startupi

A few days ago I met with two enthusiastic young entrepreneurs. After having studied and worked in the field, both in Brazil and abroad, they decided to build a tool to help make life easier for new entrepreneurs. Now they are promoting their first product - a social network that includes a  directory with virtual business cards, CRM, a B2B guide and client-satisfaction ratings. Meet Empreendemia.

Empreendemia is a network for professional contacts in which your business can organize client and supplier contacts in a simple, quick way; get to know new businesses; make new business connections; and promote the reputation of your business via evaluations by your customers.

Millor Machado e Luiz Piovesana met at Unicamp. They were passionate about startups, and soon got together their ideas and a plan. They built a team, a product and a business. In April of this year, they met Mauro Ribeiro, who was responsible for the layout and programming of their system, turning the idea into reality.

How an “epidemic of entrepreneurship” grew

Millor: “It all started when I was a student at Babson, near Boston, studying entrepreneurship and related subjects. I was thinking about opening a consultancy with Luiz, to help small businesses, because the market is so big. In class there was an Argentine who said it’s not worth it if you don’t have a focus or niche. From that I thought about what a great advantage it would be for entrepreneurs to develop contacts with each other, to talk about business ideas and to get feedback.”

Luiz: “At that time I was doing studies in entrepreneurship at an institute in Germany, researching entrepreneurship globally. When Millor talked to me about feedback among entrepreneurs, I suggested he look at the site GoBigNetwork, a network for linking entrepreneurs and customers, consultants and investors. He said it was this kind of idea that he wanted to do, and we decided to start on it when we were back in Brazil.

Some time later we started to dedicate ourselves completely to the project. We didn’t know how to program very well, but we mocked up the idea in PowerPoint and showed it around. We started getting feedback and were introduced to other people and started to put together a team - two people who built the system.”

Millor: “Empreendemia is a business that basically provides a network for sharing virtual business cards, in order to facilitate the way business is done. The user creates a profile, has his contacts and information about them, and it’s available. It makes it much easier, for example, to generate a list of contacts such as a quick list of suppliers and see all their phone numbers. The user can add notations to the contacts, such as “call tomorrow” and use those notations in an unlimited way, creating a history. It also serves to create a to do list.

This part of the system ends up being a type of CRM, but in the Empreendemia network you don’t just maintain your contacts: the owners of the profiles update their telephone numbers, addresses and websites, for example. You can also trade business cards with others who aren’t in your contacts yet, meeting them through searches for businesses in different sectors. This list is ordered by reputation, which is based on evaluations done by the clients of each business. Whoever does good business gains votes and ranks higher on the lists. The focus is B2B - businesses that do work with other businesses. The network is also a sort of virtual product display, where each business can show what it sells.”

Empreendemia is still in beta, by invitation. Try out the interface, and if you’d like an invitation leave your name in our comments.

Follow Empreendemia on Twitter.