Last time I wrote about Protechting I mentioned that last year instead of one winner, there were three. Visor.ai was one of them, they won 10.000 euros and traveled to China and between all this they made business that lasts until today.
Gonçalo Consiglieri, Visor.ai Co-founder, said that unlike other programs he has participated in, Protechting is very focused on people, making it easier for startups to arrange meetings with the partners who are all very involved and willing to hear from them.
When Visor.ai entered the program their solution wasn’t quite ready yet, there were some changes to be made and the program ended up challenging them to develop their product according to a client’s real needs. All this in one week during the bootcamp and 2 or 3 months for the pilot.
The importance of a bootcamp was also underlined by Gonçalo. It is a fact that nowadays pretty much all programs have a bootcamp but if we go one or two years back that wasn’t the reality. The bootcamp helps both sides, the partners side and the startups side. It’s not only the partners who use the bootcamp as a barometer to see if there’s a fit with startups, the other way around also applies. Startups can also understand in the course of a week if their solution can be valuable to the partners, but more than that startups get to grow and adjust their product and for some of them that’s what’s most valuable.
It’s been a year since Visor.ai won Protechting’s last edition and now they have another project with Fidelidade besides the initial one. The one they’re focused right now is related with their website and how to better get leads. After one year, the three winner startups are also still friends with each other. Hard to say if it was the bootcamp or the China trip who bond them, or probably it was both, truth is it remains until now. And I mean they actually stay at each other’s places when they go to their countries and help each other on their solutions, so it’s not a fake friendship.
Asked if Protechting changed them and their business, Gonçalo says that they’ve definitely changed and thanks to the programme they’re now developing features they wouldn’t think about if it weren’t for Fidelidade. Actually now they only develop what their clients ask for and stopped wasting time developing stuff just because they thought it was cool.