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October 2019

Better World is awarded as the best European startup for the automotive sector 1024 576 IMPACT Accelerator

Better World is awarded as the best European startup for the automotive sector

Better World is awarded as the best European startup for the automotive sector

  • Better World is the second winner of the IMPACT Connected Car second Pioneer Award
  • The SME accelerated by IMPACT Connected Car will receive a 15.000€ award (on top of other European funding already granted to Better World) and will be participating in Autonomy 2020 in Paris
  • Better World is an SME dedicated to collecting and analyzing customer feedback in the automotive sector, relying on proprietary Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing Algorithms.

Barcelona, 17th October 2019 – Better World, accelerated by IMPACT Connected Car, was selected as the winner of the ICCAR Pioneer Awards. Daniel Ritter, Co-founder & CEO of the winning startup, identified a simple challenge that their solution addresses: Carmakers who want to increase their customer-centricity need to focus on their feedback management processes and this is where Better World comes in. They enable carmakers to be customer-centric through AI-based feedback management in a 3-step process: 

First, the feedback is collected inside the car makers’ organizations, on the web, and through the connected car; then it is analyzed with their own AI / NLP (Natural Language Processing) algorithms; finally, a structured and efficient browsing experience is provided, as a result of the analyses, for the teams in organizations, along business use-cases with measurable ROI.

The Impact for carmakers is massive, as it contributes to increasing their revenue base (better products and services, better advertised and better sold) and decreasing their cost base (more focused R&D, faster quality incidents detections). 

What does Better World offer? 

Better World offers an end-to-end feedback management solution, specifically dedicated to the automotive sector. This means that feedback is collected from the sources specifically adapted to the automotive industry, including in-car vocal feedback. 

The natural language algorithms are tailored to the automotive-related language. Their solution is able to detect automotive products and services with accuracy (e.g. the precise generation of a given car), allowing competitive benchmarking. 

The main use cases are focused on product, allowing to define the specification of products and services; manufacturing, to improve the efficiency of factories, leveraging the insights of operators; service, adjusting it to the customer’s expectations; and quality, detecting and launching corrective actions earlier and faster. 

According to Daniel Ritter, “The automotive sector is undergoing massive changes, especially towards more electrification, more autonomy, more sharing and more connectivity. This implies that car makers urgently need to define where they want to go, in that fast-changing context. We believe that it is critical to leverage the input of users in that process, which is precisely what Better World is enabling.”

Pioneer Awards Ceremony

The criteria used to evaluate the 18 competing projects were based on a score of technical, business and corporate performance after the mentorship/coaching of experts on these 3 areas. Better World successfully completed the three stages of the IMPACT Connected Car Acceleration Programme within the program portfolio. 

The Award Ceremony for the second round has taken place during Autonomy Paris 2019 on October 17th at 17:15 at Stage 1. David Seoane, as a Project Manager of IMPACT Connected Car, briefly presented the advancements of the 3 years of the project in regards. 

The €15.000 award was handed over by Virginie Perron, as the Project Officer of the European Commission from this project.This award comes on top of other European funding already granted to Better World.

The winners affirmed “Our conviction is that the future of automotive customer feedback collection is vocal and inside cars, compared to lengthy paper surveys that are filled out at home. Imagine your car asking for your feedback (if you agreed to upfront) while you are stuck in a traffic jam. We believe this prefigures the future of automotive market research.”

About IMPACT Connected Car

IMPACT Connected Car aimed at creating value link-chains for innovation in the Connected Car open space, with vehicles, infrastructure, device and TelCo interactions, and consumer and business services. Achieved through the acceleration and smartization of over 60 disruptive SMEs. The project distributed €2.1 million funding, equity-free. 

IMPACT Connected Car was led by top players in the fields of innovation and automobiles, including Mobile World Capital Barcelona, ISDI, FundingBox, Ferrovial Servicios, CTAG, FIA, Groupe PSA, the FIWARE Foundation, PARP, Insero, Mov’eo, MSAK, LPNT, Argus, HEVO, Little Electric Car, and Botcar.

This project received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No 731343.

