We passed 2 terrific days sharing dinner, stage, experiences and many other things with the finalists of the #CICD Startup Competition 2013 in San Sebastian.

The competition started many months before, when we had to send our proposal to the jury. After some weeks of uncertainty and nervous we received an e-mail from the organization telling us we were one of the ten finalists. After that, a couple of weeks of frenetic work preparing the presentation, investigating each minimum data that the jury could ask us and a few hours feeling a bit stupid front of the mirror ;-).
It was our first experience showing our startup to investors and they were of first level (Inma Martinez, Aquilino Peña, Laura Urquizu, Nacho de Pinedo,Luis Gosalbez, Igor Marroquín and Javier Martin).
Everything started the night before with a networking dinner (finalists and judges), it was fantastic. We met a lot of interesting people and very interesting projects too.
On Thursday morning we started an intensive day showing our presentations to the jury. We had 10 minutes to present and other 10 minutes for questions.
The questions of the judges were very impressive and at the same time they made us feel comfortable in every moment. The level of our competitors was really high. Definitively, we assume it had to be very difficult for them to decide the winners.

This was the final result:

First prize: ByHours
Second prize: Chicfy
Third prize:  Mystoremate

Entrepreneurial Spirit prize: Quoders Mobile (on the left you can see our award :-). A "txapela".

Without any doubt the most important thing was the networking. We met a lot of interesting people and we learn a lot talking (listening) to our competitors (we are really proud to share the final with all of them) and the judges. As we said before, there was a very high level and we could learn from all of them, some of them had bright ideas, other made fantastic presentations. And, of course, we took note of all the questions of the jury people, not only to us but also to the other competitors.

Definitively it has been a fantastic week for us. Our app Madrid Bus got 5000 downloads on Google Play and we just uploaded a new release v0.99.6 Beta.
From past August we received very good feedback from our users (almost 4,5 rating) but most of them repeated the same comment: "If it had real time connection it would be perfect". We love to hear our users and thanks to EMT Madrid (Open Data) we have had the chance to include Real time connection on this new version.
Madrid Bus users are telling us all the time they love the app basically because it's extremely easy to use, so we had the challenge to include the new feature (real time) without impact in the usability. At the same time we want to keep the offline navigation (provide lines, stops, estimated time arrival...) so we decided to do it transparent for our users. So, it works very easy, when the user go to the required Stop screen if the device is connected to Internet it provides real time data, in case it's not connected to Internet in that moment the app provides estimated time data (calculation based on official timetable). It's very easy to know whether you are receiving real time data or not. When the app is connected to Internet in every places where it provides real time info you can see the text "Powered by EMT" and the EMT logo.
In the screenshots below you can see a couple of examples:

We have fixed some minor issues too, one of them was requested in a comment by one of our users in Google Play, It consisted of when you closed the app it continued using the GPS and therefore wasting battery.
We hope you enjoy and recommend our Android app Madrid Bus and as always please don't hesitate to contact our team for new suggestions.
If you want more details about Madrid Bus you can find more details here.

One year ago we posted an entry on this blog reporting info about our Android app BilbaoBus and its statistics.
Let's review our statistics one year later and so we'll see not only BilbaoBus evolution but also the Spanish market evolution (BilbaoBus is a transportation local app and 99% of the users are located in Spain).

Let's start with today's numbers. If we would like to repeat the same title than one year ago it would be: BilbaoBus Report - 17 months - 6 releases - 15506 downloads

During this last year (from April 12 to April 13) we were focused on Bilbao Bus for 3 months and the past July 12 we uploaded our last "big" release to Google Play (v0.9.4), the following versions would include only small improvements. After this, we were involved in other projects and Bilbao Bus was growing in the market "alone". In that moment it had a very good rating (4,6), it was well positioned on Google Play and it was the first transportation app in Bilbao (in downloads) for Android.

If we compare the numbers with the statistics showed one year ago in our first post, we notice the following things:

• We are keeping a constant downloads from the users (about 5000 downloads each 6 months)
• In the last year we have decreased the rate between downloads and active users. One year ago we were had 67% and now we are in 50,30%. Anyway, the important question is which of the 7800 active users are using the app regularly (we'll see in a future post).
• The "Install per month" graph gives us an interesting data. Checking the numbers from Dec 11th to April 12th vs Dec 12th to April 13th, we notice that they have the same performance, they increase from Dec to Jan and in the following months there's a constant decreased of downloads.
  

