Embracing Customer Centricity

Imagine having the opportunity to read 50 pages of a full vision describing how to change everything we know about the internet by improving the correlations between media, brands, and people, with privacy and good ethics at the front. That's how we discovered and fell in love with PrivacyCloud’s ambitious vision.

For me, it was an excellent opportunity. Great founder and CEO with an incredible track record, a growing team with tremendous potential, recently well-founded, and a huge market full of challenges and opportunities.

I joined the team to help it grow and design systems to ensure our operations were smooth and qualified to scale. In my first weeks, we were already involved in negotiations with some of the biggest publishers in Spain, offering them a new revenue stream to monetize their content in addition to third-party ads and paywalls. The future was looking promising.

During our first months, we focused on having everything in place to build highly efficient and empowering teams. Diversity, inclusion, ownership, transparency, and psychological safety were challenges we had to face to support our growth.

It appeared that we were ready to launch and go big, but market and life always play their role; COVID-19 came, and we needed it to change our go-to-market strategies and financial plans. One day we were about to integrate our technology into our partner's product, with millions of users, the next day, we needed to find those users on our own. We decided to start from scratch, changing the way we work, forcing us to go back to basics, talking to people, and building a lot of experiments to find product-market fit.

Under this situation, I became CPO, to put our products out there and start iterating we worked our way to becoming a product-obsessed organization. In a couple of months, we built our own media site, created partnerships with top digital publishers and content creators (ABC, El Confidencial, El Español…), and showed our value proposition to thousands of people, clients, and partners.

Our new product and go-to-market strategy and its implementation helped us gather many signals, metrics, and patterns to make better decisions and find the most relevant problems. Involving the entire team in the discovery and shaping process of the company was a milestone that changed the dynamics and culture of our company.

Last but not least, the implementation of OKRs, opening our firsts operations in the US, and working closely with Sergi (CTO) to design a career framework and improve our methodologies helped our team to understand the flywheel and be motivated to redefine marketing, media, and retail in favor of individuals, all at once.

After a lot of work, and just when we started having some traction, we ran out of cash, forcing us to let go of most of the team, including co-founders and C levels. Since then, our resilient founder has been trying to find new ways to make PrivacyCloud's vision a reality, I’m sure he’ll find a way, and I’m looking forward to it.

we could talk for hours about all we learned here, but maybe it's easy if we just take a coffee 😉.