For further information:

Better World – www.better-world.io

Marta Portalés Oliva – Mobile World Capital Barcelona
+34 606 461 225
mportales@mobileworldcapital.com

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The 31 best startups of connected mobility in Europe 1024 576 IMPACT Accelerator

The 31 best startups of connected mobility in Europe

The 31 best startups of connected mobility in Europe

  • The final 31 best startups of connected mobility in Europe were accelerated by IMPACT Connected Car. The program distributed up to €2.1 million equity-free funding during the last three years.

Barcelona, 23/10/2019. IMPACT Connected Car is a mobility startup acceleration program focused on the cars of the future, driverless transportation, connected cars, and innovative experiments in the automobile industry. 

IMPACT Connected Car was designed to give a boost to all parts of the value chain, including automotive startups and industry SMEs. During the last three years, projects selected for the accelerator program smartized their connected car startups while learning from experts in business, technology, corporations, and funding. IMPACT Connected Car program partnered with global brands including PSA Group, Ferrovial Servicios, and the Federation Internationale de l’Automobile.

The participating companies had access to up to €60,000 per startup, equity-free, in startup grants and up to €50,000 per startup equity-free. Up to €2.1 million were distributed. The selected companies from 12 European countries and Israel were accelerated in the areas of business (ISDI), technical coaching providers (CTAG, INSERO, MOVEO, and the clusters AUTOKLASTR and LPNT) and large corporations (PSA Group, Ferrovial Servicios, FIA, FIWARE Foundation).  

Here’s a list of the 31 best Connected Car companies shaping the future of mobility in the European landscape: 

    1. CardioId (Portugal): CardioID developed Cardio Wheel, a system composed of software and hardware, in the form of a steering wheel with conductive leather. It acquires the heart signals from the driver’s hands. www.cardio-id.com
    2. Carfit (France): Carfit developed an AI-based technology that reads car vibrations to make maintenance easier and mobility safer.www.carf.fit 
    3. Chargetrip (The Netherlands): Chargetrip is a B2B Smart Navigation SaaS platform providing intelligent predictive routing for electric mobility. Chargetrip makes electric driving and charging effortless for individual drivers and fleets. www.chargetrip.com 
    4. Eccocar (Spain-Germany): Accelerating through efficiency, the world’s transition to sustainable mobility. Empowering fleet operators to get the full potential of their vehicles with their shared mobility platform. www.eccocar.com
    5. Howmyhub (Spain): Howmyhub is unlocking the full potential of garages by enabling people to control their garage door from their smartphone, from anywhere. www.howmyhub.com
    6. Motor AI (Germany): Motor AI has built an Artificial Intelligence system that solves edge cases in autonomous driving, using data collected by its Knox device. www.motor-ai.com
    7. Parkbob (Austria): Parkbob organizes global parking data and transforms it into actionable information to enable better mobility decisions. www.parkbob.com
    8. Situm (Spain): Cloud-based indoor positioning services with higher precision and minimal infrastructure. www.situm.es
    9. Spark Horizon (France): In order to accelerate EV adoption, between EV and charging stations. Spark has deployed the first public charging network, sponsored by sustainable brands, at high-traffic locations. www.sparkhorizon.com
    10. Trafficnow (Spain): Analysis and visualization of Connected Car Floating Data in our existing cloud or on-premise data analytics platform. www.deepbluesensor.com
    11. Worldsensing (Spain): A more reliable tool for traffic management related to parking spaces thanks to this automatic enforcement backend, which will minimize the number of agents dealing with parking fraud. www.worldsensing.com
    12. Xapix (Germany): Xapix is building an orchestration platform for digital mobility services, providing vehicle manufacturers, suppliers, and service providers with ultimate flexibility, speed, and security around data interoperability.www.xapix.io
    13. Ximantis AB (Sweden): Ximantis is a smart, green, software, technology company offering intelligent solutions in the field of mobility management, connected cars, smart cities. www.ximantis.com 
    14. 25Ways (Germany): A provider-independent mobility platform that encourages behavior change towards sustainable mobility. www.25ways.de 
    15. 2hire (Italy): Technology that connects all kinds of vehicles, allowing remote-controllable interactions and access to parameter readings. www.2hire.io 
    16. Anadue (Ireland): Location intelligence analytics products that help cities and mobility companies understand and manage the impact and benefits of mobility services. www.anadue.com 
    17. BeNomad (France): By enabling accurate energy consumption and EV route planning, BeNomad facilitates the transition towards e-mobility. www.benomad.com 
    18. Better World (France): Leveraging the collective intelligence of drivers to help automotive engineers conceive better cars. www.better-world.io 
    19. Capricode (Finland): SyncShield secures vehicle connectivity, improves over-the-air management and helps to digitize business processes. www.capricode.com 
    20. Discoperi (Spain): System Eye prevents road accidents and monetizes automotive data thanks to its built-in Blockchain protocol. www.discoperi.com
    21. Drivvisor (Spain): A driver-monitoring app that uses computer vision to detect and prevent distractions and fatigue, and analyze further driving features. www.drivvisor.com 
    22. Go To-U (Ukraine): A platform that connects drivers of electric vehicles and eco-friendly businesses. www.go-tou.com 
    23. Journify (Spain): Journify is a carpooling app that facilitates daily commutes. www.journify.es 
    24. Mappo (Israel): A geo-culture content layer created by a robust algorithm combining texts, music, and AR video. www.mappo.world 
    25. Micocar (Spain): An app that saves users 10% to 50% on all taxi rides through a more efficient marketplace where ride prices are calculated according to supply and demand. www.micocar.com 
    26. Newport (France): Phebe is a vocal companion providing in-car mobility services and products. www.phebe.io 
    27. Ozone Drive (Spain): A tech startup specialized in the design and implementation ad-hoc of electric mobility solutions. www.ozonedrive.com 
    28. Parquery (Switzerland): Analysis of images from any camera to detect vehicles and provide real-time results on both parking availability and duration. www.parquery.com 
    29. Safe Mode (Israel): Driver-centric software to empower fleets and shared mobility platforms with automated tools for management. www.safemode.co  
    30. Secmotic (Spain): Plug and play product designed to improve road-workers safety using AI and edge computing techniques. www.secmotic.com
    31. xMotion (France): Turning driving data into opportunity and saving lives. www.xmotion.io

