One of the great things about going to a lot of international web 2.0 conferences with prominent tech analysts and well-known entrepreneurs is that you can learn a lot from really impressive and experienced people, if you are willing to listen. When you tie that into the fact that the combination of money (from investors and Neotec) and an interesting project helps you recruit top talent and a kick-ass advisory board/group of investors (Didac Giribets, Albert Armengol, Juan Luis Hortelano and Joaquim Calaf), you can start to see how a concept (vertical search) transforms into a real company (migoa).

Case in point. In deciding our launch strategy we had two options that were the cause of intense debates:

• One approach is to launch quickly, all over the world and then hope that the traffic and the advertisers will come to you. Some of our competitors have done this to varying degrees of success.
• The other approach is to launch more deliberately in specific countries with a clear sales and marketing strategy in each market and only after the product has been developed and adapted so that local users will see its obvious value.

In the end, we decided to follow the second approach. After all, as I repeat often on this blog: You only have one chance to make a first impression, so try to look pretty. Both VCs and potential strategic partners want to see that you are able to realise “inspired execution”. (I’m borrowing the term from a blog that I read recently, but I don’t remember which one.) Of course, they want you to dominate the world, but they want you to do it one step at a time, with a clear plan in mind and with an aspiration to excellence. And when you’re working with limited resources, it’s essential to prioritise.

In plain English, this means that in a winner-takes-all environment like the Internet the key is to have a product that demonstrates relatively quickly that it is a potential winner. But please note the emphasis on “relatively”. The goal should not be to push out a rushed, poorly conceived product just to show that you can do it first; the goal should be to create something that’s built to last — something that can justifiably be described as innovative, better than the competition, scaleable, and most importantly, that takes the users’ needs and wants fully into account.

We’ve been lucky that a lot of VCs, tech analysts, traditional media companies and other entrepreneurs have been willing to push us to define the nuances of our strategy. The feedback has really helped us to hone our game plan before launching. I emphasise this point, because after launching it becomes a lot more difficult to change your business plan and product. So while it’s important to be flexible and willing to adapt to changing market conditions and opportunities, it’s also important to have some sort of vision before dedicating substantial resources only to find out later that you’ve gone in the wrong direction.

Some people have complained that we are taking too long to launch migoa. My view is that we should launch when the product is ready, not when the blogging and analyst communities demand it. In my humble opinion, a lot of our competitors launched too early and are so confident that they are already out of public beta. But most of their products don’t inspire me, and it’ll be interesting to see if their users disagree with my assessment. After all, I’m hardly impartial. In fact, I’m sure that a lot of our competitors will only improve their products with time, particularly if they get (more) funding, but the key question is whether they’ll be able to recapture users who were turned off after the first visit. Only time will tell.

In terms of what we’re doing at migoa, we are focused on creating brands for each vertical (we’re focused on three verticals — real estate, jobs and cars). Migoa will continue to be the umbrella brand for all of our vertical search products, but each vertical will have a separate identity. To choose the name for the first vertical that we will launch, we got the entire team involved in the process. Everyone could submit as many names as they wanted, as long as the relevant domain names were available. I was happy to see that the team took the task seriously! For about 24 hours, we were all on godaddy.com testing out our skills as naming experts.

This little exercise helped to demonstrate the good and bad of democracy in action. On the one hand, you get lots of candidates and, if you’re lucky, the active participation of all members of the team. On the other hand, there is the risk that a compromise candidate wins, instead of the most brilliant and original candidate. In the case of our voting process, we saw a lot of varied candidates. Some names were real losers, but then again, each member of our team had very different theories for what makes a good name (hence, the danger of the compromise candidate). I even learned during the process that that are guides and companies specialised in naming that charge enormous sums of money. Who knew? In any case, there was one candidate that blew the competition away in each of the voting rounds, and it will be the name of our first vertical to be launched in September.

Unfortunately, I can only release the selected names once we have bought all the relevant domain names. But I’m guessing that issue should be resolved relatively quickly.