One year ago 70,97% of our users had a Gingerbread today we down to 49,09%. Obviously, the users moved to ICS and Jelly Bean. Anyway, it looks like the penetration of these version in Spain is a bit slower than the rest of the world for transport apps.
Regarding devices we see how Samsung gets 7 devices in the Top Ten. But there's other important data to take into account: the last year only 38,71% of the devices were in "Others" but now it grows to 59,34%. It means that device market continue breaking up in multiple manufacturer.

We decreased a bit the average rating from 4,6 to 4,36, it's not very significant due to the increment of users but we'll keep an eye on it.
The most negative opinion from our users are always relative to the real time data. As we explained in the app info, the app is not showing real time because it's not connected to BilboBus servers. We were in contact with Bilbao council to get connection with their servers without success.  We provide info based on official timetable and we CALCULATE the time based on that info.
You can read users opinion about Bilbao bus app on this link.

If you follow our blog, maybe you are thinking we are not moving too much in the last 3 months and nothing further from the truth. 
We've been applying for a couple of acceleration programs and now we would like to share with you our experience.

One company, organization, business angel or a group of them open a process to help a few startups to accelerate their business (See Seed accelerator in Wikipedia for more info). These are the normal steps:

• Open the selection (Startups apply)
• The selected startups receive some funding (in exchange for a %)
• Work during few months in a free co-working space with other startups and with some mentors
• At the end of the program, startups get a chance to pitch to top angel investors and venture capitalists for funding. 

Obviously, these companies are not NGOs, so the reason why they provide you with (some) money, support and mentoring is because they hope to get a revenue. So, the last point is really important for them (and for you of course :-D).

We are focus in Public transport applications so, of course, our idea, our business model is based on a transit solution. One of the thinks that we learned is that the idea is not so important. 
You can see in the picture below a summary of our solution, in a future post we will explain  it carefully.

We are working almost a year on our transport apps but taking into account that our dedication is not 100% to Quoders yet, our milestones take longer than we wish.
We had the idea, we had the knowledge to do it but we hadn't the time.
One day reading a blog we hear about accelerator programs and we thank they could be a solution for us.

We started applying to Startupbootcamp for Berlin. We had to fill an online form about our idea, the team, etc... Also, we also showed them an application (they like to see at least a prototype). They contacted us asking also for a short video where the whole team (if possible) simply introduce ourselves (1-2 minutes long with a webcam).  
One month later Alex Farcet (Startupbootcamp Director) informed us we have passed to the next round. We were selected between more than 300 startups. At that moment only 50 startups continue "playing", the next test was an interview by Skype with Alex Farcet. From the 50 teams interviewed, 20 would be selected to participate at the 2 Day Selection Event in Berlin, and 10 would be the winners.
We had the call with Alex and one of the surprising things is that he asked a lot more about the team and our commitment that any other thing. It was a very interesting chat of around 30 minutes.

In the middle of the process of Startupbootcamp we found information about another very important accelerator program in Valencia (Spain) so we applied too.
In this case we had to sent some documentation. From PlugandPlay sent us a template to fill out. It was some kind of business plan :-)

We were selected for the second phase. And they asked us:

• A powerpoint presentation in english (maximun 20 slides) selling our project and with an specific point of the project status and the metrics.
• Access to a beta or a demo (at least in case we have nothing yet).
• In case it was a hardware project (it wasn't our case) a video with a demo (with as much details as possible).

They even passed us a presentation example, really good, to be honest, so let us share it with you too.
At the end we were called for the third and last phase (more than 150 startups applied and only 10 were on this round). After that, they had to select 4-5 startups for the acceleration program.
Juan  Luis Hortelano (PlugAndPlay director in Spain and one of the most important bloggers in Spain) contacted us in order to have an interview by Skype.
We had the interview with Juan Luis and other 3 colleagues from PlugAndPlay. Again, they focused a lot on the team and the commitment. Of course, they also asked about the product and the business model. The duration of the call was about 45 minutes.

