5 Ways Mentors Helped Me Grow My Company
Learn faster with people more experienced than you
How did you learn math when you were a kid? Did you use your gut feeling, or did you learn from other people?
If there were one hack to shortcut in your path to success, it would be to find mentors to learn from people who have already done what you are trying to do instead of trying to come up with every single solution yourself. Usually, the type of mentors who tend to be the most helpful are those who don’t necessarily give you an answer, but they give you a better way of finding that answer.
My first company developed games for Facebook and mobile devices. Having mentors helped me create a profitable company, which allowed me to leave my mother’s house and live by myself. I wouldn’t get as far as I got without their help. There were different key moments in my entrepreneurial journey that were impacted by a mentor.
#1 Find the right users
When I moved to Chile in 2014, I still didn’t have a profitable company, and I had seven months to make that happen. Otherwise, I would run out of money. During the Startup Chile program, I got help from different mentors. As my program’s goal was to be a profitable company by its end, I shared the pains I was facing to achieve that.
In 2014, we had one game, and it was making a few dollars every day. Users seemed to enjoy playing, but we needed much more people spending money for us to have a profitable company. In the middle of the program, I met a partner of one of Brazil’s big companies. It is funny that I had to go outside my home country to meet this Brazilian mentor. He asked me a lot of questions about distribution.
As we got US$40 thousand from the program, we decided to invest some of the money in advertising to bring more users into the game. However, that wasn’t working yet. This mentor didn’t give a specific answer that solved all my problems, but he stressed how I should find the right users for my game. I needed to find users that were willing to spend money on our product.
At that time, I already knew that my target audience was mostly women over 35 years. I am used to seeing surprised faces when I tell other people that I made games for that audience, as people usually expect to see younger men playing violent or sports games. That was the audience for the games we were building.
We were also focusing on the LATAM market. It was cheap to acquire users for our game, but they weren’t spending enough money. Thinking about what my mentor has told me, my partner and I started to wonder if LATAM was the right market for us. At that time, there were few word games in Portuguese and Spanish. I assumed that people would spend money if they could play a game in their local language. That was what I wrote in my application for the Startup Chile program that was accepted.
As I got to the last month of the program after almost seven months, we still didn’t achieve the goal of having a profitable company. We had some money left in the bank to pay our three employees next month’s salaries. However, we decided we would bet that money on advertising. We decided that we would pivot from LATAM to the US market. We assumed that LATAM players don’t like to spend as much as we would like them to do, and US players would spend more.
Our bet worked, and we finished the program having a profitable company. We probably wouldn’t think about pivoting if I didn’t have a mentor asking many hard questions about users and distribution. Although he didn’t give me a clear path, he helped me question everything I was doing.
#2 Learn from data
Three months after finishing the Startup Chile program and returning home, I was moving out again. This time I would live three months in Malaysia as I participated in my second accelerator program for startups — Game Founders. We already had a profitable company, and we had two games now. However, I wanted to keep growing. I still lived with my mother in Brazil as I didn’t make enough money to pay for everything by myself.
I liked to work with numbers and spreadsheets since I was a kid. I knew that learning from data was something important, but I didn’t know how to that precisely. What should I be looking for? What is the most important KPIs (key performance indicators) to keep an eye on? What is expected to achieve in the games industry? I didn’t know any of that.
In the first month of the Malaysia program, I had a Finish mentor who helped me learn the answer to all those questions. He shared what his gaming has been doing and how he worked with data in his energetic talk. After his speech, we had a private mentoring session where I shared how my company was doing. He asked me questions about data that I couldn’t answer. I had to put into practice the things that he has shared.
As I started learning from data, I could understand what I should be working on. We waste much of our time working on things that we believe will make the difference. However, those tasks are usually based on our gut feeling. When we have data to analyze, we can improve our chances to work on the tasks that will enhance a company’s performance.
During the three months of the program, we improved our games based on the data we had. We analyze the numbers, worked on improvements, update the games, waited a few days to get new numbers, and repeated the process. Sometimes we had some questions about data that our mentor helped us by sharing some material. Learning from data allowed us to grow significantly during the program. As it finished, we were able to increase everybody’s salaries in the company (including mine).
#3 Focus on what generates the most value
Even having increased my salary, I still couldn’t afford to live by myself. I still needed to live with my mother. I needed to make more money with my company so I could change that. How can a company make more money?
There were many different ways my company could make money. We started testing some of them, but nothing we did had any significant impact. We were spending many work hours on our tests. I didn’t know what we were doing wrong.
Luckily, at that time, I had a Brazilian mentor that had an exit with his gaming company that helped me see everything differently. I shared with him what we have been trying to do and a new idea we just had. He asked me how we were making most of our money. As I gave him the answer, he said that instead of adding new revenue streams, we should work to improve what we already had and focus on the things that generate the most value.
Sometimes we end up working on the things that we enjoyed the most and not necessarily the ones that can help to increase the company revenue. When we build something, there are fun and boring parts. We usually like to focus on the fun part, but we need to work on the most valuable tasks. We may believe that we have to build the more challenging or technological features, but often that is not the case.
