Driving start-up success through mentoring

This year’s Leeds Digital Festival was a great success. 115 events were attended by over 10,000 people. The city was literally buzzing (probably from all the tech being used!) and I’m pleased to say Calls9 was able to contribute to the festival by providing tech start-up mentoring.

Futurelabs hosted the mentoring sessions and if you’re looking for flexible start-up workspace or event space in the centre of Leeds I highly recommend you contact them.

I spent several hours working with both pre-launch and early stage start-ups. The range of ideas being put forward was very diverse. We covered topics including freelancer sourcing, healthcare, the sharing economy and drones. It was a great opportunity for start-ups to network with mentors and for mentors to give back to the tech community.

I can’t talk about the specific companies I mentored on the day but I can pull out some of the key points we discussed.

What problem / pain are you solving?
Being able to clearly articulate the problem / pain you are solving is key to any start-up’s success.

We’ve built a product called Calls9 Knowledge Plus and we describe it as:

The simple way to share knowledge, improve internal communication and connect your team

If you can work out the problem / pain you’re solving early on it makes answering the rest of the questions a lot easier.

Who is your ideal customer?
With our product example, since we’re helping people share knowledge and improve communication we typically work with heads of marketing / marketing directors when deploying Knowledge Plus, although CEOs and Managing Directors may also be involved in the decision making process.

Some of the start-ups I worked with on the day needed to focus more on defining their ideal customer. Until the ideal customer has been defined it is difficult to know how to price the product and therefore what the business model is.

What is your business model?
This is a much debated area but my personal opinion is that every start-up should have a business model, even if your product or service is free at launch.

Your business model is the opportunity for you to show why your product is different and why people should pay for it. With Knowledge Plus we took the view that companies would be willing to pay monthly fees to access a cutting edge Intranet / Knowledge Management platform instead of paying to build one from scratch or hire an internal team.

Clearly understanding the problem / pain we’re solving and for who enabled us to pick a price point that made sense for everyone. It’s the relationship between pain, customer and price that creates the foundation for your business model.

Who is in your team?
Great, so we’ve made it this far! We have a problem that needs solving, we know who the customer is and we also have a sense of the business model — but who’s going to make the magic happen?

With tech start-ups you broadly need:

• Marketing lead — Creates messaging and supporting collateral.
• Commercial lead — Sells your product using the marketing collateral.
• Design lead — Designs your product.
• Technical lead — Builds your product.

When you first start out some of these functions will be carried out by the same person but over time you’ll want to find specialists in each area. Also, as you grow you’ll need other people to cover finance, HR and operations — but you that’s a nice problem to have once the business is growing!

Ideas are cheap, execution is everything

An overused phrase I know but it does hold some truth. You do need to protect your ideas but without the right team you’ll never bring them to life. Getting the right team should be one of your highest priorities.

Early advice can make all the difference
What was great about the Leeds Digital Festival mentoring afternoon was that people got access to advice from a range of mentors early on in their start-up journey. Getting this kind of advice early on can really help a start-up avoid making common mistakes and slowing their growth potential.

If you weren’t able to attend this year’s Leeds Digital festival I recommend you try to come to LDF 2018. I’m sure it will be bigger, better and even more helpful to start-ups across the region.

Free consultation
Calls9 works with a range of business from start-ups, to SMEs and global corporates.

When working with start-ups we usually require them to be funded or have a significant chance of being funded in the near future.

If this sounds like you and you’d like to discuss how we can help you please schedule a free consultation.