Category: insights

Digital Manufacturing and Prototyping for Industrial Startups

During the summer of 2019, I had the opportunity to attend a course on Fusion360 in MotionLab Berlin. It started as a Saturday evening entertainment, but many months later, I’m still a Coworker in MotionLab. It is a factory/maker space in Berlin, the dream for an adult kid, full of toys like 3D printers, laser

Hallo Welt!

A Hello World! is not a usual post for a blog established 17 years ago, but it’s true. It’s the beginning of the blog in German. I started in July 2004 in Spanish, and in August 2012 in English, but I never mentioned it. It was just two different audience and two channels. But now I

Berlin is the New “Start-Up City”: Market and Trends: Why? How? Who?

I wrote about this topic some time ago, but it’s a good moment to summarize and update. Germany is an attractive place to start a company with Berlin leading the way. However, the Startup ecosystem did not occur overnight. Today, Germany has around 1800-3000 startups, 50+ accelerators, and 400+ active angels with investments growing every

Validation: tools for prototyping

In recent articles I talked about MVPs and prototyping, explaining What to do. But we will need to know How to do it, and we will need some tools. The good news is that no technical skills are required and that many of them are free or really affordable. I consider a good investment of time learning

MVPs: A confusing name for a needed tool. Examples and real cases

After the theory, let’s apply it to some real projects: Physical device, hardware product. I had been working with many of them at hardware.co. Let’s think about a device with some technology behind it. Experiments: You can run many experiments to find the perfect size or design. You can also present the potential customer different

MVPs: A confusing name for a needed tool. Concepts

Is one, probably the critical step in Lean Startup methodology. It’s needed to check the validations and the interaction with customers and users. And together with the price, it’s essential to understand the ‘Product-Market Fit.’ The trick is the word ‘product’ inside. Many entrepreneurs understand it like “the product = my baby” and all the

Cultural differences and how to deal with them

In internationalization of companies there is always a layer of cultural behavior that affects business and personal relationships. Many times we don’t speak about it because it’s difficult to assign general rules. This is because each person is different, because it can be politically incorrect, and because it’s also really easy to drop into stereotypes

Doing business in Berlin IX: final thoughts

The activity in Berlin has been relevant during the last 5 years, and now it has become one of the main hubs for startups in Europe, fighting for number one with London. And not only for startups. Berlin is becoming the center of Germany for “digitization,” the movement that connects startups and innovation with big