Captain’s Log: Week 6

Our sixth week’s reflection of the DivInc Social Justice Innovation accelerator.

Recap

Our fifth week of the accelerator was all about concept testing. We put ourselves and our concepts out there and spent time connecting with and learning from fellow entrepreneurs during SWSW. During our sixth week, the midpoint of the accelerator, we focused on getting the most out of our potential users and crafting our solution.

Full circle moments. At this point, we are confident that managers have a problem worth solving. When revisiting our original questions and assumptions from Week 1, we were pleasantly surprised to see the following validated user assumptions:

• managers want to share their best practices (seasoned managers, managers who recently wrapped projects, thought leaders)
• managers want to find best practices (novice managers, managers experiencing a new problem)
• managers are unsatisfied with the current solution finding experience

Our return to our origin led us to identify two manager types that will most benefit from our solution — a searcher and a sharer — which will inform our hypothesis and experiments this week.

Trust and ease of use are essential. After interviewing over a dozen managers about their management experience and our concepts, it’s clear that managers need “on demand accessibility to solutions” from trusted sources, be it their personal network or a publication.

“If your hair is on fire, you don’t really care your shoes aren’t tied.” — Senior Manager

We also need to trust our data as the builders of this solution. We’ve been noticing the favorable responses to our concepts, which is great, but as a mentor shared with us this week, “you need more noes.” Failing fast has always been the plan, so we’ve added “more failing” to this week’s to-do list.

Founder quality time. The second week of SXSW was a lot less eventful and offered us some much-needed time to reset and reflect. Some highlights:

• We’ve officially added new tools to our toolbox (HubSpot for Startups) that we hope will streamline our processes and give us more time to do the deep work needed to get ready for demo day.
• We’re talking to mentors. Hearing from folks who have walked this founder path has been enlightening and affirming. Each conversation has given us what we needed to keep moving — thank you all for your time!
• We started building. After some motivation from our DivInc program team, UX mockups, a new site, and a top secret project that we are excited about kicked off this week.

Spending dedicated and focused work time together is our most effective working style. Doing that this week brought us closer together and closer to a solution that will help build better leaders.

What’s next

Help us fail fast this week, by telling us why our solutions aren’t going to add value. Let’s chat.

If you haven’t shared your feedback on our concepts via survey, please do.

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 journey here on Medium or our social media accounts.

Lawrence Humphrey, Co-founder and CEO of Tech Can [Do] Better

Fallon Blossom, COO of Tech Can [Do] Better