How Blogo secured funding for a WordPress publishing app

Several years ago Amure Pinho started as a Blogo user and now is the CEO @GetBlogo.

Amure shares his experience with growing Blogo and provides insights for you to include as you fine tune your product offering. Invest in yourself before going after investors for your product. Get a good team together and produce a starter version of your product. Amure held Blogo Day, an event to highlight the first version of the product, and invited investors to attend. There is nothing like good product and interested users to get the interest of angel investors.

Look beyond what your users are doing directly with your product. Examine what other products and services are part of the workflow before customers use your product. Taking the time to get this deeper understanding can help you to be proactive in making connections and finding partners to integrate with your product.

The Blogo team escalated a relationship from being a fan of Evernote to becoming a partner of Evernote. Don’t sit back waiting for things to happen to get your product noticed. Be sure you are creating a two way street and be creating value for your partners.

Amure shared some lessons learned from creating products in Brazil markets:

  • Be profitable from day one.
  • Be sure your product solves a problem and is not just something cool.
  • Get traction. Don’t just copycat.
  • Find a niche. Don’t just create a tool for everyone.
  • What is the solution you are providing? Be able to talk more deeply with your users.

Congrats to Blogo for being the silver platform award winner at the 2014 Evernote Conference!

Listening options

Itunes:subscribe to MattReport
Stitcher:subscribe to MattReport
[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/173172327″ params=”color=ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false” width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]

Viewing


What was discussed during the conversation between Matt and Amure Pinho
1:10 How did you end up building a product around WordPress?
3:15 What was Blogo like before you took over the CEO role?
5:40 How is Blogo currently funded?
7:20 What words of advice do you have for freelancers that are doing client services to fund product development?
13:45 Is there a stigma connected to WordPress with angel investors?
18:15 How did you partner with Evernote?
Blogo wins Silver Award at Evernote Conference 2014
25:40 What’s the difference between U.S. and International or Brazil start ups/entrepreneurship?

You can have everything in life you want, if you will just help enough other people get what they want.-Zig Ziglar

36:00 How did you determine Blogo’s price point?
41:30 How did your team come up with the design of GetBlog website and press kit?
43:45 What’s next for Blogo?

Resources Mentioned

GetBlogo.com
@getblogo
Evernote Conference Award Winners
Blogo in Evernote App center
UserVoice
Jot Script Evernote Edition for
handwriting

Resources mentioned


Comments

2 responses to “How Blogo secured funding for a WordPress publishing app”

  1. I love hearing stories like this as they get me super-excited about all the possibilities that little indie apps have.

    🙂

    Obviously I’ve got a desktop blogging app myself, Desk App, that just launched, but I don’t have the team that Amure has!

    1. Fairly certain with your expertise, your new indie venture will go far. 🙂

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *