Yorso and 500 Startups with Sberbank. Week 2 progress and activities
The lectures from the second week are not everything we experienced during the previous sprint. Another important event was related to meeting and pitching to the corporate partners of Sberbank. And, of course, new data, wins and fails inside the Yorso team. How it was and what we got after this sprint — see below!
Meet the corporate partners
On Wednesday evening we were expecting about 15 representatives from different corporate partners of Sberbank such as MTS, Beeline, Auchan and many others. The event to meet them can be split into several parts:
- “Hello, world” from the host part. Nothing special.
- The 30-second pitch from each project. All the project initially pitched in English (don’t know what for) but then in Russian (twice). The biggest issue was with the mic: when you speak it was with a short delay interrupting you. Some people decided finally to speak without the mic, some were confused. I really hope organizers will next time figure out something with this
3. Then corporates were moving around in a “Speed dating” format talking to startups and understanding who might be interested. I was really disappointed how in fact these partners behave: instead of coming to each team and getting to know each other they visited at maximum each ~10 teams. Why do I think it is wrong? Because you might have missed the pitch or the pitcher failed in 30 sec (mic issues, lack of practice, moon phase, etc.) or you could just expand your networking because there are not many people in the country do entrepreneurship. In fact, it looked that in many cases there were no decision makers and thus it was more the obligation rather than an opportunity for them
4. Free talks, drink reception. Nothing special, no one was drunk (unfortunately)
Yorso week progress
Key accomplishments
- All the team members have read the book “Mom’s test”
- Prepared the questions for problem interview (for owners and managers)
- Scheduled 6 interviews for the next week (1 Mexico, 3 Spain, 2 Russia)
- Identified 3 key directions to dive in: trading, SaaS, order processing tool (purchases, sales) and split the responsibilities inside the team
- 2 articles written: one on medium, one on vc.ru (brought more than 2k views, several new potentially valuable connections in Russia)
- Found potential partner in Asia (big trader from Bali)
- Completed the negotiation to sell the WL license for Yorso for 200k$ to the agriculture industry: it is the case when non-direct monetization helps the main business
- Did the analysis of key competitors: GFresh, Oceanexecutive, Procsea, Waystocap. The interesting part was to understand that we all have chosen a different approach and USP/VP. And the other interesting part that it is logically correct depending on the investments brought to the projects
Priorities of Yorso for the next week
- Conduct interviews
- Segment audience we have: buyers, sellers, subscribers, registered, warm database, cold database, exhibitions
- Prepare the emails for:
Further segmentation of unknown emails (in total about 25k emails of companies in the industry)
Onboarding for SaaS
Challenges, fails and lessons learned
- We overestimated last week plan for 20+20 interviews: we were not ready. It is better to conduct <10 quality with current vision and repeat the cycle if needed
- To fit into the schedule and do right prioritization: the amount of tasks is overwhelming, plus Anton will participate COP24 and will work remotely during 9–14 of December from Poland, Katowice
Key metrics and data for the week 2
- Cash Balance: $40,000
- Monthly Burn Rate: $10,000
- Runway: 4 months
- New orders: 1, transactional revenue — $3000
- New suppliers who put products online: 1
What’s next?
Just do it! A lot of mentors and third-party observers are keen to know the results of the upcoming interviews because we managed to find good representatives to speak too. The bad result would be a huge difference in responses and the wide range of existing problems in the fish and seafood industry.
#sber500startups #500Strong
