Captain’s Log: Week 2
Our second week’s reflection in the DivInc Social Justice Innovation accelerator.
Recap
For our first week of the accelerator, it felt like we drank from the fire hose. The second week kept with the trend. This week’s focus was customer discovery, testing risky assumptions, and meeting with mentors.
Customer discovery. To begin to narrow in on our users and their context, we cast a broad net with a survey. This would tell us a few important things:
- Average team size
- Commonly used management tools
- How many, and to what extent, managers influence purchasing decisions
With a few dozen responses, we already have helpful insights. To our surprise, a significant number of managers have buying power — one of our core, riskiest assumptions. Over half of respondents consented to let us interview them for a deeper dive.
Financial modeling. We kept iterating on our financial model; the Forecastr team came and talked us through some of their best practices, including sharing amazing spreadsheets for different kinds of businesses.
Mentor meetings. Mentors play an important part of one’s growth, both individually and organizationally. As a part of the accelerator, we learned mentor meeting best practices and did some mentor “speed dating.”
This overlapped with our org’s advisor meeting, where we ran our current (re)direction past our day-one advisors. We talked them through our vision, lean canvas, financial model, assumptions, and questions to date. We walked out with their wisdom, support, and blessing.
Our biggest learnings from the second week are:
- Testing assumptions can be clumsy, but enlightening.
In a matter of several hours, we addressed one of our highest risks by simply drafting a survey and sending it out to as many people in as many ways we could. We’re reminded that failing fast and cheap is the best use of our limited time and resources. - To get results, you sometimes need to do non-scalable things.
Despite posting our survey in many large channels and across social media, we had terrible conversion. We’re still diagnosing why, but in the meantime we pivoted to sending it to our close friends, coworkers, and their networks, with much greater success. (Thanks, y’all!)
What’s next?
We’ll be diving deeper into the research process. After consulting with a friend and user research subject-matter expert, we are interviewing folks that are willing to share more about their management experience.
Additionally, we’ll continue seeking the expertise needed to maximize success. That includes key, strategic advisors and mentors and members of the team that will round out the team.
More existentially, we’re in the process of discussing what our trajectory means for Tech Can [Do] Better, and how it pairs with the work that we’re doing. More on that later.
How you can help us.
In addition to taking our 3-minute survey, if you are or know one of these people, hit us up.
- Web developer with full stack experience
- SME in freemium software
- SME in productivity tools
- SME in leadership and corporate DEI
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, our website, or our social media accounts.
Lawrence Humphrey, Co-founder and CEO of Tech Can [Do] Better
Fallon Blossom, COO of Tech Can [Do] Better