Startupbootcamp: We weren't selected for the 2 Day Selection Event in Berlin. In this case we didn't receive any kind of feedback why we weren't selected between the 20 finalists.
Anyway, we are happy to be between the first 50 from more than 350 startups from all parts the world.

PlugandPlayAccelerator: We weren't selected either. Again, to be between the 10 finalist from more than 150 was a bittersweet experience. The good news is that Juan Luis Hortelano provided us with feedback and coming from a person with so many experience we think it's a good idea to have them into account. This is more or less a translation of his constructive feedback (let us keep some secrets ;-):

• We like the team and the project in general terms.
• It's not so clear the business model. It is not providing a clear focus. Also, you will need a lot of resource to escalate the consultancy part and this is not what Plug&Play is looking for.
• There are a lot of competency in transit apps and you are at risk that Google try to "eat" all that market in any moment (with Google Transit).
• The team is scattered and some of you are working yet.

We had to dedicate a lot of time and effort to apply to these programs. Not because they requested us lot of paperwork, that was the easiest part to be honest. In order to be able to answer the questions, prepare the presentations, etc... it's necessary to work a lot in your idea and focus a lot in the risks, the Strengths, Weaknesses, etc... 
Everybody in the team must to take a stance, it sounds like something easy but it isn't.

Ok, let's go with the summary, is it positive to apply to one of these accelerate program?

Positive:

• You must to prepare some documentation and presentations, this is very good because you are obligated to put it on a paper.
• They ask you a lot of interesting questions that maybe you didn't, so you must to think in your idea from a different perspective.
• They give you a third party vision of your project. A clean vision. Many times, we were so concentrated in our idea that we didn't spend a minute to know what could think other people about it.
• We had to do a very hard job in order to align the whole team.
• They ask you about the money, the business, etc... so it's a good chance to think it your idea can provide revenue or it only will do a better world ;-)

Negative:

• In our case nothing was negative, maybe to be so close to get it the both times. We felt like the guys that are the 4th in an Olimpic Games, you know, so close of the medals and so far from the glory. 

DEFINITIVELY YES.

Maybe, after reading the post you are thinking a lot of effort and poor results, but we see the things in a different way.

Thanks to this job we have thought a lot in our product. We have analyzed the strengths, weakness , we have discussed about the future.
Also, we have received very interesting feedback from people with a lot of experience on Internet and Startups and we have taken note.
We have learnt during the process and we've done self-criticism.
And finally, we have known each other a lot better and we are a better team no.

So if you are asking if it worth the effort for you team and/or your idea, from our perspective the answer is YES, ABSOLUTELY.

Maybe we are not the best to explain what is needed to get accepted when we didn't get it.

If you look what they are looking for, you will notice it's very similar:

Startupbootcamp: 5 Tips to Get Accepted

1. Be 100% Committed
Joining Startupbootcamp requires total focus and availability. The rest of your life — from jobs to studies to, yes, your social life — has to be on hold.
2. Be a Team
We love teams who have done stuff together before – another startup, being colleagues, or just knowing each other really well. Startupbootcamp will put on tons of pressure and tension. We look for tight teams who can handle it.
3. Be Coachable
Of course your idea and product are brilliant. But can you listen to (often contradictory) input, see the wood for the trees and act on the best advice for you?
4. Be Resilient
You and your idea will be questioned, argued with and pushed around. You have to be determined, unstoppable.
5. Have a track record
This may be your first startup. But what have you achieved before that’s truly impressive?

Plug&Play Valencia: Assestment
- You have a company or you are working on it
- You have at least a developer
- You are looking for funding
- You have a product or service that can be tested, checked. Not only a business plan on a paper.
- Someone in the team is able to talk english (this one is from Spanish perspective)
- The project must be international and you would like to go to Silicon Valley.

Maybe you didn't notice one thing yet. It was surprising for us in the beginning, they don't ask about THE IDEA. How is it possible? Isn't THE IDEA the most important thing? 

Perhaps, haven't all of the entrepreneurs the best idea in the world (that anybody thought before us)? DEFINITIVELY, not for them. The most important thing for them is the COMMITMENT. And if you think about that 5 minutes you will probably agree with them. Would you lend your money to someone who doesn't believe 120% in his/her project?

