The Blog of the week

Portugal's growing number of young entrepreneurs

-- my very own summary of that well written article --

Since the unemployment rate in 2008, around 7.6%, it has nearly doubled by June this year, around 14.1%. Among those unemployed there are very many young adults, according to Eurostat one out of three young adults is unemployed. 

This problem has resulted into a huge amount of people being wannabe entrepreneurs. Apparently most of them seem to have very good start-up ideas, however behind those ideas there is no future. As an example they then take the 'App entrepreneurship wave' where young very smart adults develop apps, very good one, however not having any market ideas behind it. 

With this boost of young entrepreneurs, the Portuguese government decided to create a 'investment body' called  ''Portugal Ventures'' to be able to invest 20 million € a year into new start- up firms, to get them on their feet in so called 'incubators''. 

The key thing in this article however is the story of Mr and Ms Tilli, who decided in 2011 when the economy in Portugal was hit the hardest to start up their own business because Mr Tilli earned 'close to nothing' as an estate agent. They needed to do something, so they brainstormed all the ideas they had, thought about what could work out, and what will most likely not work out. They came up with the idea of starting an estate agent business with specializing in renting houses in Lisbon (something that is not very common in Portugal because a house is a pride of the owner, so everyone gets their own house at some point, mostly already in a very young age) The business started of very small, Uploading pictures, that were taken by professionals in best quality, on a Facebook side, soon got the interest if many young adults in lisbon, They slowly started building up their flow of customers, and expanded into 2 different cities and are now even thinking if the should maybe even expand a bit further, maybe Madrid ?!

Message of this article : Have a good idea, think about the market behind this idea, start off small, don't put in too much money, see how it goes, and then fail or win. 

http://www.bbc.com/news/business-29027462