It took two professionals two months to get the first version of FreeClas up and running. FreeClas offers free online classifieds, and is a project from Santa Catarina startup B2Top Negócios. They are competing against some large players in the space: OLX and QueBarato (the latter part of Grupo Buscapé). Read more…
Flávio Pripas and Renato Steinberg were working in IT in financial offices. Their wives liked fashion and asked them to help create a blog to talk about trends. The blog became a social network and the couples quit their jobs.
The network allowed users to create looks by virtually combining different items of clothing. Large fashion and entertainment brands showed up to buy, and they defined a product. It was a perfect case of a lean startup starting by bootstrapping, doing excellent consumer development and launching the ideal product-market fit. But it didn’t stop there. Read more…
The first time I met Olivier Grinda I put some of his enthusiasm about Brands Club down to the euphoria of the party we were at (celebrating the launch of Sonico’s Brazilian site) and part to his role as chief marketing officer.
Last week, the virtual buying club received an investment of US $17 million. I resolved to talk to him again - this time in all seriousness - and could understand how both the partners and the investors see Brands Club as a money machine. Read more…
The Facebook Applications Challenge was launched in August, when Mark Zuckerberg visited Brazil.
Entries were taken until October 19th and in November Facebook began reviewing them to choose the winners.
The winners were announced January 20th on Facebook’s page about the Challenge. Read more…
Check out the video of this exclusive interview I had with the founder and CEO of the social network Sonico, Rodrigo Teijeiro, and with Country Manager for Brazil Alexandre de Freitas. Founded in Argentina, this OpenSocial-compliant social network has its largest user base in Brazil (9 million users). Read more…
A few weeks ago there was a flurry of hype in Brazil over the launch of a new Orkut invitation-only interface (Orkut being Google’s social network, recently made available for mobile via Android). Argentine social network Sonico just launched a Brazilian interface (their biggest user base is in Brazil), and an iPhone app and announced the placement of a country manager in São Paulo to take care of operations for this expansion. And Facebook is about to announce the winners of the application challenge announced during founder Mark Zuckerberg’s visit to Brazil. Read more…
