Skip to Content
HiTech
4 minutes read

Colombia’s Silicon Valley, mistakes, and more apps. Mixergy talks with Jonathan Tarud

By Robert Kazmi
By Robert Kazmi
HiTech
4 minutes read

Mixergy

If you want to know more about our mysterious CEO, Jonathan Tarud, now is your chance. Last week, Andrew Warner, founder of Mixergy.com conducted one of the best interviews we have of Jonathan. Mixergy is the well-known hub for entrepreneurship tips, interviews, and courses. They have interviewed some of the most popular entrepreneurs: like Adam Goldstein, founder of the travel site hipmunk.com, Ben Parr, Editor at Mashable, Jessica Mah, founder of inDinero, and Emerson Spartz founder of Spartz Media.

This interview will give you a glimpse of the best aerospace engineer turned web and application master. Below are some of my favorite and most fascinating questions and answers. Or you can always listen to the entire interview.

Why the name Koombea?

Jonathan: If you look up the word Koombea, the dance, it’s Cumbia. The way that we spell it is the phonetic pronunciation in English. It was a good name, good tradition and it was an available domain and dot com, dot net, everything so.

What were your mistakes?

Jonathan: So the first one is, and I still do it sometimes, I go to these events like new tech event or whatever, where there is a lot of people, you know, tech people. They go to network and everything. Usually nobody’s buying. So that was a tough one. I did a lot of, I’m trying to remember, like, that was the one thing that I did the most. Go to networking events at night because I was with a client all day during the day.

The other stuff was have budgets or we’re kind of a waste of time. You start learning the hang of it and I think that the one thing that has been proven over and over again is networking. Once I started meeting people and they introduced me to actual people that had budgets, had good intentions to actually build something, that’s how we’ve been able to grow for the most part.

Product business or build business for others?

Jonathan: Correct. Yeah. That’s the long-term vision, but there is some fun stuff that you learn working with other people, trying to help their businesses grow. It’s almost like dating. Dating is kind of fun when you’re getting a girl every couple of weeks. A different girl every couple of weeks is kind of fun, right, but after a while it gets old. To a certain extent, it keeps things fresh and you get new perspectives. You get leads to a lot of different markets and different verticals, which is fun. But it’s also like a surrogate service. You make a baby, then you give it away. It gets painful after a few times that you’ve done it.

What’s wrong with you, what do you do when you fail?

Jonathan: So I just build another product. We built several products. Our latest one’s called dashable.com. It’s basically an agency managing tool.

—-

Are you worried someone will steal your ideas?

Jonathan: No, no. Stealing ideas is over rated. Like all the problems and all the challenges that we’ve gone through just to get to where we are with this product, they’re going to have to discover themselves. And if they don’t discover these problems, it’s because they’re not doing it correctly. So instead of just building the product, it’s figuring out the market technique, figuring out the right words to say about it, figuring out the right pricing, figuring out the market channels. There are so many different variables that go into something like this, it’s almost impossible to steal.

Hear the entire interview at mixergy.com or by clicking here:

Author: @keswanberg

Girl With Glasses

Want to Build an App?

Request a free app consultation with one of our experts

Contact Us