About IMPACT Connected Car

IMPACT Connected Car aimed at creating value link-chains for innovation in the Connected Car open space, with vehicles, infrastructure, device and TelCo interactions, and consumer and business services. Achieved through the acceleration and smartization of over 60 disruptive SMEs. The project distributed €2.1 million funding, equity-free. 

IMPACT Connected Car was led by top players in the fields of innovation and automobiles, including Mobile World Capital Barcelona, ISDI, FundingBox, Ferrovial Servicios, CTAG, FIA, Groupe PSA, the FIWARE Foundation, PARP, Insero, Mov’eo, MSAK, LPNT, Argus, HEVO, Little Electric Car, and Botcar.

This project received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No 731343.

For further information:

Marta Portalés Oliva – Mobile World Capital Barcelona
+34 606 461 225
mportales@mobileworldcapital.com

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How data can eliminate your digitization doubts 1024 768 IMPACT Accelerator

How data can eliminate your digitization doubts

How data can eliminate your digitization doubts

A few years ago we (Good Rebels) made the claim, in our white paper on Data Driven Marketing, that:

“…a Data Driven culture is not that of a company governed by automation or mathematicians in which there is no room for creativity or lateral thinking, it is precisely that which favors creative thinking and a project towards the future based on the quality and solidity of decisions. It is a culture that does not use data to block ideas but to generate better ones.”

A new culture has been built around the availability of data. The act of simply generating or analyzing data does not mean you’re necessarily data driven – however you’re on the right track. Data helps us to understand what’s really happening within our own organization – and when we can predict the future of our organization through data, we edge that much closer to our goal.

‘The act of simply generating or analyzing data does not mean you’re necessarily data driven’

How do we begin this journey? If your interest is in obtaining, integrating and visualizing data then there are four key stages you can follow:

Data in a digital world

Those of us who work within the field of communication, marketing and advertising know the challenge of managing increasingly sophisticated digital assets; new channels and new advertising formats make the managing of metrics more complex. Not because we don’t have access to the right data, but because making the most of that data requires a radically different approach.

