Although it is not one of the best-known brands for the general public, it is one of the six most important startups in Spain and one of the Top 25 in all of Europe. We are talking about Red Points, an overwhelming success that hides two buybacks and the bankruptcy of its founder, Josep Coll. This is the story that the Catalan entrepreneur tells in Rock and Business, a groundbreaking conference on what entrepreneurship is ---which he recently gave at the Aquitania Theater in Barcelona---, with an exhibition that combines the strength of rock&roll with the dazzle of the best lessons in economics and business.
An intellectual property lawyer, Coll decided to found Red Points in 2011 after almost going bankrupt a few years earlier due to the irruption of the piracy crisis. "In less than two years I lost almost all my clients. It was one of the hardest blows we who work in the cultural industry have suffered," he explains. With a client portfolio made up of record companies and music groups, Josep Coll had to recover practically overnight. "In the period from 2006 to 2008, book piracy levels went from 5% to 54%. In the case of cinema it was from 20% to 84% and the music sector experienced growth from 10% to almost 98%," the businessman emphasizes.
"In a matter of months, people went from buying all the music they listened to to not paying a single euro." Faced with this authentic cultural tsunami, the lawyer and amateur musician (he has been a singer for groups such as Discípulos de Otilia and Sin papeles and has accumulated more than 500 concerts) decided to undertake a new project to fight against piracy. After five years of struggle and several launch attempts, among which two buybacks and a financial cushion that barely reached 3,000 euros stand out, Josep Coll managed to establish Red Points in 2011, one of the most used brand protection software on the international market.
Through a system of trackers or crawlers, Red Points eliminates all content protected by industrial intellectual property rights. From digital books uploaded on pirated content pages to copied products sold on platforms such as Ebay or Amazon, the goal is to completely eliminate fraudulent trade. "We started by detecting illicitly uploaded songs or movies and ended up working on the detection of clothing or accessories," explains its founder.
Together with Coque Moreno, his current partner, Coll explains in Rock and Business how he managed to refloat a company he practically considered lost, thanks to his tenacity and persistence in the fight against piracy. "I had to resort to my parents' inheritance in life," he explains with the smile of someone who has successfully overcome the worst of scenarios. "The goal is to give the most relevant advice from everything we have learned over the last few years, so that new entrepreneurs do not make the same mistakes."
Although he remains a minority partner in the company, in 2018 he decided to sell Red Points to other investors and step away from the business world for a couple of years. He is currently the owner, together with Moreno, of RepScan, an online reputation improvement software that eliminates all content that could damage the image of a brand or company. The main objective is to guarantee the right to second chances. "We try to apply what we learned in the previous company and explain it in our conferences in a new and transgressive format," Coll explains to The New Barcelona Post.
Both entrepreneurs want to transmit "joy and vitality to the Barcelona startup ecosystem" through this type of event. "Rock and Business is a very common format in the United States, but it had never been done before in Barcelona. It is a musical monologue that tells a story of successes and failures. Barcelona is sad, it has lost its sparkle. It needs events like these to regain its pre-pandemic joy," Coll concludes.