Preparing for Post-Shutdown : Advice from Early Stage HAX Founders
Startups all over the world are re-evaluating their products and retooling their strategy as a result of COVID-19. We asked four founders from our early stage hardware portfolio to share advice on how they’re preparing for the shifts that will come as the world cautiously starts working again.
Reinforce Your Culture
Nishant Jain, Co-Founder of Presso. Atlanta, USA.
We’ve decided that being transparent with our team is incredibly important during the coming months. This started with one-on-one meetings with all of our team members to openly discuss the state of our company. We showed them our books, talked about our burn rate and asked them for suggestions on what we can do as well. We have also given them time to talk about their concerns and how we plan to work together over the coming months. This has already helped with team buy-in, and even resulted in employees offering to make sacrifices in their pay or benefits to help us get through this. Everyone’s focus has now turned to take on what comes next!
Excelling at WFH
Gilberto Loureiro, Co-Founder of Smartex. Porto, Portugal.
Because expectations around sales, traction, clients, and demos have diminished, our recent focus has turned to better product development, where our expectations are very high! We also believe that WFH presents an opportunity to get ahead on a few other important tasks:
- Prepare text for future press releases, patents, and applications materials for government grants
- Prepare sales materials, like new videos, one pagers, websites, or documents templates
- Spend time researching public grants & government resources that you can use to your advantage
- Clean back of house by updating the accountability, work contracts, and your trademark
- Open new leads (this depends on the Industry, but in some cases, this is a good opportunity to find your clients aware of their e-mail box. It will be difficult to go deep into a negotiation, but it could be a good opportunity to start some early contacts).
Don’t Hesitate to Attack New Opportunities
Amber Qi, Co-Founder of Youibot. Shenzhen, China.
When the pandemic first began, we were laser focused on using our hardware to fight the virus. We spent the first two weeks of the lockdown communicating completely digitally, and drawing up plans for a new robot fleet, the Aris-K2, which can disinfect surfaces with UV light and autonomously record human body temperatures. The Aris-K2 project has allowed us to deploy our hardware fleet inside of completely new environments for our products, like hospitals and airports, which is an incredibly valuable experience. Founders should be asking themselves if they can use this opportunity to gain experience in a new sector or environment that might be useful for future product development.
Youibot develops autonomous robotic solutions for industrial and enterprise environments.
Strengthen Customer Relationships
Thomas Uhlenbruck, Co-Founder of Pulse Industrial. Toronto, Canada.
“Everyone needs to be aware of how they should shift operations to keep confidence with their customers, as well as keep motivation high with the team. With respect to customers, we have taken the following actions:
- Let current customers know our monitoring service will continue
- Let upcoming customers know what to expect for installation dates for potential delays
- Clarify with customers if we are allowed to visit, and be respectful of their policies
Several of our pilots have been pushed back due to restrictions on site-visitor access, which has freed up some time on our engineering team to take on some new initiatives. Some of our customers have inquired if we can monitor other equipment (motors and gearboxes in particular), so we are now going ahead with some modifications to pilot those features. These are projects we’ve wanted to do for a while, and now we figure it’s a great opportunity. And from a business perspective, we can get more revenue without needing to acquire new customers.”
HAX is a hard tech investor, supporting founders that mesh physical and digital technology to transform industry. Early stage founders can find learn more and apply at www.hax.co.
