Rodrigo Barros, CEO of Hands-On TV, breaks down traction as three things: team, investment, and users. He shares his mistake of rejecting early funding and explains why a founder's excitement is a real signal to pivot or stay. Small teams learn faster and make better mistakes.
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So let's talk about what I've learned so far with Hands-On TV, what I've learned so far on Silicon Valley. There's a big word here in Silicon Valley called traction, OK? Everybody have heard about traction. Everybody says, oh, what's your traction? On the time I came here, I was like, you know, I don't need money from investors, so I'm going to fund my own company. Big mistake. Because the second thing that I've learned from Tommaso Di Bartolo, which is over there, the founder and CEO of Swag, was traction is about the team. Traction is about investments that you get for your company. And then traction is about users. So you see, before you got the team, then you get investment, and then you get users. Oh, Rodrigo, we can't get users without investments. Or we can't get investments without users. It's the chicken and the egg, right? But believe me, it's part of the traction. Get your investment. It's part of the traction. Get your seed funding. That's what I've learned. And that was a huge, but huge mistake for me in Silicon Valley. Because I was feeling that I didn't need any investments. I didn't need any investors. And I would move forward myself. So that was the first thing. The second thing was I was a business entrepreneur. Right? Before coming here, all my success was on business. When I came here, I understood the importance of being a product entrepreneur. So I turned my mindset to be a product entrepreneur. But then comes a third thing, which is when you think like a product entrepreneur, be careful to not fall in love with your product. Why? Because I've seen so many people, so many people here in the Valley building this great, amazing, fulfilled product that nobody is willing to buy. And this is amazing how people build something amazing that they think it's amazing and nobody is willing to buy. And then comes another thing, which is as an entrepreneur, as a CEO, as a founder, you really need to empower. You need to believe in your vision. You need to be like crazy enough to do something that other people don't believe. But at the same time, you need to understand how are you thinking? How excited are you about what you're doing after a week, after a month, after 6 months? Because your excitement and the excitement of your team is what is Is going to show you which direction you should go. So let's say you're not being so excited because it's going to happen, right? It's going to happen. One week you're not going to be as excited as you were like 2 weeks ago. So it's going to happen. You're not going to be that excited. But if the following week you're not that excited again, be careful. You need to understand that on that time You might need to pivot. You might need to do something that you're not doing on that moment because your excitement needs to go up again. This is really important. How excited are you and your team about what you're doing right now is not like how we were excited like 2 months ago. No, no, no, no. How excited are you right now? How are your colleagues in your team waking up and saying, man, I'm going to execute this vision today because I love it. This is a great vision. We're doing so great. We're doing amazing. How excited are you? And this is really important for you. So this is another lesson that I've learned here in Silicon Valley. Another thing is to believe in what people don't believe. Believe in what people don't believe. Okay? There are 2 things that I can see nowadays that you can build a product. First of all, you say, I'm going to stay here in Silicon Valley. I'm going to build a worldwide product. So then you believe in what people don't believe. And there are another thing. You go back to your country. I don't know where you guys from, but you go back to your country. And do something that is going well right here, right now, and you execute that in your country. The copycat. A lot of people are doing it, and a lot of people are doing great with it. It's not wrong on it, but you need to understand what you want to do. And then with this, if you want to have a global scale agenda, it's great. But just be careful because it's not only having the right vision for for a global scale agenda is how you execute that vision tomorrow. Today, tomorrow, the day after tomorrow. And what I've learned also is that you should do that in a small group of people. Don't try to execute your vision in a big group of people because probably you're going to make a lot of mistakes and you will not learn from it. Because making mistakes is good. The problem is if you don't— if you do not learn from it. Okay? That's the problem. So try to work in a small group of people, and that's the way you're going to learn from it. Thank you.
