A startup is not just a smaller version of a mature business. Not even close. With scarce personnel and no money founders are not only engineers, but also salesmen, accountants, lawyers. Everyday comes with a new role, every hour demands different expertise. Switching between roles, eliminating distractions and remaining focused is one of the most challenging tasks during the early days of every business.
The way you manage your time during these hectic days is as important as your idea.
One of the things I don’t get about many StartUPs is their corporate work routine. Not sure if it’s bad heritage left from school or corporate days. Everybody claims to have a new approach, a new idea, a new view. However if you visit a typical accelerator you’ll see it buzzing with life during the week (10:00 onwards to ~19:00) and it will be quiet, if not deserted during weekends.
I am not saying you should be working all the time. You can’t. All I am saying is that you, as the manager of your time should really optimize it.
Spread your activities in such a way as to get maximum output for minimum time input.
The days to your Demo Day are counted and you better fully utilize them!
First, set your expectations:
An accelerator can not literally “accelerate” your business. What an accelerator can and will do is to give you some breathing time, save you the hustle and expenses of finding and furnishing a real office and give you a sexy aura that will put a spell on potential employers. It’s up to you to squeeze the maximum out of everything that your accelerator and the people running it can offer, which will potentially help you grow your business.
Most people would rather be busy at work, crunching lines after lines of code that will not find their ideal users. That’s a safe and sound thing to do. You’ve worked, you deployed — now the users will come. Right? No!
Each and every accelerator will try to minimize its risk by throwing you immediately into the Agile trenches. The “speak to the customer first”, the “go out on the street”, the validate talk will be given over and over.
They’d like to see that there is interest, demand, clients for what you’re about to build, way before you start building it!
Do talk with your customers. At least define them if they’re impossible or very difficult to reach (top CEOs). This will help you lose all the fat from your MVP and actually have something built, better — sold at Demo Day.
Second, play as expected
Acceleration programs are not only helping you with money, but are also trying to provide valuable advice, know-how and contacts. To the best of their abilities accelerators will try to organize events and workshops at which established proffessionals will share their experience.
There’s no “one size fits all” model in which the speaker or the workshop will be useful to everybody. It will be for some, others will condemn it as “waste of time”. You are, however expected to attend these events because… a lot of people put a lot of effort to pull them off.
Here are some tips how to save time and get the most of any such event:
Delegate
Probably this is the only good thing of having a team with more people — send the most relevant person to the workshop/lecture. Have him summarize it to the team later.
Ask questions
Most of the time the speakers/coaches will be meeting you for the first time and will know nothing about you or your business. To get them out of their generic presentation/advise simply ask the questions that matter to you, get your answers or move the conversation over mail.
Connect
If an executive is delivering a monotous talk, this does not mean that you should ignore him. Reach out after he’s done and try to tap into his network.
Third, and most important: forget about the days of the week.
The days of the week, are just an agreenment of when business is expected to be done. Business, not work. Two very different things. Business is talking to people and making them do something — sign and send a contract. However, we all know how crazy Monday mornings are — people catching up on mails because they enjoyed their weekend. Fridays are the same — people hurring to their weekend destinations. Turn this to your advantage, do business during the week and work on the weekends:
There will be some set activities (reporting, seminars, one on ones) for which you will receive information in advance. Plan your business week around them.
Accelerators normally occupy open spaces and during the week people talk, listen to music, strall, make coffee. Since accelerators and “innovation” are trendy, journalists will interview people. Founders will interview employers.
There will be no activities and distractions during weekends.
That’s when you get to code and build. You can even adjust your development cycles in a way that you improve your product during the weekend based on the feedback obtained during the week.
Bureaucracy
Leverage Monday Mornings, Friday Afternoons, National Holidays and Bad Weather. Occasionally you’ll have to deal with authorities. Do it when nobody expects you — the day before a long weekend or national holiday when the city empties. Friday afternoon is also a good time.
Nobody likes bad weather. Except you. Bad weather locks people at their homes, empties the streets and all administrative desks.
As luck would have it, just while wrapping this up…
