TriggerMail at TechStars NYC 2013

About three months ago, I moved from Seattle to New York to join the TechStars NYC class with TriggerMail. I had a vague idea of what TechStars would be like, because while I was in Seattle, I happened to work at a startup that operated out of the same building as TechStars Seattle. There’s also plenty of things written about the TechStars experience in various blogs and press articles, but holy cow, none of them do justice to what the experience is really like. TechStars was extremely intense and exhilarating, and it was almost all due to the amazing people in the local startup community that the program surrounds you with.

Enjoy the ride

A roller coaster ride would be nowhere near as fun if you did it alone, without a few dozen people experiencing the highs and lows and screaming out loud with you. When Mahmoud and I started TriggerMail full-time, we were doing a lot of things in isolation. It was always fun, but it was like riding a roller coaster alone. That changed in an instant the moment we joined TechStars. We were surrounded by 10 other teams that were extremely diverse in thought, experience and nationality. Some teams were doing over a million dollars in revenue, while others had just changed their core idea a few weeks before the program. It was truly humbling to be around a group of people who were absolutely committed to their mission. Each of their personal stories reinforced the fact that you were among a group of people who you’ll be learning from during your life-long relationship. I’ve always believed in optimizing for people you’ll surround yourself with and TechStars truly accelerates the process of finding and building relationships with a group of people that would otherwise be impossible to get together in one place for an hour, let alone for three months.

Listen, filter and absorb

I knew that mentorship was a critical part of the TechStars program, but had no idea that some of these mentors actually work their ass off for you without expecting anything in return. The first month in TechStars involves “mentor dating”, where you meet both startup operators and investors in short 30 minute meetings after which you mutually decide whether or not to work together. It might sound like an inefficient process on the surface, with dozens of meetings every week while you are trying to build a product and get customers, but some of these meetings have a really high fan-out value. For example, our first mentor meeting got us two customers right in less than a day. That same investor mentor ended up leading our seed round of funding at the end of TechStars. When I went to visit family in Seattle during TechStars, I sent an email to another of our mentors to see if he could make any customer intros there. The day after I landed in Seattle, I was sitting down explaining TriggerMail to the VP of Marketing at Nordstrom. When we had trouble getting the @triggermail handle on Twitter, one of our mentors made it happen in less than 20 minutes and that too via a connection to the CEO of Twitter. I can list a few more paragraphs of all the things that our mentors have done for us. But the point is that some might say that spending your time in tons of meetings is pointless, which is true to a certain extent. But if you get to spend time with the right people and 30 or 40 meetings over a month is what gets you access to some of the smartest investors and operators in a city, it’s absolutely worth it. There is also a temporal effect to meetings. We could have probably done 30 meetings over a course of a year, but that wouldn’t have been as effective as back to back meetings in a month. The locality of feedback from high frequency meetings allow you to really test and iterate how you communicate your product, market and vision in a controlled experiment in a short amount of time. As long as you make sure that you take all advice with your own filter and make sure that the feedback and criticisms you get from these meetings are relevant to your unique problem set, there is no doubt that it can be a powerful enabler for your startup.

Pick your battles wisely

When you build a startup, you have to choose what parameters to optimize for as you work towards your vision. You can optimize for anything but not for everything, so you have to pick your parameters wisely. Some startups optimize for revenue, some founders optimize for equity, some optimize for happiness and so on. For us in the early days, the high order bit was always about optimizing for people and time. When it came to people it was about making sure that we were surrounded with the best people and ideas. When it came to optimizing for time, it was always about how can we test a hypothesis quicker, how can we get a customer on boarded faster or how can we drive revenue for our partners faster. Think of TechStars as the ultimate toolbox for your startup. Pick the parameters you want to optimize, and then throw TechStars at it. The people and process that makes up TechStars will learn, adapt and accelerate your startup journey like nothing else you’ll have experienced.