Techstars in Review
As I walked on stage on Demo Day, it hit me: the process of getting there was equally as important as the goal — again. Given Techstars’ emphasis on Demo Day as the culmination of our learning and progress throughout the program, I was nervous.
However, I relaxed immediately upon recognizing over half the crowd as the mentors, investors and fellow entrepreneurs who had been readily available to help think through specific problems, advise on strategy, and support the growing pains of building a team for 14 weeks on end. I knew they were in on the lesson with Techstars; the ritualization of tactical execution is what creates success.
And I’ve recurrently realized the same lesson week over week since Demo Day. That’s not to say the goal isn’t incredibly important, but when you examine the statistics for start-up success, the devil is in the [execution] details. You can maximize your odds of success by fine tuning your means of getting there.
This definitely isn’t a new idea — not for the world or for me. In fact, this famously misattributed quote from Will Durant has been scrawled in red letters on my bathroom mirror since I quit my former day job to pursue Transmute full time:
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”
I’m fully committed to self-optimization as a practice, and habit stacking is my favorite strategy to apply. While I quickly understood entrepreneurship to be a game of extreme self discipline and stamina, Techstars taught me that the same framing should be applied to running my company. After all, well defined goals not supported by good habits are just dreams.
Here are the three major habits that the Transmute team will carry from Techstars forward, indefinitely:
Prioritize Daily
This one may seem obvious, but when you’ve got three people and a million things on your to-do list, the slippery slope to frantic execution is real. This type of unfocused execution often makes motion at the expense of progress — a critical distinction for young companies.
To ensure our team stays laser focused on the tasks that matter most to our goal of launching the Transmute Platform, an enterprise grade decentralized application platform, we stacked a habit our Techstars MD, Amos Schwartzfarb, calls “The 3 Ps” on top of our daily stand-up ritual.
Now, all team members drop their top three priorities into a designated slack channel before our 8:30am stand-up. This means we are evaluating our workloads and justifying their contribution to the collective goal before diving in. Sharing them with the team in a written format before stand-up creates external accountability and ensures a supportive forum for resolving any blockers.
Measure Weekly
The Techstars Austin class required every company to define their revenue formula early. The idea being that task execution should be prioritized according to what most directly impacts our bottom line.
Here is ours as an example:
Revenue = (# of visits * conversion rate) + ($ per month * # of months) Note that this is a living formula we fine tune as we grow our business.
We then adhered to a weekly key performance indicator (KPI) meeting where all the companies in our class met once a week to present our progress the previous week. At first, there were growing pains. The B2C companies’ had sexy metrics for their ad campaign strategies and detailed hypotheses about their customer retention, while most of us B2B companies were still in R&D mode and struggled to bend our work into a similar reporting format.
It didn’t take long before we were fully committed to building a metrics-driven business, tailoring our reporting to fit Transmute, tracking critical development and hiring milestones towards our overarching goal of pushing the Transmute Platform live later this year. We are now fully subscribed to the idea that, “anything that can be measured can be improved,” [according to Peter Drucker] and the weekly measurement ritual stuck.
Consistently Critique & Iterate
This was a common lesson in Techstars, but it’s the lesson that became most evident on Demo Day: create opportunities for constructive criticism and learn to evaluate and incorporate it for rapid iteration. The structured, daily pitch practices for the month leading up to Demo Day are the most overt example of this.
We defined the goal — a stellar pitch — and then broke the process down into bite size chunks to help measure progress easily. Then we practiced…a lot. We rehearsed the story, the script, the slides, the performance, every day to a room of our peers and at least one new mentor. Their job was to provide criticism at all costs, and it was not always easy to take.
That said, we developed a method: gracefully accept the feedback and then filter it as a team after the fact to determine which parts to incorporate and which to ignore. The result was getting extra comfortable with criticism and confidently chiseling our pitch to perfection.
There’s no chance our pitch on Demo Day would’ve been as impactful without ritualizing the iterative process, and pitching is not the only element of a business where a ritual of improvement is positive. At Transmute, we now schedule regular meetings as opportunities for feedback on everything (code, content, design, team dynamic, etc.).
These three habits serve to unify our collective competencies into the basis for effective team communication and business growth. While they feel like deeply ingrained habits today, we have Techstars to thank for helping instill them.
