Product Hunt MVD 2019 — Campus Party Edition.
Product Hunt-ing in Uruguay
Think of the Agile method of product development: a new sprint requires user input, correct? Each new stage requires some developing according to user feedback.
The Product Hunt online community offers exactly that a two way conversation between creators and users. It sets the right kind of environment where you can learn from your customer, adjust your product and talk to experts if needed.
Think of it as an enriched test environment that provides the right kind of exposure.
1950labs is a proud organizer of the Product Hunt meetup in Montevideo, Uruguay (we call it Product Hunt MVD). We’ve been holding it since 2017 (check out our first edition here). We sponsor the community by selecting those local tech startups that are disruptive and enhance our human abilities. It is structured up in meetups, where we set up the environment that startups need to launch their creations.
This first quarter we held our third Product Hunt MVD edition at the Campus Party in Punta del Este. We had an amazing weekend, but the startups stole the spotlight of that Saturday's evening.
Check them out:
Mark Robots
Mark Robots prepares kids for the future. They offer an excellent educational tool that integrates Robotics as school discipline. Kids learn to program hardware boards naturally using scratch.io.
Markrobots offers to incorporate Programming within the learning schedules.
Like it or not, it is a must learn for kids today as it was a flower arrangement for young girls a hundred years ago.
Their disruptive idea began with Lego, but somewhere in the process, they believed that open source hardware technologies offered better opportunities than Lego’s. The resulting prototype MARK UNO ROBOT. It was designed for the use of elementary school kids all up to high school for learning purposes.
You get the whole kit for your kid. It provides the pieces, the start up guide and all of the support you need to program the Robot. It is based on open source Arduino technology and it is completely customizable. Arduino has a huge community with a large amount of open documentation that you can use for free so you’ll never get lost or bored. This is a collaborative modern learning technique where the youngster enters real engineering, mechanics, programming, science, and logic.
“Do not worry if you do not understand some of these terms, little by little you will begin to familiarize yourself with them.”.
I must confess, the pictures, and the brainy challenge it had me rushing to dust off my old Mecano.
Though Arduino boards might have some energy defects here and there… Markrobots engineers have thought this out. Custom Robo parts can be 3D printed (super-dooper disruptive alert here), plus, they are expandable on demand. Students are able to design and print their own pieces, so they can enhance the Arduino kit with sensors and actuators.
Sagal.io
If you have an online catalog on a hosted e-commerce site and it’s time to renew your products, after so many CTRL+C and CTRL+V you might end up hating the process. Alejandro Sagal had this issue as well and decided he wanted to provide a solution for massive product upload and save his digital fingerprints for other life purposes.
Sagal.io is a platform that allows you to upload a thousand products per minute on to your e-commerce sites at the same time. Call your favorite developer or tech person for challenging stuff not copy pasting.
The platform is easy to use, it synchronizes your stock levels and tracks your shipments while integrating with Mercado Libre, SAP, Magento, WooCommerce and Google Drive. It’s not an expensive tool at all plus it saves repetitive and subject to fail manual work of your employee while reducing your uploading costs.
“Product Hunt meetups are the best place to feel nostalgic about your company. They help you organize your ideas, and lay on the table everything that has and could change about the product, the company and yourself.”
Alejandro understands that if you have the power of good networking you have the ability to get noticed. Maybe your meetup colleagues will be your next big client? Who knows who can you meet…
Sigh…working with industry giants was no piece of cake, if a partner decided to change how they present items to the customer, Sagal’s code needed to revamp itself fast . They learned this the hard way with Mercadolibre.com. The commerce giant decided to change their operative and almost 80% of their customers left overnight. They decided to not allow HTML templates on their site and therefore the functionality Sagal offered on that purpose was not functional anymore.
But, their vision stood upright. Sagal knew that what their product could do was more than a HTML template editor (with all my respects to HTML). They switched their audience and listened. They concentrated on their real clients, those that needed their core product and prepared for them.
Flager.io
I am not a big fan of Tinder, however, the swipe left and swipe right thing I love.
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Flager.io is makes your product campaign a digital, trackable and memorizable entertaining experience. Make digital marketing content easy and impelling. No worries, if you’re like me and your talent for tasteful design is secretly guarded in Asgaard, this tool is the power Tesseract.
Flager.io lived the Agile product process in 3D. They launched with an idea only, a very basic and manual prototype, but revamped it with every new product presentation.
In the beginning, a raw Flager.io version lived a captive and simple life in a pen drive. It took more than a stroll in Montevideo, visiting agencies and leads, nurturing from requirements until one day, a pen drive was not enough but a database that stores valuable information for the company. Started out as a fun iframe and it is now a complete content marketing information system that captures all of its user's information.
Once the final version was finally out, their business needed to change the business need they were targeting. From a simple social media marketing template to a social and demo capturing tool! With Flager.io you can translate your digital marketing vision into a tool and publish it on any social media platform while tracking your customer’s interests and demographics.
Is there another easier way to engage your customer while they spend time on media?. Talk about targeting optimization to its highest extent.
The Product Hunt MVD meetup was the first time they presented their product.
“It helped us to understand how we can communicate what the product does without being able to see it”.
With no doubt Alejandro’s team is extremely organized efficient, the meetup was their chance to prepare their first presentation and hence it was their first success. Networking during Product Hunt MVD meetups was an essential part to theirs and everybody’s victory path.
Get Product Hunt-ed!
What other best place to start besides the Product Hunt community? It is a space where you can spread your work, capture customer insights and start business network while gaining valuable feedback from customers.
Now, don’t make the mistake of rushing into the site and publishing all of your endeavours for there is an algorithm behind it and your exposure might persist in time, or could easily disappear. I’ll get on to a few tips later on this.
Get familiarized with meetups or similar circles. They are meant for you to meet people, that right kind of people, those people that can take your business to the next level without knocking on unnecessary, unhealthy and tiresome doors.
Think about it, you can be the next in line if you are submerged in the right kind of environment. In other words, getting noticed with the right kind of audience. In Alejandro Sagal’s words:
“you never know who you might meet”
However, if you wish to go down with Product Hunt:
- Do your homework, market research, and target audience.
- Be prepared to change your product, start over, cry a lot, laugh even more. Expect no sleeping maybe and spending a few hours everyday engaging and networking.
- Be your creative, empathetic and professional self at all times. Interact, be open-minded, its a community, imagine you are talking to friends.
Getting involved is the best way to get noticed
Feeling a bit shy? Not sure how to begin? This article is awesome but you want to talk to someone? Ask the organizer himself @Leonel More. He scouts Uruguayan startups for the Product Hunt MVD meetup.
The best tip we can give, don’t forget you are a human being. Talk to real people. Go places.
At 1950labs we believe in distributed teams for building high-quality software. If you are looking for an alternative to contractors or traditional US vendors, write us to hello@1950Labs.com to start talking. — We work on your time zone.
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