And the second important thing is THE TEAM. It should be a complementary team (better if you have a developer and a marketing guy than two developers, etc...).
During both interviews they pushed us a lot about our commitment and also a lot about the team, our rèsumè, how did we meet each other, our relationship, who is taking care of each part of the project. 
We talked about 70% of the time about commitment and team and 30% about the business plan and the idea.
The idea is not the important thing, it's the EXECUTION, that's the step where fail most of us.

And finally THE PROJECT. Regarding this point it's important that you are able to show how you and them are going to get money with it. It's a "silly" detail but they are not NGOs, they are assuming a big risk giving you money in exchange for "a hope". 
So, you must prove you are not "a hope", you are "a reality", and they will have a revenue for each $ they invest on your idea (and of course thanks to that the world will be a bit better ;-D).

El pasado 13 de Agosto publicamos en Google Play Madrid Bus (aplicación no oficial de transporte para la Comunidad de Madrid).
El día 14 se envió por parte de Quoders un comunicado de prensa a los principales medios de Madrid indicando la salida al Market de manera gratuita de la aplicación y contando como suele ser habitual en estos casos las prestaciones de la misma. 
Como se ve en la imagen, el día 15 ABC se hace eco de la noticia y, por desgracia por un error de interpretación vinculan el desarrollo de la aplicación a la EMT.

La nota de prensa hacía mención al carácter no oficial de la aplicación en la siguiente frase: "Existen muchas aplicaciones en el mercado de transporte público pero MadridBus no es una aplicación más con los horarios de los autobuses de la EMT de Madrid (aplicación no oficial). MadridBus va más allá. "

El día 16 por la mañana es cuando en Quoders somos conscientes de que se ha publicado la noticia con la errata. Por eso, en ese mismo instante (a las 9:39 a.m.), se envía un desmentido al ABC indicandoles que no es una aplicación oficial tal y como se indicaba en la Nota de prensa.

Cual sería nuestra sorpresa cuando a las 13:01 del día 16 en lugar de modificar sencillamente la noticia o indicar que hubo un error de interpretación, ABC indica que la EMT se desmarca de la aplicación gratuita para Android y además indica "La Empresa Municipal de Transportes (EMT) se ha desmarcado de esta iniciativa y asegura que dicha información se ha publicado sin su consentimiento. "
No sabemos a qué información se refieren, si quieren dar a entender que Quoders ha utilizado el nombre de la EMT es totalmente falso y si así se lo han transmitido a la EMT entendemos que lo desmintieran.

Obviamente desde Quoders no podemos aceptar lo que se dá a entender con el titular ya que el daño que puede hacer en nuestra credibilidad puede tener un impacto muy grande.

This is a new transport app for Android devices that provides info about the lines, stops and timetable of buses in Madrid (EMT). It's a FREE APP.

Why is this app different or better from the dozens of apps in the market?

• It's extremely easy to use. You don't need to know what line you need, where is the stop, NOTHING. You simply say where you want to go and the app will calculate the closest bus stop and the line you need to take. That's all.
  
• It's in 5 languages (English, French, German, Portuguese and Spanish). We want tourists, foreigns, Erasmus ;-) to use the app too.

On Nov 29, 2011 Quoders started a fantastic adventure with BilbaoBus. It was a different product (after Archer Master), a different market, so we hadn't any idea what would happen. In less than one year we have something in the market very close to the app that we dreamed, probably better, thanks to the advice and support of our users.
A few months ago we noticed that we were spending too much time for one app in order to get the quality that we wanted and it was bad for the business ;-).

And here is the elephant in the room, if you have a look to BilbaoBus and MadridBus you will see they are very similar, in fact, they have the same core app. But both of them have a very important difference in the backend. We use General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) as source data for MadridBus. GTFS is an standard format proposed and supported by Google and it's being used right now for almost 500 cities in the world. It means that once we complete the beta for MadridBus and the users gave us their approve we are in a position to raise hundreds of transport apps in the world. But this is material for other Post in the future :-).

If you already know BilbaoBus then you are ready to use MadridBus. In other case you can find more details about MadridBus on this page.

We have delayed for more than 4 months from version 0.99.3 to this one but we think the wait was worth it. 

