Some advice about advice
Rule #1: Work with people you know and trust
Rule #2: Work together, in the same physical space
Rule #3: Be your own customer
I guess we had been warned. We had been told, very aptly, that we were “trying to do a hard thing on hard mode.” Yet we were somehow unfazed. I’m unsure if it was our naivety, sheer confidence, or the optimism that Nicole and Ashton (plus the dream-team of mentors they managed to pull together) instilled in us during the kickoff to the Cansbridge Fellowship Incubator (CFI), that made us feel invincible. We were attempting to do something notoriously difficult, that none of us had done before, while ignoring three pretty crucial pieces of advice.
Taking a stab in the dark
I would never have have thought I would spend this summer trying to start a venture with two strangers. After a couple of messages back and forth, and a last-minute phone call the evening before the program started, Evan, Kaye and I decided that we were going to spend 12 weeks with CFI, trying to start a venture from scratch. We were living in three different cities, knew nothing about each other, but collectively thought: “Well, what else?”
We were flooded with advice from Day 1. Guest speakers, Y Combinator lectures, mentor chats, and more reading recommendations than we could plausibly go through. Everyone wanted to share their words of wisdom, their lessons learned from the failures and successes they encountered as entrepreneurs. And we listened, rather eagerly, zoom call after zoom call, to everything they had to say.
One mentor advised we spent no more than 3 weeks ideating before starting to build out a solution. Another suggested we talk to our future customers for months, for as long as it took, until we truly understood what it was they desired and how we could build something to fill that gap. Their advice came from a genuine place. Mentors wanted to tell us what worked for them, and help us avoid the rough patches they endured.
Except none of them had ever built a venture from scratch, with a team of three strangers. Located in three different cities. Targeting a demographic, young mobility-aid users, that none of us were a part of. Finally recognizing this, more than half way into the program, started to change the way in which we listened to, and acted on advice.
Were we missing a zero?
7 weeks into CFI, we pitched our venture. We had no product, no customers, simply an idea that we believed could greatly impact the lives of a small, but by no means insignificant, number of people. Our criticism came not with regards to the idea, but concerning the ‘limited’ and ‘uninspiring’ initial market of $15 million we were targeting. All of our targets for growth, for market share, seemed to be off by a factor of x10. Our socially-oriented venture, surprise surprise, didn’t seem to be meeting the targets of a high-growth tech start-up.
Could we be more ambitious? Yes. Could we inflate and expand our TAM SAM SOM to be more eye-catching? Yes. Do we have priorities other than rapid growth and capturing market-share concerning the social-impact of our venture that are challenging to quantify and difficult to effectively measure? Yes, yes we did.
It took us over two months to realize that the ‘Sam Altman’s and ‘Paul Graham’s, as well as the CFI mentors and weekly guest speakers, all had incredibly valuable insights to share with us, but that not all of their advice was relevant. This seems obvious, and it likely is, but to three rather impressionable first-time founders, it took some to discover. Maybe we need to figure out how to measure the social-impact we hope to deliver, as tough as that can be, before working out how to scale our company x10 in the next 18 months.
Advice from a mentor who knew what he didn’t know
Our mentor for the summer (and hopefully beyond) was a large part of what kept our team together, and moving somewhat forward, over the summer. Zach knew what he didn’t know, and went well out of his way to educate us, and himself, on topics we got stuck on. What he made a point to remind us of was that the excitement of our customers said more than the excitement of possible investors. If a modular, customizable cane is something that energizes young mobility-aid users, that speaks volumes, even if an able-bodied investor is unimpressed by the lack of patentable, technological breakthroughs in your product.
Hitting the brakes, for now
Evan, Kaye, and I started SPRING Mobility with unrealistically high hopes. We were quickly humbled by our lack of understanding of everything from our customers and their needs, the medical device licensing system in Canada, to how to measure and track social-impact KPIs. With school, work, and general life getting in the way, we won’t be able to continue working on SPRING Mobility in the capacity we had hoped to. We may have to bring on another co-founder, pass the torch to an entirely different team, or maybe revisit the idea at another time, in another place.
We did indeed “do a hard thing on hard mode”. We may not have done it well, we may not have achieved our absurdly ambitious CFI Week 1 goal, but I could not be happier with the experience and friendships that came about from this summer of endless whereby calls (to support Kaye and her low-bandwidth internet), as we attempted to build a something from nothing.
