auto-financing prevent future VC investment?

Concerning the technology side, Alberto's decision to deploy a crowd and open source software (PrestaShop.com) was in line with the low-cost-of-ownership constraint. However, it is important to underline that this is not in contradiction with the suggestion of the other entrepreneurs we had so far. In fact, even though Alberto did not develop his technology he still has a lot o competence in using this technology. So, even if they rely on third party (the crowd), they are still committed in mastering and controlling the technology they use.

In conclusion, I believe that they designed and started an all rounded business taking care of every single detail. They make sure that every decision is taken accordingly with their value proposition.