To tackle this challenge head on, we need to first define our priorities – develop a strategy centered around understanding the value of the data we currently have access to, and how to access data that is useful but inaccessible.

As we explained in our article on behavioral analytics, there are three types of data:

  1. Registered data: stored in our CRM or on a marketing automation platform.
  2. Observed data: behavioral data collected at each stage of the user journey.
  3. Obtained data: comments, surveys, reviews shared by consumers that reveal their opinions on our brand, products or services.

You may be asking yourself – how exactly is the data we gather going to help us? How are we meant to store this data in order to help us achieve our global vision?

Marketing and technology teams will have to work together to identify the types of data that is most valuable and the sources we can obtain that data from (our own platforms and/or external platforms). Then, it’s critical that we ensure this data is reliable, start gathering only the most valuable data and store it within a Data Lake (or any other similar system) before beginning the integration and visualization process.

Regarding technology

If we’re already obtaining data through owned digital assets, then it’s time to centralize them on a platform of our own. Doing this enables us to use technologies and platforms that facilitate the processing of more complex and heterogeneous data structures; logs, mail, conversations, locations, etc. This, in turn, helps us to more effectively and more efficiently manage, interpret and predict the outcome of our campaigns.

For example, if your organization invests heavily in media buying then you should develop a DMP (Data Management Platform) in order to segment your data and integrate data layers. This is especially important if you’re focus is on programmatic advertising. The aim, in short, is to develop the ability to build your own Data Driven Attribution Model – one which will allow you to increase the effectiveness of your media buying.

Talent: training as a key element in data culture  

People are the foundation of any organization. Culture is formed around co-workers. For this reason, organizations must focus on promoting internal talent through quality training and attracting new and relevant talent capable of facing these new challenges through a process of internal digital transformation.

If you don’t invest in your employees, or you fail to prioritize new technologies, you’ll lose your competitive edge and you’ll be unable to build a culture driven by data.

In their study on the digital environment, ISDI Business School outlined 61 different types of specialists within the field. Knowledge and talent are the most effective tools at our disposal, and we need to invest in them if we want to reach our goal of total digital transformation.

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‘If you don’t invest in your employees, you’ll lose your competitive edge’

Benefits of a data-driven organization

After completing the previous three steps, we can now centralize and guarantee the quality of our data. Doing this enables us to order, filter and obtain information for the development of advanced analytics, localization of patterns, application of predictive models, and identification of correlations and trends. For example, insights obtained through behavioral data can help us to increase conversion rate by up to 85%.

Relying on a data model and applying technologies (such as machine learning) during a digital marketing campaign enables us to build a robust validation framework – and generate higher quality data. From there, we can refine and improve our model.

We should be aiming to generate increasingly relevant business insights, in addition to sharing access to that information with the rest of the organization, storytelling through data visualization, and ensuring that data is accessible in order to promote a better understanding of our organization and the campaigns we manage.

Note* for the development of this article we have used content published in Rebel thinking and Facebook IQ
Photo by Franki Chamaki on Unsplash

About the author

I have been working in the Digital Industry since the year 2.000. I’m passionate about learning and teaching professionals from different countries and cultures. I’m a people-connector and away from Spain 6 months a year 😉

In IMPACT, we proud ourselves of having the best mentors for the startups that go through our programs.
Salva Suárez is a Specialized mentor for a Korean, an Italian and a Spanish startup from the IMPACT Connected Car acceleration program. He also teaches Digital Strategy in ISDI Spain and Latin America.

His extensive experience goes from working in companies like Domestika and IE Business School, just to name a few and he is Co-Founder, Partner and Managing Director of Good Rebels.

