Originally written November 5th, 2014.

It’s been almost six months since I first left to Boston in June to join an accelerator program for my business, REACH Diagnostics. It was an incredible experience and incredibly rewarding on a personal and professional level. After reviewing all my notes from the past summer, I’ve summarized everything I learned over the summer into a list of three core lessons.

1: Just do it.

The biggest, most important lesson I learned is also the simplest.

While in India running the business with my team, we had allocated some time to partnering with hospitals, a) to advertise our business to their existing diabetic patients, and b) help us create an effective mobile monitoring solution. Unfortunately, we had no network into the hospitals, and were spending weeks coming up with strategies, trying to connect with people on LinkedIn, and asking our Indian advisors for help. Over the span of two weeks we made no progress at all, until we finally decided to get out of our apartment, take a rickshaw to the biggest private hospital in Mumbai, and walk in.

We were stopped by security in the first 10 seconds of walking through the doors. As I tried to explain why we were there with my limited Hindi, one of the doctors passing by overheard me, pulled our team aside, and gave us the contact information of the person we needed to talk to, as well as their schedule. We had a meeting with him the next day.

A similar strategy landed us our first meetings that led amazing conversations with the IDF, Joslin, and many more amazing partners. In retrospect, it doesn’t seem like a particularly insightful takeaway, but the type of passive behaviour we were exhibiting is more common than I would think. Instead of spending days ordering our uniforms, Danica and I walked to the closest market and made the purchase for 20 saris and had them at our door the next day. In our business and out of it, I realized that no decision was oftentimes worse than making the wrong decision.

Since then, there have been a lot of times where I’ve wanted to accomplish something, and instead of sitting around, mulling it over and talking myself out of it, I do my best to just do it.

2: Nobody knows your business like you.

In our first two weeks at the accelerator, we asked to pitch our business to some of the Hult mentors and advisors. We used the same deck and script as our regional round, a proven presentation that received rave reviews.

We got shredded in less than 5 minutes into our presentation. The mentors were uninterested, unengaged, checking their phones, and their disappointment was evident. They discovered that we hadn’t invented the technology we were using, we were just using it in a unique way. Because of this, they thought we had no competitive advantage and nothing of value — and they didn’t hesitate to communicate that. I think my team and I deflated like balloons, and all the hype from our previous success in Shanghai was gone. We went home immediately after and wasted the rest of the week eating and drinking — we’d almost given up on the business and it took us a while to bounce back from that presentation.

We didn’t agree with the feedback given to us, but weren’t confident enough to believe in ourselves. When someone with years of social enterprise experience tells you (a second year business student) that your idea is shit, it’s tough to have faith in your business. But that’s exactly what we should have done. Since that day, I’ve been told many times that my business doesn’t make sense, it’s not going to work, or it’s not going to make a difference. But now I know that I know my business better than them. Someone might have years of startup/consulting/life experience, but (almost) nobody has more experience in the inexpensive-paper-based-diabetes-diagnostics-in-urban-slums industry.

That being said, there’s a fine line here between ignoring feedback you don’t agree with, and ignoring feedback you don’t want to hear. It’s important to evaluate feedback and criticisms on their merit, and people have definitely criticized REACH in entirely valid ways as well — we do our best to improve on those limitations. But sometimes when we think we know better, we follow our instincts.

3. Understand the incentives at play.

With the popularity of books like Freakonomics, The Why Axis, Predictably Irrational, etc, I don’t need to explain that understanding incentives is important. Had we realized that the mentors who ripped us apart on our first presentation just wanted to see how we react when challenged (and wanted to push us to do better), our reaction would have been different.

Over the span of the past 6 months, I’ve had a lot of advisors and mentors telling us to do different things, and at times it became extremely confusing. When a partner at a $1.25B venture capital firm is telling you to do one thing, and the head of innovation at J&J Worldwide is saying the opposite, it’s tough to decide what to do. Even when deciding whether to attend the accelerator or take a formal internship in Toronto, I received conflicting (equally valid) advice from multiple people. But the moment I realized the importance of understanding incentives was when REACH was deciding whether or not to pivot away from a distributed-printer-based model to a centralized-production model.

We were leaning heavily toward keeping the distributed printer model, and this sentiment was echoed by most of the advisors at the accelerator. But then we heard someone say “imagine how great it will sound in the papers”, and suddenly the light bulb turned on. Nobody who was recommending the printer-based production cared about the business! Their incentive wasn’t seeing REACH succeed or maximizing our impact. It was getting us (and by relation, the accelerator) in the papers for a “fresh” and “innovative” new product. Outsourced distribution wasn’t sexy or newsworthy. But it meant we could bring the cost down for our customers by more than 50%, making our solution affordable to over 10 million more urban slum dwellers in India alone. It was obviously the right decision, and it was only when we realized the underlying incentives of the people around us that we realized it.

A keen eye on incentives continued to be important for our business, helping us design compensation packages for our salespeople, crafting a pitch that resonated with our specific audiences, and ultimately in seeking financing as well.