Captain’s Log: Week 5

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

Pearl
Pearl
3 min readMar 14, 2022

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Recap

Our fourth week of the accelerator was all about connecting the dots. We learned a lot more about our users and their most pressing problems, struggled with finding our rhythm as founders, and decided to put our concepts in front of users. During our fifth week, we put ourselves out there and asked our users for feedback on our concepts. Lastly, we spent time connecting with and learning from fellow entrepreneurs during SWSW.

Importance and logistics of advisors. We were always aware of the important role advisors play in an organization. What we were still figuring out is how to engage with our advisors and what is customary in terms of scope of work, incentives, and the written agreement binding it all together.

“Everything you do is marketing.” Dana Wildeboar, VP Global Marketing & Communications of MassChallenge, shared this, which opened our mind. She also offered practical tips for creating a strong marketing foundation, including five must-haves for startups:

  1. Messaging (i.e. purpose, promise, principles, and audience)
  2. Customer relationship management (CRM) plaftorm
  3. Landing page or website
  4. Organization email
  5. One social channel

We noticed immediately that we weren’t yet using a CRM, which cemented our decision to make the plunge (managing spreadsheets, emails, and multiple social channels between the two of us was growing cumbersome).

Fundraising fundamentals. We spent the first day of SXSW learning about high growth and company building at the HBCU@SXSW event, organized by Opportunity Hub. Dave Parker shared amazing tips and hacks on things like pre-revenue valuation, deal options and mechanics, and pitching investors. Much of it he offers online.

Our biggest learnings from the fifth week are:

Our biggest competition isn’t technology. The data shows that managers overwhelmingly go to their mentors, peers, or direct managers for solutions and support. Surprisingly, managers feel like they have “a reliable” resource in their networks vs. search engines, message boards, and written publications.

Unsurprisingly, users would prefer a community-based solution. Taken in conjunction with the previous point, there appears to be a slight preference to see and collaborate on managerial problems with others. This is best exemplified in a response justifying the answer: “I think mangers’ problems are very people focused, and collaborating feel more appropriate. Situations aren’t usually binary.”

Reclaiming our time. We started the week excited about the opportunity to connect with fellow founders and attend amazing events during SWSW. After reflecting on it as a leadership team, we don’t see SXSW providing more value than talking to customers and iterating on our concepts. Pitch day is right around the corner, and we want to crush it — which means we need to be heads down on connecting growth-minded managers to the actionable leadership resources they need.

What’s next

We had several people reshare our post soliciting survey responses which felt awesome! If you took and shared our survey already, thank you it really makes a difference!

Even still, we netted around a quarter of where we hoped to be in the same amount of time (data collection is hard work, y’all).

If you haven’t shared your feedback on our concepts, 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, 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

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Pearl
Pearl

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