Lean Coffee, HSS Style — 30 Nov 16: Problems, Co-Founders & Mentors
Tales from Auckland Lean Coffee, inspired and guided by The Happy Startup School.
To give you a bit of context, Lean Coffee is an event where the group collectively suggest and decide on startup and entrepreneurial related topics to discuss. Everyone puts forward a question or topic and we vote on three to discuss. Here are the questions and responses from the session. The bullet points represent different suggestions from the group members.
NB, the Q&A’s are all based on peoples individual opinions and experiences, so use your own judgement on which pieces of advice you want to take.
The Questions Discussed:
Tricks to finding good problems to solve?
- Find the area that you want to play in, then put yourself in the environment where you get a better understanding of the problems that exist in this space.
- Find an existing idea that’s not been done well, or an obvious idea that’s not been done yet (relevant for NZ).
- Understand what you’re good at, and what drives you (the things you love doing), e.g. working with people, solving problems, building communities. The more work you can do on understanding yourself, the better positioned you will be to make the most of a good idea when it comes along.
- Screw the advice, just do. Fail fast and try again. Gradually your ideas will become better and your ability to execute well will develop.
- When it comes to negative feedback (from people other than your customers), don’t be disheartened. Instead let it fuel you.
How do you know if you need a co-founder/How to find people to join my startup?
There was a fair bit of discussion on this, and the overarching theme was to not let the absence of a co-founder stop you from moving forward.
Your best approach to getting a co-founder is getting traction behind your business. Then you’ll either find the right person, or you’ll get to the point where you can hire someone. If you do nothing hoping that the right person will come along, you’re not likely to go anywhere fast. Stagnation is the worst thing for a startup. Here are a couple of good points that came up:
- The diversity of thought that comes with having another person involved in the development of your idea is definitely beneficial. It helps you to get out of your head and consider things from a different perspective. It’s also means that you have someone who you can share the work with, ideally someone with a different skill set from you.
- It’s harder to get traction when you’re a solo founder because it’s harder to make concrete decisions and you don’t have someone to share the work with. When you have another person you are constantly creating agreements which creates a new reality in terms of the development of your business. There is less room for self doubt and things can move forward faster (if you work well together).
- Solo founders have a lower chance of success, which makes them less credible in the eyes of investors. This becomes less relevant once you start getting customers and employing people, because you’ve proven that you can get shit done. Up until that point it’s hard.
- There are so many should and should nots in the startup space, but they only exist until someone proves them wrong. There is no one right way to build a company. Worry less about what you should or shouldn’t be doing, and just do! If you keep moving forward, things will work out.
For more great information on this topic, including how to structure equity, check out this Quora post.
Where to find a suitable mentor?
- Find people who have done what you want to do and ask them for a coffee. It doesn’t have to be a formal arrangement. You can have a number of mentors/friends that help you out on a range of different things.
- Sometimes it’s better to find a mentor who is just one step ahead of you. It’s less intimidating to approach them, they will probably be more willing to help you out and their advice will be relevant to what you’re going through right now.
- Practice opening up about your challenges to people around you. You never know who might have the exact piece of advice that you need at that time, or who can connect you with other people who can help.
- NZTE have some services that can help.
The other awesome questions:
Do you have any good user research tips that can be used in a cash strapped startup?
My top tip for this is to do customer discovery yourself through one-on-one interviews. Every founder needs to be doing this anyway, regardless if you’re cash strapped or not. You need to get the level of understanding of customer behaviour and problems that can only really come from in person, one-on-one customer interviews. You should aim to do 30 (if you’re building a B2B company, ok to be slightly less) before you build your product. Doing 30 interviews consumes a lot less time than having to rebuild a product if you don’t get it right. It’s a small upfront investment that definitely pays off.
How to network efficiently?
Be authentic and ask questions. Focus on how you can provide them with maximum value from the conversation, rather than what you can get out of it (tip form the book Bullseye by Brian Tracey). When you focus on asking them questions and are genuinely interested in what the other person is saying, you slip out of the “consciously networking state” which makes the conversation a lot more natural.
How to find and make meetings with the right people/customers e.g. validation
Firstly, write down your assumptions of who the right person is. Once you have a clear idea of who you’re targeting it becomes a lot easier to find those people. Then think about where those people are likely to hang out online and offline and go there to find them. Understand the drivers that will make them more likely to want to talk to you, e.g. your story, your purpose, the problem they have that you can help them solve.
Having a couple of touch points before you jump straight into the meeting (e.g. for validation), e.g. if communicating online, ask them a simple question that’s easy for them to respond to. Then ask another question then say “hey I would love to find out more about ……., would you like to catch up for coffee?”
Think about how someone would convince you to give up 30mins of your precious time and do that.
What do you wish you were doing more of in your business/life?
I’ll leave you to think about that. Tip, if you’re thinking about the material things you can buy with the money you’re making, you may be missing something in your work/life. Often we seek external things to fill an internal gap so it’s a good indication that you might not actually be doing what you love right now.
How do I focus on my tasks better?
1) Do you have a clear plan for what tasks you should be doing right now in order of priority? If you don’t know what you should be working on at any given point in time, it’s hard to be focused. Monthly, weekly and daily plans do wonder for focus.
2) Build you energy levels so you’re in a good state to focus.
More tips here:
How do you protect your IP when pitching for a job?
I don’t know the answer to that from a legal perspective — this article has some advice.
My approach is to be so awesome that whoever you’re pitching to knows that they could never do the job as well as you.
Certainty and confidence about what you’re talking about helps to position you as the expert, which helps you to “claim the space” and deter people from trying to just copy your ideas. You want them to want you more than you want them, because you are so good at what you are do.
A lot of this comes from how you feel about yourself and the product/service your pitching. If you don’t feel fully confident about yourself and your ability to do the job better than anyone else, it may be that you haven’t quite found your groove or you need to do a bit of work on your self belief (I’ve definitely had to work on both of those things).
What is the current competitive market in the NZ startup space (what are people experienced with funding, support etc). The better place to find information about the state of the NZ startup space is the NZ Tech Startups Ecosystem facebook page. Mum’s Garage is also about to release some awesome information on what’s available in the space and how to access it, so stay tuned!
Thanks to the brilliant people who came along to the event and contributed to such a good discussion!
If you want to come along to the next Lean Coffee, HSS Style, join the meet up group here: https://www.meetup.com/The-Happy-Startup-School-Auckland-meetup/members/
Previous posts: https://medium.com/@MumsGarage/lean-coffee-hss-style-31-aug-16-44cbb81826c5#.xofcmilsi