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IMPACT Connected Car, Funding the Movement partner, present at Autonomy Paris 2019 1024 576 IMPACT Accelerator

IMPACT Connected Car, Funding the Movement partner, present at Autonomy Paris 2019

IMPACT Connected Car, Funding the Movement partner, present at Autonomy Paris 2019

  • The European mobility startup acceleration project IMPACT Connected Car will be attending Autonomy (Paris) on the 16th and 17th October at Paris Grand Halle de la Villette.
  • IMPACT Connected Car will hold the Data and Connectivity “Shaping the future of Connected Car views from corps, investors and startups world” and host the Second Pioneer Awards on October 17th.

Barcelona, 15th of October 2019. The coming October 16 and 17th will take place at the Grande Halle de la Villette Paris, Autonomy and the international exhibition of sustainable mobility. The event is intended for professionals in the sector and will gather startups and investors interested in the landscape and future of European mobility.
IMPACT Connected Car startups and partners will showcase their solutions. The following list is a selection of the 31 startups portfolio that can be consulted here:

  1. Xapix (Germany): Xapix is building an orchestration platform for digital mobility services, providing vehicle manufacturers, suppliers, and service providers with ultimate flexibility, speed, and security around data interoperability.www.xapix.io
  2. Eccocar (Spain- Germany): Accelerating through efficiency, the world’s transition to sustainable mobility. Empowering fleet operators to get the full potential of their vehicles with their shared mobility platform. www.eccocar.com
  3. 2Hire (Italy): Technology that connects all kinds of vehicles, allowing remote-controllable interactions and access to parameter readings. 2hire.io
  4. Capricode (Finland): SyncShield secures vehicle connectivity, improves over-the-air management and helps to digitize business processes. www.capricode.com
  5. Better World (France): Leveraging the collective intelligence of drivers to help automotive engineers conceive better cars. www.better-world.io
  6. Spark Horizon (France): In order to accelerate EV adoption, between EV and charging stations. Spark has deployed the first public charging network, sponsored by sustainable brands, at high-traffic locations. www.sparkhorizon.com
  7. BeNomad (France): By enabling accurate energy consumption and EV route planning, BeNomad facilitates the transition towards e-mobility. benomad.com
  8. Parkbob (Austria): Parkbob organizes global parking data and transforms it into actionable information to enable better mobility decisions. www.parkbob.com
  9. xMotion (France): xMotion turns driving data into an opportunity for saving lives. www.xmotion.io/
  10. Parquery (Switzerland): Analysis of images from any camera to detect vehicles and provide real-time results on both parking availability and duration. parquery.com

The project partners attending the event will be, among others, David Seoane, Project Manager  and consultant of IMPACT Connected Car, he has over 10 years experience on Fundraising in EU programmes, including proposal preparation, partner search and networking in INNOVATION funding programmes: H2020, INTERREG, ERASMUS+, LIFE Experience on EU PROJECTS management in such programmes.

Olivier Lenz, programmes director from FIA Region 1, responsible for the consumer protection activities of the FIA in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. He supports the Automobile Clubs from the Region I headquarter in Brussels, Belgium. He manages various aspects of mobility policy work related to connectivity, efficiency and affordability, road safety and environmental protection from the consumer perspective.

Emily Carroll, acceleration manager at ISDI accelerator, has led the business acceleration part of IMPACT Connected Car as well as managing several other public and corporate innovation programs such as MERLIN Proptech Challenge, UNICEF neXst and currently IMPACT EdTech, a new program focused on educational technology. Emily has a degree from the University of Minnesota and a Master’s from ISDI.

IMPACT Connected Car Data & Connectivity Panel 

The panel Data & Connectivity “Shaping the future of Connected Car views from corps, investors and startups world” will take place on Thursday,17 of October, at Stage 2 from 15:00 to 15:35. The discussion will be focused on the future of smart mobility and connected cars. The speakers will give their insights from the corporate, startup, policymakers point of view. They will also announce the 31 best startups of the programme disrupting the mobility sector with their projects. 

The speakers will be Olivier Lenz, FIA Region I Programme Director; Anna Sobczak, European Commission Policy Officer for Clusters and Emerging Industries; Ingrid Sarlandie, Plug and Play Mobility Innovation Manager and Laurent Evain, CMO / CSO of Xee, connected car platform and service marketplace.

