Preply at Techstars’15, Berlin

Intro: Techstars’15, Berlin

Last 2 months were full of blood, sweat and tears(of happiness of course) — as Preply got into Techstars program(link).

Just a little statistics, Techstars Berlin received ~800 applications and invited 10 teams, so conversion rate is < 1% and that is quite cool to be in converted part.

So until the 15th of September, me, Kirill, Serge and Andrii will be in Berlin. In this post I’ll try to wrap up my attitude to Techstars, learnings about this expуrience by far.

Techstars program

Briefly, Techstars program is awesome. It starts with a motto “Give first” — you should always think how you can help people you meet starting with other team and ending with mentors. First two weeks were “mentor madness”. Each day we had 10 one-on-one meetings, 15 minutes each with cool mentors. Some of them were investors, other were former or current founders. Few of them were with technical background and much more with marketing. After those two weeks each team can leverage that mentors network to accelerate their product. The funnies thing was that you almost always get contradictory feedback like:

You should start scaling ASAP!

Mentor 1

Scaling at your stage is shooting yourself in the foot. Tune the product, improve conversions, trigger better PMF.

Mentor 2

The instinctive way of using this feedback is to deny opinion opposite to yours, but more you listen — more you learn to accept and analyze feedbacks and nurture them for useful thoughts. When I now reflect on mentors’ advices I find that now we use some of the advises despite of the fact that we were critically perceiving them when first heard. Pro tip: Always, write down feedback.

Except building your network mentors help you to think in strategic way, to be ready for problems you do not even think of:

If you think you have problems while and because you are small — let’s make it clear: while you are not loosing millions per day because of security breach, firing dozens of people because of expenses cut, disconnecting millions of users because of your servers are down — you do not have problems, you have tasks.

Mentor 3 on marathon approach to building a company

Business would be awesome without that f..ing people. Mentor 4 on how HR is important

I know you X, Y, Z and they were building very similar product but failed. Let me check if I can contact you with founders to chat about the market and mistakes they made. Mentor 5 on leveraging his network to help

So, basically, before Techstars you should be ready for two questions: “What do you need?” and “How can I help?” — if you have problems of any kind or unanswered questions — you are at a right place.

After mentors madness weeks you have approximately two monthes of time to develop your product before demo-day(for us it will be on the 10th of September). Demo day is huge cool event when 10 teams from techstars cohorts present their stories in front of 500+ investors. In between:

• every Thursday we have talks together with all teams and with some invited famous guest from startup community who shares his story. In the evening, some Techstars organizes thirsty Thursday — where all teams(sometime together with mentors and their friends) go to some pub and chill out.
• Every Friday personal deep-dive with managing director of our program(Jens Lapinski, check out his blog).

Technology discoveries

• Microservices are not future, they are widely used now. They help you to scale product and moreover — speed up development process.
• Immutable deployment is de facto industry standard and must have if you plan to make a long-run service(I think famous Joel Spolski list should include it now). Awesome book by NGINX on the topic.
• There are so many awesome PaaS/SaaS solutions that you should use — talk with other teams, exchange your experience. In our case we were very happy with Zendesk until we saw Intercomio. We were using perhaps one tenth of Amazon Web Services until we visit AWS summit in Berlin. Tech PaaS solutions like AWS(they btw have awesome blog for startups) that take care of all routine can save your much time and help to focus on what you do best. Do not invent a wheel — use he best tools money(or perks ) can buy — thus you buy speed.

Marketing discoveries

• As a Ukrainian we have a good standing in marketing(channels like seo, ppc, email etc.), especially if it is data-driven. Obviously, sales in not a strong side of uUkrainian teams(weak local b2b market), our colleagues in Techstars do it much better — and this is good opportunity to learn.
• Preply is good in analytics, there is a room for improvement, but what we are doing is much more that many startups are thinking. Stand on the shoulders of giants and create/execute/learn fast. Really fast. Growth rate matter more then absolute numbers
• Retention is a king. Recently I there was an article about new term called “retentioneer” =”retention” + “engeneer”, which is kind of upgraded growthhacker role that would prevail in companies focused on growth, given the fact that CAC across marketing channels grows each year. Even if your LTV:CAC=1:10, weak retention is a red flag. In our case, there are much of business model nuances but still, “user who return and pay” = “users who love you”.
• Marketing is a process, if you set everything up it just becomes a part of your product. Processes work nicely if you have motivated, responsible people behind them.

If one will ask me what I would do before techstars that would save me the most of time I would answer — investing time into making our analytics reports outside the product(Excel, Google Spreadsheets). Some time before techstars Paul Levchuk said us: never invest development time into internal analytics dashboard — you will never cover all metrics/cases. Only integration with Excel or similar, only hardcore. We did not take it serious enough at that time, we did not expect it to be so true. During Techstars we have to calculate up to 50 different metrics each week, different reports for different stakeholders with different dimensions — it can be a nightmare. I will not do internal analytics inside of product anymore. Exports to third-party tools that can proccess raw data and are designed to do that is the thing I do regret we have not implemented before.

Berlin is awesome. I love New York the most, but Berlin is like NYC younger brother — very similar in habits but smaller. They share the spirit of freedom and self-expression: at any given time something happens somewhere in Berlin. There are so many cool events and parties that you have to choose where to go. We were very lucky to rent an apartment at Alexanderplatz so we mostly choose events that are in walking distance from our home. But Berlin life deserves to separate post.

Two thirds of our program past, will try to write about techstars experience more in details during the last few weeks.

Originally published at 52.18.241.151 on August 22, 2015.