Our first week’s reflection of the startup accelerator.
Preface
In case you missed it, Tech Can [Do] Better officially took a step into the arena of entrepreneurship this month by joining DivInc’s 12-week social justice accelerator.
We are going on this startup journey which is inherently hard, but even harder if you come from a disenfranchised background. Many facets of our identity will surely be headwinds: Black (with a Black female executive) and first-time co-founders, with a non-wealthy upbringing and network. Our life’s mission is to lift as we climb, as our ancestors have, and to make the path to success more accessible for folks like us.
Over the next 12-weeks, we are sharing our story—authentically and transparently—to connect with:
- New and aspiring underrepresented co-founders — There weren’t many stories that we could see ourselves in, and we hope to share this experience with you, good, bad, and ugly. We hope it inspires you and gives you lessons you won’t have to learn the hard way.
- Advocates, domain experts, and supporters — To be successful, we’ll need help, primarily in the form of wisdom and access. We hope our story invites you into our process. We love feedback, so please chime in where you see you, or someone you know, adding much-needed value.
- Our family, friends, and anyone else who loves us — We really love and appreciate all the support, past, present, and future. So, have grace with us as we obsessively focus our time, energy, and social battery on trying to make the tech industry better.
Recap
In our first week, we covered the basics of our business, including:
- honing our mission & vision,
- establishing our target customers (the who), refining our solution (the what), and articulating the value (the why), also called W3,
- drafting our revenue model,
- analyzing our critical assumptions, and
- identifying our key performance indicators (KPIs).
We spent time consulting and networking with mentors (program alumni, founders, and investors) at the Black in Tech event at Capital Factory this week. They shared solid business advice, best practices, and how to apply those practices in our context.
As two non-business savvy founders, this event was incredibly enlightening and inspiring. Each day brings new challenges, inspirations, and, most importantly, lessons.
Our biggest learnings from this first week are:
- A revenue model represents one’s business operations.
Drafting our revenue equation, including value drivers and sub-drivers, allows us to visualize our business infrastructure and map how inputs correspond to outputs. This dynamic entity will change the more we experiment, and we suspect we will iterate on this model as we learn more. - Customer is key (duh).
As product and design folks, this concept wasn’t new to us, but we had no idea how relevant it was in the context of an early-stage startup. Every investor cares about your users and the extent to which they buy or want to buy your product. - Talk to users…then more users…then more.
Identifying your users and what makes them happy requires “going outside” and talking to people — a lot of people. Ideally, before you start building your product, as it allows you to inexpensively validate whether your product solves users’ needs. - Execution wins.
A plan is essential; executing the plan consistently, with quality and speed, is paramount. It’s the coalescence of the right people doing the right things over time and iterating to drive repeatable outcomes. It’s not unnatural to have to cut your losses and pivot. Fail fast and cheap. Keep moving.
What’s next?
On our path to minimizing risk for our business and finding product-market fit, our next step is evident — talk to as many potential users as possible. To that end, we’re focused on cultivating a deeper understanding of the managerial experience, and executing our discovery aimed at answering:
How might we empower managers to perform more ‘value-additive’ management to enable everyone, inclusive of identity, to do their best work?
Managers, we need you!
If you lead a team of people, whether it’s a small software engineering team or a marketing department, we want to hear from you.
Please complete our brief, 2-minute user survey, and share with your peers. We’re eager to hear your stories.
If you’re looking for a quicker start on how to advance DEI and achieve your business outcomes, we’d love to talk to you. Let’s do better.
You can follow our accelerator reflections, including questions, answers, experiments, and experiences here on Medium, our website, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter.
Lawrence Humphrey, Co-founder and CEO of Tech Can [Do] Better
Fallon Blossom, COO of Tech Can [Do] Better