As we have been working with data for the past couple of months, we had numbers to look to understand what we should work on. As our goal now was to improve our main revenue stream, we had to learn from data related to that. There were many things we could look at and improve. We had to find the ones that were supposed to generate the most value for the company. It was hard to know exactly what to do, so we tested different things and continue working on the ones that generate the most value.
#4 Have the right processes
After a few months of focusing on what generates the most value, we started to see a significant impact on our company revenue. However, our days and tasks were a mess. I know we could improve our productivity if we strengthen our way of working. Besides that, I still couldn’t afford to live by myself.
When I moved to Malaysia in 2015, I had a Danish mentor. After coming back to Brazil, I kept in touch with him. On a Friday night in 2016, I shared with him how we struggled with productivity (he lived in Thailand, so it was Saturday morning for him). He asked me about my processes, and I didn’t know what to answer. He then shared a tool he used to organize his company tasks and the methodology they were using.
The Agile Methodology is a practice that promotes continuous iteration of development and testing throughout the software development lifecycle of the project. It is one of the simplest and effective processes to turn a vision for a business need into software solutions. Agile is a term used to describe software development approaches that employ continual planning, learning, improvement, team collaboration, evolutionary development, and early delivery. It encourages flexible responses to change.
I have heard about that before, but I never knew how to put it into practice. Talking to my mentor, I understood how I could start putting everything into action. I started using Trello, a list-making application that he shared with me, to improve how we organize everyone’s tasks. I spent the weekend organizing everything so I could share it with my team the next Monday.
Having this intro of Agile Methodology on a Friday night encouraged me to study more about the subject. I shared with the team how we could increase productivity if we started using it, and they liked the idea. From time to time, I also talked to my mentor to learn his thoughts about things that I was considering testing. We ended up testing different ceremonies from the Agile Methodology to see what worked best for us.
After a few weeks, my employees shared with me that they felt more productive during the work-day. Not only that, but I saw much more being done, which allowed us to test different things that could generate more value for our users faster.
#5 Be prepared for life-and-death situations
Although we were more productive and working on what generated the most value, we were still struggling to grow. My main goal was to increase revenue. I wasn’t concerned about increasing profit. All extra money we made I reinvested in the company. That helps the startup grow faster, but it is also hazardous if you don’t have enough runway to face unexpected problems. I did some bets considering that we would grow in the next couple of months. That wasn’t happening, and I started to be worried about that. My startup could die if I cannot do anything to improve its situation.
I had a Brazilian mentor that call me at least once a month to check how things were with my company. I shared with him about the bets I did and how things were not working. Sometimes what you need is someone being severe with you and put you back together to your place. I was with a very negative mindset, and I was complaining too much about the fact that I couldn’t make things work and that I was facing another life-and-death situation. My mentor told me to stop complaining and keep trying new things. He also said that it is normal to face life-and-death situations. That is part of being an entrepreneur. I needed to prepare myself better for that.
I didn’t know what to do to beat my current situation. I asked my mentor about that, but he couldn’t give me a straight answer. He reminded me of everything that I have achieved so far and told me to explore new things.
I was devastated after the talk with my mentor. I didn’t expect him to be so severe with me, and I thought I would come out with an idea of what to do at least. I was sad and stayed a little down for a while, thinking about the talk. I didn’t know what to do. Well, I knew that I didn’t have time to complain.
Our main problem at that time was that we didn’t have a high company credit card limit. We invested money in advertising to bring more players into our games, which resulted, if done well, in more revenue. We wanted to invest more money, but we couldn’t. I was trying to get help from investors and other entrepreneurs, but nobody was interested.
After a few days of the talk with my mentor, I had an idea: what if I use my own credit card? I talked to one of my partners, and we started to increase our investment in advertising by using our personal credit cards. As we increased the value, we also started using the credit cards of people near us, as mothers and girlfriends. The bad part about that was that we couldn’t pay for all the credit cards because we didn’t have enough runway. The good part was that the games were making more money, but it took one month for us to receive that money. We continued anyway.
Our user acquisition strategy worked profitably, just the timing to get the money that wasn’t good. At the same time, some tests we were making started to pay off. Because of all of that, we grew our weekly revenue by ten weeks in a row. That was when my Danish mentor called me.
Final thoughts
After growing our revenue by ten weeks in a row, I had a call with my Danish mentor. It was December 2016. We talked about our growth plans, and in February 2017, he invested US$1 million in our company. In May, I decided I should spend some time closer to my Danish mentor and now investor. I decided I would spend two weeks in his office in Thailand. One week before going there, I finally move out of my mother’s apartment. I was finally living by myself.
Don’t try to figure everything out by yourself. Look for the help of more experienced people. That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t try to give a shot by yourself first. There are a lot of things that you can find with a Google search. After that, look for mentors who don’t necessarily give you answers but who walk you through the process of how they might think about making the proper decision given all of your particulars.
