Startup

Hi everyone, I hope you are not expecting something too formal for this blog post. My aim is to start a series about the relaunch of our startup Elokenz. My goal is to share insider view of what it is to re-build a project on the ashes of the previous version.

What went wrong on the first version?

Well, in the first version of Elokenz nothing really went wrong (at the time of publishing, the tool I’m talking about is still in production). We had early traction, organic customers (word of mouth + interest got us the first dozen of paying customers for free).

We finally made it: we found our podcast’s name. Instead of a basic “Track our Startup” we will call our series “The Appetizer — A fresh taste of startups”. Here is the first episode:

Let me tell you that writing content that will showcase your brand in a foreign language is not easy… and when you need to talk it’s even worse. If you add the fact that I am French (and you probably know how bad French are in foreign languages…) then you might understand why it took me so long to release a public video for Elokenz. However, I have wanted to share small bits of stories about how we are building Elokenz for a long time. It all started with the newsletter sent by John Hingley (founder and ex-CEO of Dasheroo). He was committed to summarize every week in a newsletter called ‘Track our Startup’ (and a few days later he publishes the newsletter content on Linkedin Pulse). Long story short, I felt it was great to share an insider view of how the startup was growing and decided to do the same.

After working with my co-founder, Fanny Arles, for one year, we decided that it was a good time for us to “discover” our company culture as we will soon be expanding our team and want to pave the road for the future and hire like-minded candidates. Many times companies fail not because of the product, but because of employees or the core team’s misalignment of core values. Until recently, I had only heard and read about the concept of company culture. I never had to express it with words and jot it down on paper.

Three years ago was an important period of my life. I was in my final PhD year, and I decided to create my first SaaS product. This first experience taught me an amazing amount of things. I had no pressure to do it since my PhD was still going on, and it was more like a side project. The project crashed more or less at the end of 2014 for several reasons. Today, I’m starting over and, for the second time, I’m working a product I desperately love : Elokenz.

Je reprends la plume délaissée depuis un certain temps pour vous présenter un évènement auquel je viens d’assister à Marseille. Il s’agit du Web In Provence , un apéro networking dédié aux acteur du web en … Provence. L’idée était d’associer un apéro avec une conférence sur une tendance montante d’internet. Pour cette première édition, les organisateurs (Florent Hernandez et Alexandre Durain) avaient choisi comme thème le “Conception Web et Multi Device” . L’invité de cet conférence était Stéphane Martin senior product designer chez Stack Overflow/Stack Exchange (la plateforme de questions/réponses dédiée aux programmeurs créé par Jeff Atwood).

If you never heard about the 30-days startup challenge that I am taking, then I suggest you to read the following list of articles. Today we will disclose the business model behind WordiZ, the application we are creating. By doing this, I am of course aware of confidential issues, but I have the feeling that people tend to be lazy and stealing ideas take some energy. Since I am also some steps ahead from I will describe here, the concept given is the one I wrote down 2 weeks ago, and it as slightly evolved.

If you arrive on this post by a direct link or from Google, I suggest you to read the last two posts on the 30days startup challenge : here and here.

Now, let’s go to the main topic of my article : how to design a logo for the startup. Well, it’s not going to be a nice tutorial like the ones you can find on Smashing Magazine. Here I won’t give you any method, just some tools I used to design my logo.

For those who don’t know about the 30-days Startup Challenge, please have a look at my explanation here. The post of today will explain in detail how I selected the name of the startup, and what had been achieved in the last 4 days. We are indeed already reaching day-4 and I have the feeling that many things happened.

Initial feedback

You have been almost 300 people to read the first article (and I got no comment via the blog). I exchanged many emails since last Monday, and I should say that the overall feedback is really positive and motivating for me. Thanks to the first article, 10 more people signed up to the newsletter, which is quite a good number. If you want to receive the last updates, I strongly suggest you to do the same :

I have not been writing on my blog for many months now. This was probably to learn more and more from online readings and share experience with friends. As you may know, I am still working on PhD degree (Italy//Spain) in the field of nanotechnologies. However, I recently decided to try a quick and intensive challenge. Let’s call it the «  30-days startup challenge  ».

30-days startup challenge

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