Oliver Lenz will give his vision through his experience in connectivity, road safety and environmental protection from a consumer perspective; Ingrid Sarlandie will present her views on the Silicon Valley and Europe mobility startup ecosystem; Laurent Evain, who will address the audience regarding to his expertise as CMO of a connected car company; and Anna Sobczak will give insights related to her work on innovation, industrial change and emerging specialisation in intelligent industries, she will also be moderating the discussion. 

IMPACT Connected Car Pioneer Awards

The Pioneer Award is granted to the most promising startup from the second batch accelerated by IMPACT Connected Car, it will be rewarded with a prize on 15,000€ and the winner will be announced during the ceremony which will take place on October 17th, at Stage 2 starting at 17:15. The winner is chosen based on the achievements after the project’s final review. 

The ceremony and award will be presented by David Seoane, who will explain what IMPACT Connected Car has been during the last 3 years. Then the awarded startup will be granted a 5 minutes pitch on stage and to finalize Virgine Perron, the European Commission officer, will grant the trophy ending the ceremony.

About IMPACT Connected Car

IMPACT Connected Car aimed at creating value link-chains for innovation in the Connected Car open space, with vehicles, infrastructure, device and TelCo interactions, and consumer and business services. Achieved through the acceleration and smartization of over 60 disruptive SMEs. The project distributed €2.1 million funding, equity-free. 

IMPACT Connected Car was led by top players in the fields of innovation and automobiles, including Mobile World Capital Barcelona, ISDI, FundingBox, Ferrovial Servicios, CTAG, FIA, Groupe PSA, the FIWARE Foundation, PARP, Insero, Mov’eo, MSAK, LPNT, Argus, HEVO, Little Electric Car, and Botcar.

This project received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No 731343.

For further information:

Marta Portalés Oliva – Mobile World Capital Barcelona
+34 606 461 225
mportales@mobileworldcapital.com

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Aim, load, fire! 1024 341 IMPACT Accelerator

Aim, load, fire!

Aim, load, fire!

No matter what business you are in, you need clients to sell. Whether your activity focus on B2B, B2C or any other acronyms, you will have to plan and execute different strategies to attract new clients, retain those that you captured already or upgrade them.

From all those activities, bringing new clients, whether they are consumers or other business, is one of the most difficult challenges, as there is no one success formula. Certainly, there are different strategies that worked, have worked and will work with higher or lower results, but only if your potential targets already know your brand and/or service. 

Moreover, does it make sense to apply the same strategies for companies in different markets, different product stages or different industries? At first glance the common sense tells us that it doesn’t sound right. 

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To start with, there are different development stages (Products or Services) focusing and targeting different population segments. As Diffusion of Innovation Theory (DOI) defends innovation expands into a society according to 5 different population groups, as shown in the table above. Those population groups have different interests and needs. According to that theory it makes sense to segment your targets and update your communication strategies.

For instance, if we are a startup pursuing growth and looking to increase our user base or upgrade our service. 

  1. Where do we acquire those users? 
  2. Are we pursuing the right user at the right time? 

Being familiar with DOI is crucial not only for product manager but also to marketers. All stakeholders in any enterprise trying to engage with users, clients or partners should be familiar with DOI. This theory is basically just the concept of opportunity cost of consuming any service or product based on the development phase as well as market knowledge. 

Not all users of yours, whether they are already in your platform or not, develop trust and respect for your service, brand, company at the same speed. This is why it is so important to segment and classify all of those according to what their opportunity cost would be. Once you excel in doing it, marketing and customer success strategies will excel as well, because they will handle specific “timing needs”.

Timing, educational needs or trust will vary from industries, products or regions. However, within that framework your potential target or customer will always be divided in the population groups shown above. Meaning: before planning any strategy, we should think of the characteristics of every single group. That will help us to design and tailor better tactics, sorting out potential customers and indirectly tackle our need to acquire more users and grow the business.

Sort it out Partner – Customer needs & yours will be automatically solved.

Any Startup or any other enterprise should consider its market as following before launching or pushing any service or product.

