You’re probably wondering: soft what? I’ll explain. Soft-Landing is a program for startups and tech companies that have a world scalable business. This year we are offering a Soft Landing program on TravelTech vertical as Portugal is one of the most promising country for TravelTechs and one of the global poles of innovation and technology. The goal of this joint venture between Beta-i and uGlobally is to help to connect your business with Lisbon’s ecosystem and help in your internationalization process through an immersive, hands-on experience.
In order to do so, startups will get to stay in Beta-i in our co-working space, they’ll be mentored by Portuguese market experts, they’ll have meetings with a specialist in opening businesses in Portugal, the opportunity to participate and pitch their company in meetups as well as assistance in logistics and business overview.
How can you take the most of it? Well, you need to know where you are in your business and where you want to be after the program ends. And it’s not me who saying, it’s Francisco Lang who participated last year.
It’s been over a year since he read about the program on the Internet and decided to participate and it has been almost a year since he moved to Lisbon and he’s still here, on the same co-working space he was when he first arrived.
As soon as I started speaking with him about the program, one of the first things he said was “I knew exactly what I needed, I knew exactly what were my goals”. And that, according to him, made everything easier. There was no wasted time on meetings that weren’t lead nowhere and the time was used to focus on the meetings that truly mattered.
Francisco believes it’s easier to scale up in Portugal than it is in Brazil and the repercussion of working here is way bigger. He never intended to move to Lisbon but it ended up happening and now he’s become friends with everyone from Beta-i and has no date to return to Brazil.
Keep in mind, though, that Soft-landing is not an accelerator program, there’s no equity taken and the organizer will not provide any investments. That’s why Francisco is now looking for investment just when his product is about to be released.