Don't be so jealous of your brand

Plus an exciting update on this newsletter

👋 Hi everyone, quick update! I’ve joined forces with the amazing people at Next Billion Advisors for this newsletter. Next Billion Advisors is a collection of entrepreneurs and investors with experience bringing technology across emerging markets for companies like Tala, Google, Branch, PayJoy, LinkedIn and more. Expect more content from different perspectives.

This piece is written by Enrique Carral, a global strategist, business developer and Edtech entrepreneur currently living in Mexico City

---

Credit: Math is Good

It’s funny how things work. I’ve long had in my mind writing a long blog post about my learnings during my experience of founding and stopping operations of MUKTEK Academy, and it is thanks to Next Billion Advisors that I will now write about it in bits and pieces.

The first one is about branding, partnering, and cash, but let me first give you a couple of key data points about my startup in order to give you some context.

My startup was a coding school funded by me and my angel investor and partner, Barbara Mair. We operated for 2.5yrs, launched 6 courses, graduated 120+ students in 19 cohorts. We were Top 5 in the Course Report Mexico City bootcamp list, at the time. All of our classes were in-person, pre-Covid.

So, now let’s get to branding.

The mistake I want to expose here is my brand jealousy. Here’s what happened.

At the beginning of my entrepreneurship journey, I had a great vision of what the MUKTEK brand would be about. We were about empowering Mexicans with technology, placing quality at the top of everything we did. All of our cohorts were named after the Mayan calendar. All of our community events were named using the Mayan language. The word MUTKEK has Mayan and Aztec roots (you can check this out on our website, which is still alive).

I think I did a great job of creating this vision, but I believe I protected it a little too much. I thought it was important to keep this “baby” clean and make sure I only associated the MUKTEK brand with people and companies that exclusively represented what we were about — or with top technology brands, naturally. Thus, I missed the opportunity to partner more in order to bring more cash into the company.

There are many lessons learned about my entrepreneurship journey, but one is about partnering more. When you have a startup that is semi-bootstrapped, cash is king, and that is the only priority — even if 1–2yrs of runway seem like long enough to show results, raise more capital, etc. I thus believe we could have looked for additional partnerships outside of what I thought were “perfect fit” or “top” partnerships from Day 1, which would have probably brought us more business (and even potential funding partners that I did not envision). Since Day 1, we searched partnerships with Google and Facebook (and we did hold a MUKTEK event at Facebook, which gained a ton of attention at the time), but we did not search partnerships with less prominent tech brands, nor with non-tech-related brands that were close to our target student profile.

Email from a potential partner we did not explore

MUKTEK Team after a workshop at the Facebook Mexico City Office

Thus, my advice for entrepreneurs who are starting and don’t have a considerably high level of funding (i.e. 5+ yrs of runway) is to partner and relate your brand to any brand that is healthy, strong, and that can get you in touch with more potential customers. Forget about “your baby brand” and focus on what matters at this point in the life of your company: cash. This will give you the oxygen to create and further develop that same baby, and reduce your risk of not having the chance of building up that same baby, ever again.

---

Thanks for reading 🙌 Feedback? Please. Building something for the next billion? Please reach out: on our website, Twitter or LinkedIn. If you haven’t yet, please subscribe and share!