On August 17, a new batch of fresh graduates of Upcelerator program pitched their startups ideas. At the Demo Day event, one of the mentors of the program, Gabriel Paunescu, Co-founder and CEO at NAOLOGIC. He came up with pieces of advice for the young entrepreneurs about how they can run a startup remotely. “Based on my experience running my company remotely in Eastern Europe which given that all eastern europe is kind of the smallest market of them all, if u got someone is a different time zone you gotta work in the afternoon, or the evening, but that’s ok.
Check out some insights of Gabriel’s speech:
1. Grammar. A lot of startups don’t pay enough attention to it.
“You may think it’s not a big deal, but in fact, the language is an important matter. Everything should be written in native English. If you can not do that or you don’t have the skills, hire a copywriter in order to have excellent writing on your website.”
2. Think international from day one.
“No matter what you’re selling, if it’s in Romania, Moldova, Ukraine, your product doesn’t matter in a small market. The only thing that you can do about that is think globally from the beginning.
That doesn’t mean you have to enter seven markets and do 5 year projections and PNL in different countries. It means just simple tasks. For example, when you build a landing page, you should choose something that has multiple language support. The simple thing you can do is register Linkedin or any Social Media account in multiple languages that you can select and go to multiple languages from day one. So there are a lot of small things that will get you indexed faster and will get you to become more relevant.”
3. Don’t build a company on a trend, but follow it.
Following trends means following search value, interests and qualified leads. More often that trend can be related enough to your company where you can find a common topic. Right now, the hot subject is remote work, pretty much any SAAS company that sells something, they can call itself a remote work company. So, make a landing page where you talk about remote work, try to get yourself indexed a little bit, try to go on a few podcasts, talk to people, become relevant.
4. Don’t copy other companies
It is not discussed enough the value of copying other companies. When you go to another website that you love or one of your competitors you have to understand that they have spent some money in copywriting, marketing, testing, ads and whatever you want to get to that final state you’re seeing. If you copy your competitors’ website, you are copying a few hundreds of conversations that they had with their customers. Try to find the right keywords, what makes you unique and the customers will choose you instead of your competition.
5. Don’t build a company based on a single culture
A big issue in Eastern European startups is that they are single culture oriented. Being single cultured equals failure in this day and age. The problem is that the more you grow in a single culture and you don’t hire internationally, in your case you will hire remote, the more you stick to the idea In a company where there is one culture and you try to hire an international person, they will not feel well.
Click HERE to watch the event of Graduation and Demo Day of Upcelerator 2021.
Upcelerator is an online program organized by the Dreamups Entrepreneurship and Innovation Accelerator. The general partner is Orange Systems, which has been supporting the Entrepreneurship and Acceleration initiatives of Dreamups since 2016.