Spain, Palocam, & Mench (Updates Aug 2019)

Hola brothers and sisters!

Here are some summer updates from Grumo headquarters in Vancouver, Beautiful British Columbia, Canada eh!

Spain

Next week, I’ll be travelling to Spain for a few weeks visiting friends, family, fans, and foes.

It’s been 3 years since my last long visit to the land of the conquistadores.

I’d love to meet and see new faces, shake hands, kiss babies, share stories, and make new friends.

If you happen to be there over there sometime over the next 3 weeks, let me know, and I may be able to meet you in the flesh.

Vamos!!!

And now two updates on 2 ongoing projects that have kept me busy for a long time now…

Palocam

Some of you may remember last year I decided to build a solution to record my soccer games from above. I called it Palocam, the world’s first pole-climbing camera!

The project took 6 months of development, 13 design iterations, hundreds of 3D printed parts scrapped, even a paid flight to meet the guys at YCombinator (the Oracle of startup incubators) which didn’t invest $150K, and a wonderful collaboration with my now retired fabulous electrical engineer and super amazing dad.

Before building the 3D printed version, I launched a small quick pre-sell campaign, I was able to sell 7 units, 5 to friends/family (thank you) and 2 to a soccer dad, and a professional soccer coach in NYC. However, after reading a bunch of books, running some numbers, and not getting the investment from YC, I decided not to do more promotions. As predicted, building a hardware product is super hard, and making it profitable infinitely harder!

So the project is pretty much on hold, however, we still plan to build at least 5 more Palocams in case someone else wants to own one of these singular contraptions (if that’s you, you can order it here).

The good thing is that I’ve been recording all my soccer games with Palocam and cutting highlights which my teammates love watching. (You can watch some highlights shot on Palocam here)

I’ve gained a whole new world of respect and appreciation for the people that design, manufacture, and assemble all the products we take for granted. Just making one Palocam takes 20 hours of 3D printing (18 separate pieces) and 8 hours of assembly/testing/packaging. This is not counting the time to order all the components and the time my dad spends soldering the circuit boards, cables, and making aluminum wheel hubs from scratch.

Here is a timelapse that condenses in 2 minutes 5 hours of work that took me to assemble the last Palocam I built: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6udnKYv8Ook

To turn a profit on a single unit, I would have to sell it for close to $1,000 USD. That’s where economies of scale could help, but to mass manufacture Palocam, I would have to invest around $50K to $100K just to get started with all the injection molds, industrial design, trips to the manufacturer (most likely Shenzhen, China), packaging, distribution, etc.

So for now, we will build Palocams as sales trickle and keep having fun recording my games from above which was the original objective from the beginnin!

Mench

Mench is the mother of all the projects I’ve ever worked on. We’ve been working on Mench since March 2017. It’s now over 2.5 years of long days and countless iterations.

Luckily, I have a partner, Shervin, who is the most optimistic and relentless entrepreneur I’ve ever met. I’ve gone the solopreneur path once before and the “solo” part gets old very fast. Like they say, “together is better”, and it couldn’t be more true this time around. Without Shervin, I would have quit a long time ago but, sharing this adventure with the smiliest Iranian you’ll ever meet, has been all worth it.

So what’s Mench? good question. Like most startups, Mench has gone through many incarnations. In startup speak, small changes are called iterations and bigger ones “pivots”. We’ve gone through hundreds of iterations and 4 major pivots so far. We started trying to build a 1. new education platform, which turned into a 2. bootcamp platform, to 3. a training app to help software engineers land jobs, to 4. a chatbot that can be used for recruitment (and many other things, see below).

Results? hundreds of thousands of lines of code written, hundreds of calls to potential clients, thousands of cold emails sent, countless hours discussing features and improvements, years spent looking at a silly computer screen, thousands of kilograms of cookies and bananas consumed, and… zero profits!! (so far)

Lessons learned? starting your own company is hard and only crazy nutballs would ever attempt such endeavour. But look around, every product you own, every tool you use, your toothbrush, the toilet paper, your car, even a silly eraser, everything started as an idea inside the head of a nutball entrepreneur. An entrepreneur crazy enough to spend a large chunk of their savings and life making that idea a reality so that you could get it delivered overnight on Amazon for $19.99 (in the end Jeff Bezzos always wins).

We’re still spending 40-60 hours a week working on Mench. The platform is much more robust and I’m super proud of how far is come along since my first conversation with Shervin back in March, 2017.

We’ve basically built a whole new publishing platform. But instead of articles, or blogs, like Medium, with Mench anyone can build interactive conversations that can train/educate/assess/survey customers. It’s a bit like ManyChat (a platform to build marketing chatbots on FB Messenger) but much more powerful in terms of flexibility and use cases.

All conversations are reusable across all users. For instance, currently we’re converting job postings into conversations that sell candidates on the job opportunity and while assessing their skills at the same time. At the end of the conversation, they get a score that tells them whether they are a good fit or not for that position. Recruiters can invite 100’s of applicants to that interactive job posting and automatically find out who are the best candidates to interview.

The magic is that all conversations are modular and reusable, kind of like LEGO bricks. We have already built a library of these LEGO bricks so users (right now recruiters) can build custom screening workflows for whatever job they are hiring for. Let’s say you need to hire a full stack developer good with ReactJS and Python. No problem, just plug our ReactJS and Python quizzes to your screening workflow and you’re good to go. Do you need candidates to upload videos? no problemo, do you want to do a personality test? no problemo. Do you want to take them down different paths based on their answers, easy peasy!

We’ve created a few samples to showcase what’s possible with Mench. If you want to see what I’m talking about here are 4 samples:

• Looking for a job? check our this sample job posting for Airbnb: https://mench.com/11816
• Are you a programmer? get quizzed in up to 20 programming languages: https://mench.com/6903
• Do you have a startup? find out your chances to become a unicorn here: https://mench.com/11966
• What personality type are you? find out taking our Myers–Briggs personality type test here: https://mench.com/10450

Thanks to our LEGO brick approach, you could take any of those tests and plug them into your own conversational workflows down to a single question if you wanted. For instance, our programming quizzes come in two flavors, 20 questions and 10 questions. Creating the 10 question versions took me 5 minutes. I just plugged in 10 questions from the bigger tests and boom, new test ready!

I’ve only scratched the surface of what’s possible with Mench and we’re super excited to see what other users are capable of building once we start gaining more traction.

The reality is we’re still very early and haven’t found the elusive product-market fit. We feel we’re getting close and can’t wait for the first happy user to open their wallet and put a few bucks into the Mench machine so it can keep chugging away.

Alright, so that’s it for this update. I hope you enjoyed learning a bit about my latest adventures.

I’d love to hear your thoughts/feedback on any of my projects and if you happen to be in Spain over the next 3 weeks let me know, and maybe you can tell me in person.

Thanks for being s supportive Grumo follower!

Peace, Love, and LEGO-cookies!

Miguel

P.S: Please report any bugs on Mench to support@mench.com – thanks!

P.2: Any books/movies/podcast recommendations? I’ve been impressed with the Spanish series “Money Heist” and recently discovered the podcast “The Knowledge Project” full of insightful conversations around decision making and mental models (I even built an app for it here)

P.3: I’ve also been playing with a new way to create iPhone apps without code from just a Spreadsheet. I converted Tim Ferris’ entire book Tribe Of Mentors into an app! check it out here: https://tribe.glideapp.io/

P.4: Also, if you’re interested, I’m giving away a full free month of access to all my courses HERE.