Meet Alejandro Turell, CEO & Founder of LastBasic

LastBasic is a digital prototyping platform that challenges the traditional engineering consultancy model, helping to turn inventors’ ideas into a reality. The product development platform is made up of a community of experts that compete against each other to turn inventors’ ideas into prototypes.

Inventors use the platform to post their idea to the community and LastBasic takes that idea through every stage, starting from design all the way through to prototyping. The turnaround time is only a few months, and the process can be as low as half the cost of traditional consultants.

While studying for my second Master’s degree, I was working for a traditional consultancy, and didn’t like how limited the service was, not to mention how long the projects took. I wanted to make things easier for inventors that have limited options when it comes to turning their ideas into a reality, often choosing to go down the traditional engineering consultancy route, which is complex, expensive and overcontrolling.

With LastBasic, inventors pay a fixed price per project, and experts are paid for both engaging with an inventor’s idea by submitting proposals as well as when their design is chosen. This model is different to traditional engineering consultancies and other platforms because it combines a smooth digital process with a highly connected community, all while giving inventors complete control of the process from beginning to end.

What Challenges Have You Faced?

Coming from an academic background and having limited experience in business development, I had to really force myself to believe in my vision and work hard not to let the fear of failure get in the way. In other words, I had to go into this blind and just take the leap. Initially it was challenging to get experts and clients onboard, especially when the platform had barely been tried or tested, but we remained focused on our objectives, and sheer determination made things happen.

What really helped is creating our core values: Connected Community, Closeness, Accessible; Problem Solvers, Direct, Transparent, Committed, Listen. Importantly, our values are at the heart of the business and it’s crucial that these are communicated to our customers through our messaging but also internally to our existing and potential designers and engineers.

What Have You Learned?

There have been many lessons learned along the way, but mostly when starting a business you have to shut out the noise from those who say that ‘this won’t work’. If you really want something that will disrupt the industry you have to be a little bit blind and a little bit crazy to make it happen. It’s been a long learning journey, with a lot of testing and in spite of having a platform that performs well, we are constantly looking to improve.

This is why we are constantly making improvements in the platform’s performance, making our community of experts more specialised and efficient, and working on a new website which we believe will communicate the right message, which we will be releasing by the end of November.

Our vision is to become the biggest global meeting point in hardware technology creation and interaction. We want to be a market network of tech trends for inventors to exchange concepts and ideas, providing a technical support ecosystem for entrepreneurs, SMEs, and corporations. The next three years will be spent defining and growing our three main pillars: inventors (our clients), revolution (the platform/innovation), and creation (our experts).

We want to increase our presence, brand image and reputation in the UK, Europe, US and Oceania markets through marketing efforts as well as build partnerships with SMEs, corporations, engineering associations, universities and other organisations and institutions. To do this, we must always be open to learning and adapting to meet the needs of our customers.