Business in Vancouver’s “How I Did It” feature asks business leaders to explain in their own words how they achieved a business goal in the face of significant entrepreneurial challenges. In this week’s issue, Ruben Daniel Ugarte, co-founder and CEO of Edukaans, recalls how he developed his first website at 15, taught himself the ins and outs of software development and co-founded a fast-growing video hosting company, all before the age of 21.
“When I was 15, I had just discovered the world of affiliate marketing. I was saying, ‘There’s this product on Amazon, I could just put up a website, people would buy it and I’d get a cut from them. I need to create a website.’ So I had to learn some of the HTML, CSS technologies and so on to do that.
“I [learned HTML] by myself. The first content management system I learned, I just basically Googled something, and I stumbled into this one, but it was in German. So I had to translate that. The translation wasn’t always perfect, so I was pretty sure I was missing some things.
“[My first site] was just basically going to sell some kind of product online. I was just going to grab some books or electronics from Amazon and get people to buy them and get an affiliate cut.
“The first few websites all failed.
“In late 2010, my dad and I ended up with this idea. We said, ‘What if we can combine experts and students through some kind of central technology?’
“We did our first talks with clients in 2011. I think [the decision to go into instructional videos] was guided by these first conversations. That was the kind of content they had – educational content.
“We realized that we needed some kind of software to host all this content for them. This is when we started building our software, and we hired a developer in the fall of 2012.
“We also had to learn sales. My dad’s not a salesman, and we both had to brainstorm on how to do the sales part, say, ‘How can we go in, create a sales process and all those different things that some companies had established?’ Now that we have an established process, that’s when we hope to start ramping up.”
“Now, apart from the technical side, I’m also working on the marketing side. Initially I thought, ‘If you build it they will come.’ But I quickly realized that what counts above everything, even sometimes more than the technologies, is the marketing and sales behind it.
“One thing that’s really helped us a lot in the past six months is we joined an organization called Accelerate Okanagan in October 2012. They’ve been really helpful. They gave a lot of feedback on a lot of things that we didn’t have before. Getting feedback from companies like the one we want to build has been really useful.
“Right now we have seven clients. For this year, 2013, we hope to end up with close to 40 or 50 clients and see how it goes in 2014.
“We definitely see a very positive feel in the whole online video world.” •
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