We have introduced a lot of improvements on this version and most of them in the frontend so we hope you enjoy them ;-)  This new version can be downloaded from Google Play.

We have changed the information button (on right-top corner) to include Language selection and About options following  Ice Cream style guide.
We have updated the summer timetable published by BilboBus a week ago. 

We have done a outstanding work here. We have included swype to move from Day lines to Night lines and we have added a Search Engine

The most important feature on this version. We have added a new list view for the stops of a line. It means that now when you press on a line you can see the stops in a list or in the map (like previous versions).
We've also added a search box for stops and a button that easily let you change the direction of the line to see the outward and return.
And finally we've included the transfers for each stop, very useful info without any doubt.

We are providing more info in a neater screen by splitting it up into three tabs: info, timetable and map.

• Info: Show the next bus estimated arrival in minutes (This is only an estimation because the app is not connected to BilboBus GPS system). It also shows the bus transfers available.
• Timetable: Shows the timetable ;-)
• Map: Show the map and street view 

We received feedback from some users remarking that favorites feature in the previous version wasn't intuitive enough. Therefore, we've changed the interface in order to make it easy for our users to add and remove favorite stops from the Stops, Favorites and Stops-Details screen. We've done that because it's one of the key features of the application. 

Also, we have included the estimated time for the next bus in this screen to save one additional click to the users.

We've added a new column on the left with the star, so now the user can remove a stop from the list with just one tap.

Currently we have more than 6.000 downloads and a 4.5 average rate. We think this new version has enough improvements to achieve 10.000 downloads after the summer and the most important point is that we are very close to the quality product we were looking for. So, if our users support this new version as much as we hope, it will be the moment to start to think in other cities and other countries ;-)

We are very close to complete our last sprint before releasing a new version of BilbaoBus, in this case it will be v.0.99.4 Beta.

Of course, we'll be providing you a detailed post with technical details and new features included on this new version, as we did with the previous version: BilbaoBus v0.99.3 beta.

Anyway, we are so excited with the new features that we wanna to show you an advance.

One of the better things of been involved in an startup is the hundreds of crazy ideas you discuss every week. Normally, most of them are discarded in the first minute, but from time to time one of these ideas become "interesting" and the members of the team start to think that it's not so crazy and dedicate to it some exciting brainstormings. And just after this is the moment of truth: To decide.
It's a crucial moment for a startup. You must to decide to change everything, stop the development of your product, or whatever in order to follow the new "crazy" idea. It's not easy to keep a cool head because the last weeks you've been discussing about the idea and the incredible revenue it will provide the company and how good and unique it is. 

We lived this situation the last 3-4 weeks with one of these crazy ideas. Everything started reading a news about London tube during the Olympic games: Tube Stops named after Olympics athletes. We said, this is our chance, hundred of thousands tourists from many countries will be visiting London during the Games, so why not take advantage of it to show them our work. The idea was to develop "London Tube Olympic Games Special Edition". 

 It would be an Android app with the following features:
- Free
- Multilanguage (English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish)
- Typical data of a transport app (Lines, Stops, etc...)
- For each Stop we would provide details about the biography of the Athlete and a picture
- Info about the different sport events places (how to arrive, etc...)

Advantages:
- Use the core of BilbaoBus, so we wouldn't need too much time to develop it.
- A powerful Marketing tool for us. We think a lot of people would download it during the weeks of the event, so many people of different countries would know us. 
- Good for our portfolio.
- Good position to raise a payment app for London tube after the games.

Risks:
- Redesign the graphics to become it an smart application.
- Develop the product on time. The deadline in this case was clear: 27/07/12.
- Use data feeds of Transport for London (TFL). We would need to develop a new feature of the app only to parse the info from TFL format to our format.
- Stop our current work and delay other products we are working on.
- And the most important one for us. Raise the app with the Quality that we demand to ourselves.

So, after think a lot about it and many discussion we decided that Discretion is the better part of valour. We love the idea but the deadline was very close and for us it's not a choice to raise an app in the market with the minimum warranties. 

Is it an error? We never know.

Was it lost time? We don't think so, all these discussion help to the team. We are more focus now, even discarding the idea.

What do you think? How should an startup manage this kind of issues? 

