Marcos Martin, Co-Founder & Co-CEO, Gleepa
What do you need to be an entrepreneur?
Courage, ideas, time, and above all, doggedness. Being persistent is essential and, at the same time, a guarantee for success.
What did inspire you to start your business?
Knowing it was possible. Seeing in close experiences that it was the right time and feeling that something interesting and valuable could be created.
How did you finance it?
Through self-financing with loans and capital of our own.
Being Hispanic… Does it have any influence on your business?
The motivation of carrying it out would exist regardless of the language or the place where we are. But yes, there are influences due to the kind of market where we work. The latest developments cannot always be applied immediately because of the asynchronicity of technological development among different regions. But this is not necessarily bad, at Gleepa, we take it as an opportunity to consciously evaluate if a new service is valuable or not for our customers.
In the face of adversity, how do you decide to keep going?
See the fourth ingredient of the formula to be an entrepreneur: “doggedness”.
What is the biggest challenge your business has faced?
Selling technological services to companies that do not usually invest in technology. At Gleepa, from the beginning, we focused our business on SMEs that were not taking the opportunities of the digital world or that did not count with the qualified staff for those areas.
It was a great challenge to communicate our services effectively to a public that was completely uninformed about the subject, but we did it and today, many of those companies became our main customers.
If you could change one thing about your business, what would it be?
Definitely, the balance of time devoted to work and my family. Really, I would not change anything about the business, but I would change my obsession for carrying it out even when I am sleeping.
I believe it is a common problem for entrepreneurs, you do not want to leave anything for tomorrow but you do not want it to affect your personal life. But this happens to anyone who loves what he or she does, and when the project is yours and you believe in it, your enthusiasm can distract you from other aspects of life. I would change that a little.
What was your childhood ambition?
Getting to know the world.
Tell us about three entrepreneurs that you admire?
Steve Jobs, because he was an innovator and Jimmy Wales, simply because I think Wikipedia is an amazing project. But what I always feel curious about and sometimes admire are small projects that appear all the time from young people who carry out their ideas without having the funds or counting with big structures.
For business meetings: breakfast, lunch, or dinner?
Breakfast, but not too early.
What sacrifices on your personal life did you have to make in order to become a business success?
Taking time away from my family.
What is your favorite quote?
“My interest is in the future because I am going to spend the rest of my life there.” (Charles F. Kettering)
Is it difficult to be unconventional?
No, what is difficult is to make something unconventional become conventional. To make the exception become the rule.
Biggest mistake made?
In business? Not to trust my intuition. In life….too.
Do you consider yourself an innovator? Why?
I like to define myself as creative and persistent. I am not afraid of failure.
There are not many real innovators. The rest follow them and make our best effort to develop their creations.
About the company
Gleepa is a digital agency that specializes in design, development, research and marketing.
We adapt technologies and disciplines that internet offers to the goals of companies, organizations and small entrepreneurships.
From the creation itself of your online identity to the analysis and optimization of your business results, Gleepa takes the best of the web to your business and the best of your business to the web.
For more information: www.gleepa.com
For more information: www.gleepa.com
