Startup Success Story 3
This article is written by Jeremiah Uke, a Contributor Author at Startup Istanbul.
Yousef Hamidaddin is a strong Strategist, Economist, and Entrepreneur. He is the Chief Executive Officer at Oasis500, the first entrepreneurial development, and investment company of its kind in the MENA region. He was present at Startup Istanbul with Mario, the CEO of Tespack, who was the winner of Startup Turkey earlier in the year, Yousef has helped Mario raise some rounds of funding, and Mario talked about his Startup journey. He answered a few questions too.
Mario’s startup Tespack was the winning startup at Startup Turkey, and has scaled to a level of selling its products to governments in good volumes of production, in the space of just 6 months, pivoting from just producing solar energy bag packs, to producing a wide range of solar mobile energy solutions for armies and customers.
The best time to look for money is when you don’t need it while working a deal with Yousef, Mario had a runway for his startup, Mario’s team tried to start doing business right from the beginning, so they could have everything ready before approaching an investor. Mario’s team spoke with Yousef after the Startup Turkey event after approaching him, afterward, Mario started sending Yousef a lot of emails.
Yousef talks about the importance of being ready as a startup, mentioning that whenever he asked Mario for information, it was available, this information included forecasts for a couple years, the breakdown of data, branding, and strategy. After seeing their presentation, Yousef was interested in the e-commerce and retail side of the solution, of which the team had already a deal with a model who was promoting the product, they had also spoken to adventure loving people who need the product. There was always something that they had done in the spaces that Yousef was interested in finding more about, this created confidence.
The future for Tespack is one where they are already heading to producing more customer-side products such as the Vertus, which is the smartest IoT helmet that use action cameras to prevent accidents while engaging in sports like skiing, this will be launched in Finland.
In-house back in Valencia, Mario’s team is developing about 6-7 different bag packs for different applications. Mario returned from a ministry of defense exhibition at Florida where everyone was amazed by the helmet and they want to engage. Tespack would focus on the helmet and launching other products for the consumer sector.
The future of energy to Tespack is the ability to track all the generation and usage of energy, Yousef adds that Mario was validated by the R&D institute in Finland, where they got a lot of R&D grants to develop their product, not just once, but through the gradual development process, in each phase of the development, the team was able to convince the scientists in the institute to help them in growing the product, this creates confidence with the investor. Mario experiences his gratitude to Yousef, Burak, Asaad, and Startup Turkey because the only thing that his company needed, was a fighting chance. He advised other entrepreneurs to focus more on delivering products because that is what will help growth and business.
https://youtu.be/pi_az_wW1f4