MAP Accelerator Program — Final Weeks

• Last Week: Week 13

As the program is wrapping up, a lot of things were happening in parallel. So now, a little bit delayed, here is my summary of the final weeks of the MAP program.

Branding

Very early on, in one of the mentor sessions, it was pointed out to me that branding can also be very valuable in a B2B context. For B2C it’s obvious. A lot of people are loyal to the brands they trust. But one should not forget that B2B is operated by people as well and while the decision process for a purchase usually doesn’t depend just on one single person, brand trust is still extremely important.

There are two types of brands:

• Personal brand: think of famous CEOs like Elon Musk, where people will buy the product — in part — because they trust that person.
• Corporate brand: many people trust Samsung as a brand for their mobile phones but could probably not name a single employee of that company.

While the corporate brand mostly relies on good products, there are special PR opportunities to further establish and improve the brand. Anything newsworthy can be used for this: (1) key hires, (2) product launches, (3) updates on market penetration, (4) funding announcements, (5) strategic partnerships and (6) awards and recognitions.

For the personal brand, this comes down to mostly becoming an industry expert that people trust. This takes time as reputation has to be built up. But of course a blog series like the one you’re reading right now can also be very useful ;-)

One insight from the branding session was that the Australian journalist ecosystem is quite small. So nurturing good long-term relationships with key journalists can be incredibly beneficial. The key tips how to achieve that are: (1) come well-prepared, (2) be well-spoken, (3) be able to tell your story well and (4) have media (photos, videos) ready to hand out to journalists to pep up their articles.

On a much higher level, as a start-up, you should also have a compelling answer as to WHY you started the company. A compelling WHY can establish your corporate brand very quickly and can even be more important than the product you are selling. If your customers buy into the WHY, becoming a successful business is child’s play.

General Business

This session went across different topics about business modelling, go-to-market and growth.

When you start a new company or create a new product, you have to ask yourself what type of product you have:

• A new category of products: when Apple introduced the iPhone.
• A new product within an existing category: Pokemon Go was the first augmented-reality game in the existing category of mobile games.
• An existing product within an existing category: TikTok falls into this category.

Each of these types require different go-to-market strategies. For new products/categories usually you just have to make sure people see the benefit of the product. For existing products within an existing category (the majority of all startups) the key is differentiation. You need to find out and promote what makes your product better/different from all the other products in the same category.

Beyond that, there were a couple of other useful tips in this session:

• When you have suppliers (services or goods), ensure you have backup suppliers ready - this de-risks the entire business as it removes single points of failure.
• Validate your product early with customers. A fail-fast strategy allows you to quickly pivot in the right direction.
• You might have to choose different mentors/coaches at different stages of your startup journey.

Investors / Dilution

The last session of the program again covered the general startup journey and the golden nugget from this session covered some thoughts on investors and dilution.

You have to pick your investors carefully. Lots of startups pick the slicing pie model, which basically increases the founder’s stake in the company for work hours committed (aka “sweat equity”). This is usually done by issuing new shares or options, thus increasing the share count for the founder. If you have an early investor, this will dilute the investor’s stake as their number of shares stays the same while the founder’s number of shares increases.

The advice we got was that the right investors don’t care about this type of dilution. If they do, they weren’t the right investors to start with. Good investors understand your business, trust in YOU as the founder and trust that YOU make the right decisions to make the business succeed. This needs to be communicated well between the founding team and the investor(s).

Final Thoughts

This pretty much concludes the MAP program. If you have been following this blog series, you’ll recognise the immense value this program can have for a startup. I don’t envy startups that have to survive without it. There were a lot of things we’ve learned that could’ve easily become the noose around our necks in the future. On top of that it opened the doors to the vast ecosystem of other startup founders, mentors, investors and industry leaders that we call the MAP ecosystem. A huge thanks goes out to all of them and of course also to you as the reader. Cheers.

I will try to continue to document our journey and what we learn on the way. Until next time.

• Last Week: Week 13