Oriol Vinzia, founder and CEO of GymForLess, joins this year as a mentor in the mentoring program of INDESUP !. His company, a platform that allows users to access in addition to a thousand gyms throughout Spain, was born in 2014, has consolidated a staff of 15 people and a few months ago he lived as the majority shareholder of Sodexo, a large corporation with more than half million workers around the world. Recently, GymForLess also became a partner of INDESCAT, and now Oriol Vinzia will try to transmit its experience in the world of entrepreneurship and sports to the start-ups that are selected for INDESUP's mentoring program.
What can this mentoring program bring?
To someone who is promoting a project and who perhaps lacks experience, a program like INDESUP! It can be very useful when looking for financing, to receive advice at a specific time and, above all, to focus your product or service. Sometimes, when you start, the business model is not completely clear and you need a bit of guidance. I have also been wrong sometimes, I have founded three different start-ups and I am sure that I can help other entrepreneurs not to make the same mistakes.
What are the classic mistakes of entrepreneurs in the initial phases?
One very important thing is to define the team well from the beginning. It is essential to have the support of all partners and travel companions are not always well chosen. Another mistake is to think that it will be easy to monetize from the first day. This does not usually happen, it has to persist a lot. It also often happens that the entrepreneur wants to do many things, open many lines of business at once. And it is fundamental to focus: have a very clear idea of your product and how you want to sell it.
Another important aspect is financing. How do you think the start-ups have to face this question?
If you have a product or service that monetizes from the first day, you do not need to go to a round of financing. But this happens a very few times, you usually need money to invest in technology and many other things. In this case, the entrepreneur does not have to be afraid to go and look for money anywhere: to the financing rounds, to the administrations, to the business angels ... Let's be clear that it is very difficult to promote a scalable start-up without having a external financing.
What are the strengths and aspects to improve the Catalan entrepreneurial ecosystem?
In Catalonia there has always been an entrepreneurial culture. Now, in addition, we are an important technological hub, partly because Barcelona is a very attractive city to live and attracts professional bonds. We also have the success stories of start-ups such as Social Point or Privalia that have become role models for many entrepreneurs. And if we talk about the sports sector, it is clear that Catalonia is a benchmark in sports practice. As for the aspects to improve, I think we lack tools to help start-ups: more accelerators, more programs like INDESUP !, and that big companies feed the entrepreneurial fabric, as it has happened to us with Sodexo.
What does it bring you to be part of INDESCAT?
One of the main objectives of GymForLess is to encourage sports, and in this sense it seemed essential to be part of INDESCAT, an entity that also seeks this goal through the development of the sports industry. We also find very interesting this work that INDESCAT is doing to pose in contact undertaken large and small. Many times large corporations struggle to innovate, while start-ups do have this agility to promote new projects and grow rapidly.
More information to the call of the Mentoring INDESUP! program
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