For Idalina Sousa *
The monitoring I’ve been doing, directly and indirectly, of Portuguese startups, and the experience of Spring born only with a disruptive idea and many hours of development in a garage, increasingly believe that any one of them, have an established starter, needs four basic pillars: the idea, the business plan, investment and structure .
The idea, in my opinion, is the easiest to be the genesis, the real anchor that holds firm conviction to invest all their energies in delivering a business. It may be hard to find one that is unique and it is important to have some certainty about the viability of the business, but the opportunity can be either an original product or service as an innovative way of looking at an existing offer. The business plan for the maturity of our accelerators and startups nests, such as the Beta-i Startup Lisbon, Vodafone or Startup Labs Braga, has now become much easier to compose. Even the Employment and Vocational Training Institute already have this available valence.
The investment, this also is more sophisticated and affordable in Portugal. Even before a still adverse economic environment, it is possible to find business angels, banks and a bailout of acceleration and nests very important to start with a good idea. I would even say that a good idea, you can not get financing in Portugal, get in many other countries of the world.
Since the structure is the one less visible pillar and that generally start with one or a few people mostly with technical expertise in the relevant area of your business, but few, if any, in those seemingly unimportant areas such as financial, communication or supply chain management. A start at home with himself or in a small space in startups nest with shared resources.
In this pillar which I have often seen the business to fail, mainly because the management skills are scarce, information business support is not structured, growth is fast and it is necessary for the structure to adapt to a new reality every day, without losing control. This is where comes in, I think, a great solution to support: the software
The software today with the reality of cloud and an increasingly global competition comes the low prices or paid as the use, with the addition of being needed less and less hardware investment. Some of us have believed 20 years ago that Microsoft Office would be paid on monthly basis and downloadable via the cloud? Or that today was possible to purchase online and put yourself into operation one billing software in less than an hour, ready to operate in various markets?
The software, apart from the obvious issues associated with the response to tax obligations easily lets you organize your processes, standardize them, create rigorous management of operations, add laugher decision making and maintain control. Its daily progress towards democratization of access to solid solutions and mobility lets start to structure the deal without major computer knowledge and with a null investment initially or funded as using already booming.
The answer is already very simplified with a number of software houses, many of them national, with a free gift or at reduced cost, very robust, simple, mobile and scalable to the size of the globe. If we have Lisbon as one of the nine best cities for startups in the world, we have this and other cities to give even more cards in the overall picture.
* Marketing Head Manager of Primavera BSS
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