The ideation phase

Why this concept?
The problem Yotako addresses is one I had myself as a researcher. It’s something I dealt with on a regular basis. Talking to my colleagues in research, or in the private design and development sectors, I realized we all had the same issue. That’s how the idea for Yotako was born.

How to fine tune it?
The first thing we did to find the idea was to gather designers, developers, professionals who work in the sector. And all together, at a workshop during a conference in Paris, we discussed our ideas, how we could find something that would improve our daily work.

Do you need to find the right people before getting started?
It’s important to identify your own added value, how your strengths can help the project move forward, and be able to delegate other less important parts of the project.

What criteria for choosing a co-founder?
Once I had determined the value I could bring to the project, I pinpointed different profiles that could be relevant for the parts of the project I didn’t want to focus my energy on. And that’s how I found my co-founder at the time. I did the same for the skills required for our first employee, etc.

How to maximize resources?
How you go about maximizing resources is very important… on all levels, and not just economically-speaking. There’s money, but then there are all the indirect resources like the profiles in your team, the type of hiring, and the choice between juniors and seniors, for example… Looking back, there are lots of things we could have done differently maybe there would have been a different outcome, but either way, in hindsight, we can see the impact of certain choices we made. But that’s how you learn to make better choices in the future.