McGill X-1 Week 4: Staying Focused

Week 4 Focus:

• Identifying key assumptions
• Testing key assumptions

Over the weekend, Margaret of Ananda and Martin of Silent Disco Squad traveled to San Francisco to meet with investors and mentors. The Haply team also returned from the World Haptics Conference in Chicago with many new leads and validation.

Wednesday, July 8- First Advisory Board Meeting

Teams met individually with the McGill X-1 advisory board to present their progress on their milestones set earlier last week. In addition to the invaluable advice the board gave the teams, they will receive funding for their startup based on milestone completion.

Thursday, July 9- Birthday Cake and Daily Discos

Happy birthday, Thibaud! Nothing fuels entrepreneurial innovation like birthday cake-add dinosaur sprinkles and you’ve got yourself a party. After a long day of work and meeting with mentors, Silent Disco Squad got the whole cohort up and moving and shaking with the institution of the ‘daily disco’- a one song dance party.

Friday, July 10- Brandon Waselnuk of Tattoo Hero on B2B Customer Acquisition

Founder and CEO of Tattoo Hero visited the X-1 all the way from Ottawa to speak to the teams about B2B customer acquisition. He stressed the importance of building an initial customer preception (ICP) while thinking about what products your customers are using that you compete with and how that might translate to interest in your product. Brandon also advised teams to think about where customers are living on the web and what you can decipher from previous closed deals that you can use in new ones.

Quotes:

“Your first users are your golden users — you must be grateful”

“Customers know what pain points they have, listen to them, don’t be arrogant”

“Your buyers are not your users”