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  • INNOVATORS – These are people who want to be the first to try the innovation. These people are willing to take risks, and therefore also willing to take the pain in early phases:
    1. Reward their willingness to take the pain, as this could bring them on board for longer, and enhance the word of mouth.
      a) Usually, lower CAC but high retention cost.
  • EARLY ADOPTERS – These are people who represent opinion leaders. They enjoy leadership roles and embrace change opportunities. They are already aware of the need to change and therefore very comfortable adopting new ideas:
    1. Those that kick the breakthrough off, is where the growth comes from.
      a) CAC on this population group increase and on top of that it needs leaders to back up. Therefore, strategies focusing on innovators are still needed.
  • EARLY MAJORITY – These people are rarely leaders, but they do adopt new ideas before the average person. That said, they typically need to see evidence that the innovation works before they are willing to adopt it: 
    1. Strategies such as Business cases generate really positive results.
      a) Mass market strategies and more operational strategies. CAC decrease, although taking a look at Churn Rate is crucial.
  • LATE MAJORITY – These people are skeptical of change and will only adopt an innovation after it has been tried by the majority: 
    1. Strategies to appeal to this population include information as well as branding.
      a) High cost generates low incremental results.
  • LAGGARDS – These people are bound by tradition and very conservative. They are very skeptical of change and are the hardest group to bring on board:
    1. Strategies to appeal to this population include statistics, fear appeals, and pressure from people in the other adopter groups.

With these points in mind, designing and thinking how to sort out customer needs and how to pay off their opportunity cost, would help you to get better impact on your marketing strategies. Moreover, having DOI in mind will let you figure out what your CAC or LTV  will look like.

Photo by Karine Germain on Unsplash

About the author

I started my career working in high demanding roles learning from clients, managers & C levels. I love the entrepreneurial and startup ecosystem, which shape and build the future innovation above and beyond. Having 15+ years of experience in different fields, what I bring to the table is a diverse and transversal point of view. My mind is always working to solve potential issues in particular situations and proposing different actionable alternatives.

All in all, I have developed a personal, deep understanding of the skills that any company needs to ensure that their teams deliver and build value following the company’s mission. I truly believe that why is more important that what.

I am driven by curiosity which can be demonstrated through my ventures in professional, volunteering and my personal life.

In IMPACT, we proud ourselves of having the best mentors for the startups that go through our programs.
Ángel Araujo is a Specialised & Follow-up mentor for at least 10 startups from the IMPACT Growth & IMPACT Connected Car acceleration programs.

His extensive experience goes from working in companies like Google and Booking.com, just to name a few and he is one of the founding partners of unlockmanagement.co, angel@unlockmanagement.com

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How Ontruck is killing it at product development 1024 767 IMPACT Accelerator

How Ontruck is killing it at product development

A few tips to ace product development

Original Twitter thread here

I was talking to a CPO and a senior Project Manager of a startup from California that just raised a round of more than $200 million. One hour into the conversation, one of them said to me: “It seems that you have done all you can do,” with a sigh of resignation at not being able to give me much more advice.

We might not be doing that bad here in Spain 😉

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By popular request, I am going to share a few aspects of product development in which I think we are doing a pretty good damn job:

  1. Having product teams with clear responsibilities. It must be clear who owns each KPI. Set quarterly goals (OKRs is one way). Review them bi-weekly. Make the dependencies clear.[1]
  2. Give more responsibility to the team, let designers and engineers be the ones who solve problems and define solutions. It is not the stakeholder’s or PM’s task. The PM is the ultimate decision-maker in vision and scope.[2]
  3. Invest a lot of effort in understanding your users; visit and talk with your customers every week. Shadow your clients for a day to understand their internal pains. Validate your hypotheses and prototypes with them.[3]
  4. Sharpen and reduce the scope as much as you can. Validate the hypotheses one by one by launching phases. Talk to your customers, don’t just trust the data. Designers and engineers will get nervous, but it’s ok; the important thing is to find out quickly whether you are heading in the right direction.
  5. Involve the rest of the departments from the beginning. Learn from them. Share your ideas and prototypes to get feedback and be challenged. Don’t be a lab rat. Work as an operations or sales agent to understand their pains.
  6. In companies where billing is complex, the product must be nearby because at the end of the chain is where you can clearly see the failures in the process (sales agreements that went through but were not documented properly, poor communication by ops…)

By the way, the other day I did a podcast, tackling these and other key points such as team philosophy and more. It’s a good companion to this post!

