Saving An Industry Through Digitalization: Interview with Milegny Castro, Tebeox CEO

HackerNoon Reporter: Please tell us briefly about your background.

I’m a 30 years old entrepreneur. I have a Global MBA. Went abroad for a year studying global business models. Lived in China for 6 months and starting working in Spain in 2015. The cultural sector is my biggest passion, the business models within the cultural industries need a change and that’s why Tebeox came around. Before that I studied Industrial Relationships in Venezuela majoring in Business Planning.

What's your startup called? And in a sentence or two, what does it do?

Tebeox is a streaming-based freemium platform to publish and read digital comic books.

What is the origin story?

It all started when I wanted to read Sandman by Neil Gaiman on my way to work and it was impossible to do it easily. Then looking into the Spanish comic market I found out there are major issues with the business models, the industry is literally dying. Digitalization to me was a great way to bring it back.

What do you love about your team, and why are you the ones to solve this problem?

We are young people aiming to get younger people to fall in love with a lost art. Comics are a base core in my team’s background, we all love them and we have worked super hard to make our platform the easiest to use platform in Spanish out there.

If you weren’t building your startup, what would you be doing?

Probably working for a company. Marketing is my main strong skill as I’m a good strategist. But it’s really hard to picture myself not doing my own thing for too long.

At the moment, how do you measure success? What are your core metrics?

We have been basing our first 3 years on getting the creators' trust. Today we have the commitment from more than 70 authors and 5 publishing houses. Now that we are in the client growth phase, our main metric is conversion rates and engagement.

What’s most exciting about your traction to date?

We’ve reached 20k people in the first week of our marketing campaign. Having so many people interested in our product is exciting.

What technologies are you currently most excited about, and most worried about? And why?

AI is one of our focuses for the next 5 years. We love the idea of an algorithm but fear it a bit at the same time. It’s going to be fun.

What drew you to get published on HackerNoon? What do you like most about our platform?

I got an email and found out it’s a pretty cool platform. I guess we love to be a part of big things.

What advice would you give to the 21-year-old version of yourself?

Keep going. At 21 I was still at university getting work experience to be able to apply for an MBA. It was really hard to work and finish university at night but it was so worth it. So yeah I would say keep going girl, you’re going to make it.

What is something surprising you've learned this year that your contemporaries would benefit from knowing?

You need to let go sometimes. And have fun too. I found that stressing over things doesn’t help at all. It’s worth it to have some quality time with yourself and the people you love as much as you can because things will keep on going even if you are not there 24/7