This week…

I thought this:

I thought that if we divide the work evenly between all team members, the pitch preparation will go smoothly, we will increase the feeling of ownership and accountability within our team, and we will not experience fixing our individual work by others anymore.

I tried that:

I took care of setting up the concierge. After many tries and struggles with people’s locations, schedules, and communications, I matched two architecture students who are willing to take part in our service.

I also took care of generating more sign-ups. One week ago we had 20 sign-ups, and now we are at 39. I think it’s a pretty good improvement. I achieved it by talking to students at SF State together with Ridwan, by creating Facebook ads, and collecting responses we generated during our tabling session in SfState. I also asked my friends from different majors whether they would like to take part in the service and couple of them signed up.

I crafted a professional e-mail to our desired advisors, and sent it to them with hope of positive response. My teammates could use the template to contact other people they thought would be interested in advising our business.

I was also responsible for improvement of our landing page. This step was tightly connected with generating sign-ups. I, together with Jennifer, fixed the description which was no more valid after our last pivot, we created new icons for features, and we fixed the overall visual feeling of the website. When visiting SF State with Ridwan, we asked for feedback on our landing page a business management student. He happened to own a lot of actionable knowledge and I’m glad he shared it with us. After coming home, I incorporated his feedback and the outcome finally started working much better.

In the middle of this week I experienced lack of trust from one of my team members. He insisted that we stop taking care of concierge and acquisition because we need to focus more on the pitch deck. I stayed strong with my belief that the concierge will work, that the landing page is important, and that we will get more signups by improving landing page. After the disagreement I talked to him one-on-one that the traction is my top priority, because with a good traction proof in our pitch we will get more approval from VCs. If he thinks that demo and pitch are more important than that, it works for me too. There is no reason why those two cannot go together. There are three people assigned to fixing the pitch deck and two assigned to the demo.

One day before our pitch I got the message from my teammates that they need help with preparing the deck. I realized that without finished deck our acquisition and retention won’t make sense so I decided to help them. We had a two-hour session and we prepared our pitch deck on time.

I learned this:

I learned that preparing concierge is not just matching two people and figuring out their schedules. It’s also discovering issues that our solution might address, (such as flexible scheduling), it’s figuring out the test plan to see how we can improve our service vision, what works and what doesn’t, learn what is important for customers, and what other kinds of value the service might bring to student’s and professional’s lives. I realized that we might run into the situation in which during the concierge we discover issues worth addressing by our product, so in my opinion we shouldn’t create polished demo version yet.

I learned many things that add-on to the credibility of website: providing professional e-mail such us contact@company_name.com. Our previous email address from google wasn’t so trustworthy. I learned that instead of asking people to sign up, we could provide some instant gratification in the form of for example “receive an article”. Another thing is using mantra on the home page, which is a very short (3–5 words) description of what we do, to inform the customer before she is forced to read the long text. I learned much more on making the landing page this week, but I will save it for another post.

I learned that getting sign-ups by talking one-on-one with customers gave us the biggest retention. Giving potential customers the opportunity to meet with founders increases their credibility and trust.

I learned that it’s hard to deal with coworkers who are perfectionists and don’t take enough time to rest, especially during weeks of finals. Their behavior affects the whole team negatively. I learned that if such teammate is about to blow up, it works better when I don’t take it personally and just continue doing what I feel is the most important for the company, and if necessary, provide some fun to relax the atmosphere.

I also learned that there is no way of resolving a conflict better than one-on-one conversation.

next time…

Next time I will incorporate these learnings and seek even more improvements for myself.

How did I feel about the pitch?

I knew from the beginning that our pitch deck needs some tweaking, first of all it was too long. The demo was too long too, and was focusing more on features than values. I think there was some misunderstanding with the demo between two teammates, and it made some tension in our team, but I felt confident that we will be fine eventually. It was only the practice before our final pitch and I think we learned a lot and we know already which parts need our attention the most.

Where were my weaknesses?

We started our deck very strongly, with clearly showing our problem and solution. We got a bit lost when showing our finances, acquisition, measures, and activities. We need to find out how to show this complex system easily. My personal weaknesses were in explaining our run rate which happened to make no sense, and I explained our research activities too late in the deck so I think we will move it to the beginning of the pitch deck.

What will I address for pitch day?

For the pitch deck I will take care of continuing our concierge, I will prepare slides that show clearly what we did, what we learned, and what were the outcomes of our research, and how we addressed it. I will make sure we are showing our company’s working system clearly and shortly. I also would like to increase our traction by getting more sign-ups, and I will be responsible for making animations for our demo to show our values in a tangible way.