PODCAST

[1] https://nerds.ontruck.com/from-six-weeks-roadmaps-to-okrs-2e0dc42aadd3
[2] https://nerds.ontruck.com/team-led-groomings-e7e3cd106427?source=collection_home—6——2———————–
[3] https://nerds.ontruck.com/go-faster-by-investing-time-on-research-and-scope-1af622ce3bb?source=collection_home—4——1———————–

Photo by Denys Nevozhai on Unsplash

About the author

Javier Escribano is currently co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Ontruck, a digital road freight transport company. Previously, he was co-founder and CPO at Touristeye (a travel startup acquired by Lonely Planet. He has an Information & Technology Management Master at IIT Chicago, and a Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Degree at UPM Madrid.

In IMPACT, we proud ourselves of having the best mentors for the startups that go through our programs. Javier is a Specialized & Follow-up Mentor in IMPACT.

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xMotion – Disrupting the check engine light 1024 683 IMPACT Accelerator

xMotion – Disrupting the check engine light

xMotion - Disrupting the check engine light

Modern cars are more computerized than ever. Though with all the technology going into cars today, why isn’t there a better technology to monitor the fatigue points on a vehicle?

Broken Car GIF - Find & Share on GIPHY

With over 30yrs+ experience in the Automotive Industry, xMotion’s co-founders felt they could build a solution that would make vehicle maintenance more transparent and affordable. So in October of 2018, they sat down together and founded xMotion on a simple idea – to disrupt the check engine light.

While working on a prototype of the algorithm for brake pad prediction, they realized that in order to be successful, they would have to build a platform that was device agnostic, so they could work with any Tier 1 or OEM’s embedded firmware as well as aftermarket OBD dongles.

With drive-by-wire technology becoming more prevalent, the need to independently monitor vehicle components in real-time is increasingly important for safety reasons. Therefore xMotion identified over 200+ data points on a vehicle that provide embedded messages on the vehicle health. Coming from the industry, the founders knew that these data points could be organized in meaningful ways and shared with the car owner. Though unlike a computer, vehicle diagnostics aren’t typically shared with the driver. The challenge was to make it easy for the driver to understand their vehicle’s data. To solve this, xMotion created a Mobile App that provides real-time indicators of the vehicle health for brakes, tires, steering systems, and batteries.

Today there are over 5,000+ registered users on the platform. With ample opportunity in front of them, xMotion is currently focusing on rolling out their platform for roadside assistance operators both in Europe and the U.S. To keep aligned with the vision of xMotion – to disrupt the check engine light – the company is creating a ecosystem of garages that will provide discounts and cashback rewards for using the platform.

Things move fast in the startup world. In the years to come xMotion will build a full digital twin of the vehicle and provide car owners with additional access to their vehicle data. This technology, according to xMotion’s founders “Will be a gamechanger” for the automotive industry.

*We asked Thurston for a team picture, this is what he sent XD

Featured image by Free Photos from Pixabay

About the author

Thurston Adams is a Paris-based entrepreneur with a successful history in taking an automotive start-up company from idea to commercialization.  The foundation of xMotion is inspired by Thurston’s belief that “Modern cars are increasingly computerized” and that the connected car has many fatigue points that can be monitored and tracked in order to prevent vehicle accidents. His passion for emerging technology in the Automotive Industry has led him to create xMotion. Thus xMotion’s vision is to transform the automotive industry by creating a Vehicle Health Monitoring Platform for connected and self-driving cars.  According to Thurston, the mission of xMotion is to Disrupt the Check Engine Light.

In IMPACT, we believe that startups are the ones changing this world. Their story is content worth sharing.
xMotion is part of our IMPACT Connected Car Acceleration Program. Thurston Adams and Laurent Dunys, co-founders, working alongside with Mark Howell are indeed the ones disrupting the check engine light.

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