YH Ventures 2: Customer Centricity
The Ventures Accelerator program is a 10 week accelerator course for student run businesses at Penn. Each week, the YouthHack Core Team hosts Sunday Sessions where they catch up with the Ventures, host a speaker, and have a presentation/workshop on a pertinent topic. This series of publications is dedicated to telling the story of the Ventures and exploring key takeaways from the program.
The Week in Review: Progressive Development
For this week’s session, the startups in the Ventures Accelerator worked on pitching their companies with design-oriented decks, refining their landing pages, and pivoting their business models from the consumer’s perspective.
Sunday Session: Goal Setting, Focus, and the Brand
Our Ventures met one-on-one with four mentors to with discussions centering on business externals. Throughout the session, mentors emphasized customer centricity — encouraging the Ventures to start thinking about their target markets first and foremost.
As Jess Magoch, CEO of JPM Sales Partners and a former investor through Pipeline, an organization which teaches women to angel invest, put it, “It’s never too early to think about sales and marketing. Think about your audience. See if people have a problem that’s big enough that they’re willing to pay you to solve it.” Matt Stachel, a successful entrepreneur within transportation tech, further stressed this importance: “The greatest businesses are an idea that someone needs. From day 1, find your target market. Have a genuine conversation and find out ‘how much would you pay for that?’” That is to say, customer interviews are at the very heart of evaluating an idea’s success from start to finish. Amrish Macedo, product manager at rVibe, even went to say that such attention can be more important than the solution itself:
“Whenever I go out to solve a problem, I forget about what it takes to solve it. Oftentimes, technology is the easy part. Think about who are we doing this for, what’s the market, and who wants it.”
In order to succeed in this, Macedo argues, diligence and dedication are vital: “Prepare for everything that you’re going to do. If it’s an interview, prepare your questions. You can never prepare enough. If you know your stuff, people will help you.” Matt Ehrlich, a Philly native integral to the success of three startups each in different industries, emphasized the importance of leveraging connections for a successful Venture, saying, “leverage your connections as a Penn student. Take advantage of it. I guarantee there’s a connection here that can help every part of it.”
Thus, a venture is nothing without people, though in order to establish a user base, mentors, and backing requires the utmost consideration of every factor at play. A company is after all a conglomerate of people aiming to solve people’s problems — technology, structure, and product are but mappings from people to solutions. Given this powerful advice, our ventures forged customer centric approaches to their business models, leading them to refine their target markets, solidify essential features, and move forward on actionable steps.
YouthHack is an international organization dedicated to fomenting and building entrepreneurial culture. To get involved, and to learn more, visit our website or Facebook page.
The primary writer, Reginald, is a student in the Vagelos Molecular Life Sciences Program at Penn and a member of the Marketing Core Team for YouthHack. He’s very interested in tech-based and social impact entrepreneurship.
I, Cameron, am a driven learner, developer, and designer with interest ranging across marketing, analytics, and user experience. Learn more about me or reach out on my website.