As we told in our March post about the release v.0.99.3 of BilbaoBus we've included an important (invisible) feature, Google Analytics,  to learn more about the habits of our users and so be able to improve our app on that way.
After two months in the market and more than 2500 active users we have got some lesson learned.
In our last post we talked about the comments and rating of our users and how we try to take them into account for future improvements.
Anyway, it's a reality that most of the users don't provide direct feedback but now thanks to Google Analytics we are receiving it anyway.

We are working in the new release of BilbaoBus v0.99.4 (we hope to have it before the end of this month) and we are including some improvements based on analysis of Analytics data.

In the picture above we can find very interesting statistics. Let's discuss topic by topic.

• 81.17% Returning Visitor. Very good news, it means that most of our users continue using the app and don't remove it after first testing. This number is quite aligned with our downloads vs active users.
• 7.04 pages/visit and Avg Visit 00:04:25.We need to check this more carefully. It looks like good news because the users spend more than 4 minutes each time they open the app. If they are looking for different stops and/or lines that's fine but if they spend all this time to find the info they need, we are in trouble. It won't take long until the users search for a new app. We have clear this is a "service" app, so the users only open it when they need the info regarding the buses, etc... So, it's mandatory to find it easy and fast. On the other hand it could be that our users like to check for different options or spend sometime "playing" with the app while they are waiting next bus (what means terrific news for us).
• Line Visits evolution. We started the first week with a big increment of the visits (this is due to the time spent by our user to upgrade the app to the version 0.99.3 that supported Analytics.  The next 3 weeks we kept more or less the same visits and we had an increment the last month due to the more than 1000 downloads during April.
• Line Avg. Visits Duration evolution.  The time spent by our users each time they open the app is ok. We think between 3-5 minutes is a good average. It should be enough time to find the info they need and check for other lines, read the news, etc...
  

This screen from Analytics is specially useful. It gives us at a glance how our users are navigating through the app.
We've added the view of the home screen of the app in order to help you to understand the graphic. As you can see the name of the options are self-explanatory.

• home. As normal most of the users go trough the home (we are trying to understand how is possible some users go directly to other section :-D). In this page the most important topic is that most of the users continue navigating. Only 12.8% (in red) drop off.
• lines. Most of the users like to go directly to check the line they need and once they get it go to Stopdetail (this is an screen that show details about the Stop, including timetable, next bus estimation, Streetview, etc...). After stopdetail only 5.66% of the users left the app. So, it seems they like to check of the lines.
• favorites. 15.3% of the traffic go directly to Favorites. To be honest we though more people would use it. Anyway if we check only the "Returning Visitors" the number of users that go to Favorites is a bit higher.
• goto. This is our STAR feature but it's not being used so much as we expected. We think it's due to most of the people that is using the app are from Bilbao so they have an idea where is the Stop or what is the Line they need. Anyway, we think that it will be a fantastic feature for big cities 
• stops. Definitely, our users look more useful Line screen than Stops. 
• news. 5% of the users  are looking to the news. It make sense because we are only providing the info regarding BilboBus than normally are regarding changes in the service.
• other. The rest of pages of the app aren't almost visited. It's quite normal. One of them is the "Information" that shows Quoders information. Only 1.87% of the users navigate till Greentab screen where we show the CO2 info (we need to think if we remove this screen from the app or if we change it.).

Apart of this info in other graphs we found that most of the people is using Spanish (89%), 10% is using Euskera (Country Basque local language) and less than 1% english. (So, definitively not too much tourists are downloading our app :-( YET).

Returning to the begin of this post users continue providing us with very good feedback. They tell us what their favourite features are and how they want to use our app. 

After analyzing the info above we have to take some decisions about the improvements for the new release of BilbaoBus v0.99.4 (vs the current v.0.99.3).

• Most of the users go from Lines to StopDetails page. We should think in a way to avoid this step to our users.
• Should we remove Greentab screen? Nobody is using it but at the sametime it's not disturbing anyone. So, what's the best choice?
  
• Is there some way we can get that Bilbao tourist have a look to our app?

As always your feedback will be more than welcome. Leave a comment or send us an email from our Contact webpage.

In our next post we will provide you the first screens of the new release of BilbaoBus and the new features.