Eliminating hope. Intro

In this series I look at the startup journey we are on. The journey from idea to success or failure, whichever eventuates.

The series is called Eliminating Hope. It sounds negative, but it’s not.We all have hopes for the future. In startups we hope for success. I’m not talking about this broad, positive hope. I mean the kind that exists because of ignorance or incomplete knowledge. The title was inspired by Leigh Sherman. Leigh spent a fair bit of time mentoring me earlier in the year, if you have a high growth consumer startup, I’d recommend you contact him for some high performance mentorship. This series about the transition from hope to knowledge. I’ll cover our opportunities, how they came about and the outcomes. I’ll be writing about something that founders don’t talk about much — dead-ends. The endless leads and meetings that go nowhere — until you’ve either: eliminated all hope and stop or have uncovered a viable opportunity.

The early stage of the startup journey is full of hope. It’s exciting. You have an idea, maybe a team and target market. But you don’t know exactly what the market needs or wants, you hope — consciously or not — that they need what you have, or something similar to it. As you continue and opportunities don’t pan out, each dead end adds little to your knowledge of the market, you refine your offering or approach. As you acquire knowledge, hope fades, being replaced with certainty. You move into a position where you know what customers need. Excitement is replaced with satisfaction as you come to understand the market and its problem and you are driven by purpose instead of hope. As Leigh told me: it’s the founder’s job to know more about what the customer needs than the customer does!

Defence is a case in point for us. We are developing a tactical network to connect teams and their devices in extreme and hostile environments. Aaron is former Defence and I have two brothers and father who have served across three services of the ADF. So we had some informed insights. Defence seemed like a good target market. This is where the hope comes in, we knew they don’t have what we are developing. But we didn’t know if they needed it or wanted it. We don’t know what the process for working with them is, so we were full of hope. I’ll reveal this story as the series unfolds.

CASE STUDY

Since a big part of our value prop is to improve safety, early on I thought it made sense to talk to insurers. And since we are looking at a number of federal agencies as potential customers I looked up Comcare. They cover federal government agencies for workers compensation etc. I found they have a GM responsible for innovation, read through their corporate plan, recent annual reports and the GM’s position description.

I sent the GM an email outlining who we are, what we are doing and the alignment with Comcare’s performance criteria, future vision and the GM’s KPIs — all good startup hustle stuff. I scored a meeting, with a few ideas of how we could work together, but no idea of their internal plans or strategies.

My hope was eliminated fairly quickly when I arrived. I was fobbed of to a director who had no idea why I was there, hadn’t seen my original emails and told me I should have sent my presentation through before hand (I’ll come back to this). They were very helpful though, filled me in on Comcare’s priorities, process and outlined cases where they may be involved with a startup. The meeting was a dead-end at that point in time, but I now had knowledge about Comcare and I’d discovered a lever I could potentially pull when talking to customers.

Back to sending my presentation before the meeting. I consciously decided not to do this. I was well aware that if I sent everything through, there was a risk that they would read it, come to the conclusion there was no partnership and write back, maybe with some useful information, probably just a “thank you, there is no alignment at this time”. Same outcome, but no information. I wanted a face-to-face meeting, because when people are in a conversation, they usually say more and you can probe and push for more clarity. But a note: these people are very good at telling people what they want to say — you need to jump in and ask questions and seek clarity, disrupt them to get information that isn’t on the website.

Meeting decision makers at big enterprise/government take away: if you want a quick yes or no, send through as much information as you are comfortable sharing. If it comes back negative, ask why — always ask for more information! If you want to get face time, send through as little as possible and once the meeting is set, don’t make contact again. You are meeting with someone who has spent a long and successful career inside institutions, they have no understanding of you, a startup founder. Chances are they will leave the meeting annoyed, wondering why they agreed to seeing you. Don’t annoy them beforehand or give them an opportunity to reconsider it. Once you turn up, someone will meet you and you can get some useful information.

I’ve got some backlog to write about, then this blog will move into fairly realtime. It will probably piss some people off, we’ve had some some pretty indecent treatment from one particular federal department and it will probably please some people who have been awesome. In the end, I hope it gives other founders, especially first timers some insights and guidance on their path to eliminating hope.

I’m looking forward to sharing the journey …