MAP Accelerator Program — Week 2
Another week with some fantastic content. We had our first founder’s round table, where everyone can give a brief update on how they feel, what bothers them, etc. Notable was how open the communication is. It’s clear that there’s a good amount of respect between the founders of the different start-ups and everyone is open for feedback and ideas. We were also encouraged to think about what goals we want to set ourselves for the MAP program and what metrics we want to develop to measure progress towards these goals. This is less about having something formal, but more about a mindset to work towards a goal and understanding when we move closer to it and by how much.
Email Introductions
Next up we’ve had a little session about how best to handle email introductions and schedule initial meetings. There were a couple of takeaways, where you put the person that introduced you to someone on bcc of an email, which allows that person to see how you follow up on the introduction without permanently including them into the conversation (which happens, if you add a person as cc).
Another topic discussed was how to schedule meetings. Rather than sending the other side too many options or sending them options where they have to translate time zones or do any work, it is better to do all the work for them as this increases the chance they take you up on it. So:
- Provide only a few slots spanning multiple hours.
- Translate all dates and times into the time zone of the other side.
As an example, I could provide to a person from Perth (Australian Western Standard Time AWST +8) two options: Monday between 12pm and 4pm or Tuesday between 10am and 2pm AWST. This way the person from Perth doesn’t need to do any maths and translate the time I give them in AEST to AWST. This makes it easy for the other person to simply schedule a meeting in either of these two slots and know that I will accept them — or get back to me with an alternative.
There’s an argument to be made that this depends a bit on the person you’re dealing with. Some people are happy enough to pick a date from your calendar using apps like Calendly. Others consider this too much work or too impersonal.
Risky Assumptions
The second session this week was about assumptions in our business model. Especially while you’re in the thick of it, it can be super difficult to differentiate between what’s a fact and what’s an assumption. We did some 1-on-1 sessions with a founder from another start-up — for them to identify what assumptions we’re making when we present our business case. The idea was that this removes the bias we have towards our own ideas.
The next step is to identify the assumptions that add the most risk to our overall plan and find a way to validate the assumptions. All of this helps setting your head straight and making you think about your own business model more critically, rather than indulging in blind optimism.
It is worth pointing out that there are two buckets of assumptions:
- Assumptions made about product-market-fit: Who is the customer? What problem do we solve using what business model?
- Assumptions made about the scale up hypothesis: Do we have the right team? Do we still have product-market-fit?
These two classes can be handled separately and which one to focus on depends on the stage of the start-up. For us, for example, we still need to worry more about product market fit.
Mentor Dinner
We also had our first mentor dinner, where we went around the table and each founder quickly mentioned what keeps them awake at night — basically, what is our most difficult problem right now. The mentor obviously could not know about all the details of a specific domain in which the start-up operates, but he was very good at abstracting the problem and then providing interesting solutions or at least thoughts that can lead to a solution.
It was a long session during which I’ve also noticed that we probably can help each other a lot as well. So, talking to the other founders about one of their problems and trying to give them some ideas, can have a real positive impact.
For Solstice AI the biggest problem right now is validating our solution and customer acquisition. In the enterprise space this is very difficult. The mentor provided us with an interesting idea. Rather than directly pursuing our customers, there could be a possibility of indirectly — but very visibly — validate our technology, which could create revenue and potentially even profits in the short-term and allows us to be visible to our prospective clients — solving 2 problems in one go.
It will be a difficult thing to pull off, no question. So we need to now evaluate whether a deviation from our original plan makes sense. But I guess you have to stay flexible and adapt to circumstances, if you want to succeed.
Accounting and Legal
The week finished off with an educational session with some lawyers, who went through the start-up basics with us, such as registering the business and protecting IP. We’ve heard about a few things that were already known to us, but also some new things. In the end a law firm send a few lawyers who provided an educational session to us for free. One of the amazing perks of this program.
In the afternoon, we also had the opportunity to have a 30 minute session with an accountant. I used the time well and rapidly fired away with my 6 or 7 most important accounting-related questions and got some good insights into what to watch out for and how to handle various specifics of our business.
