A stop over at Incubator — Day 2 as a VC intern

Michelle Huang
Jul 20, 2017 · 4 min read

Today I made a trip to incubate to shadow Mike Nicholls (a partner at Main Sequence) for the day


The morning began with a mentoring session with 6 early-stage startups.

The theme of the week: “talking to your customers.

The sessions were a very guided process, we ran through:

  • The problems they identified after speaking with customers
  • How to combat those problems
  • The ups and the downs of the week
  • And a truckload of advice!

Here are some of my biggest takeaways during the mentoring sessions.

Education Link — offers specialised CRM targeted at the global higher education industry.

  • Mike asked for a role play of the sales pitch they would give in a cold call and pointed out several pivotal changes that could transform the success rate of cold calls.
  • Firstly, eliminate “have you heard of us?”, because chances are they haven’t heard of your early stage startup. It’s much more powerful to tell them about a recognised company that is using your software.
  • Secondly, don’t overwhelm your audience. As a founder, there are some many great things about your product you want to relay across, but the more you speak at them the more distant they become. A one liner ‘By using our product we cut down the time it takes a sales agent to send out a qualidied quote from 1 hour to 5 minutes!'. Make it clean, fast and memorable.

Learned Hub — teaches mathematics online

  • The problem they encountered was that their audience didn’t want an online resource, they wanted one-on-one tutoring.
  • The company was on the path to finding the customer segment that would have market fit with their product
  • The advice was to conduct lots of experimentation; talk with customers, schools, teachers, principals and particularly the P&C.

AMSL Aero — creates aerial device with electric vertical takeoff and landing

  • It was extremely fun to be a part of the session for this start-up, because there was a fully functioning prototype with geeky wires, foam, propellers and lots of tape!
  • Mike’s advice for this start-up was to form connections before raising and to let your contacts know approximately when you will be raising. The advice came along with a caveat, “don’t let too much of your time be eaten up by networking” (it’s time consuming and days worth of time can be lost before you know it)
  • And one last pointer, was to always bring along the hardware if your company has a product. (if a picture speaks a thousand words, I can’t imagine how many words a prototype speaks)

After lunch, a quick workshop on marketing was held by none other than, Mike.

The coolest marketing hack I learnt about during this workshop was, the idea of creating your own leads.

Some internet router providers also provide a standalone tool/service to measure the strength of your wifi signal as you walk around your house/office once you have provide your email. (I certainly want to find out which areas aren’t YouTube streaming friendly!).

And the smart thing is, they now have a lead to a customer who is potentially dissatisfied with their current services and they can market a much dearly wanted solution to this unknowing customer. Now, that’s marketing!

In the afternoon, we headed over to a speed dating event between the Incubator start-ups and their mentors.

Martin on the left, me sitting beside him and we are talking with NutriTech. Photo courtesy of Mike

Martin Duursma, also at Main Sequence Ventures was so kind as to let me shadow him during his speed dates. It was interesting to compare the questions asked by Martin vs the questions I asked these startups earlier this morning. The questions were galaxies away. While I only every brushed the surface, Martin could immediately identify potential problems and was digging away at the core of the business.

For instance with Education Link, they were talking about how education sales agents could potentially receive up to a 30% commission on the cost of the entire university course.

Wow! That’s certainly lucrative and a little bit outrageous, but risky? (it didn’t look like it to me). But Martin explained that any legislation or regulation action on the government’s part could immediately pop the bubble in this industry.

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Michelle Huang

Written by

Growth & Marketing @Canva with a passion for all things data

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