April 2014 – Page 2 – Positive Tenacity

Mentor Week 1 at Techstars

We were meeting 6~8 people on a daily basis starting Monday til Friday, total of 36 mentors for Smile Family. The meetings usually takes place from 9am ~ 1pm with few short breaks in the middle, so basically most of them ends up to be back-to-back meetings.

Mentors are groups of successful entrepreneurs, angel investors, VCs, executives, or industry experts, so you get wide range of perspective into your business in a short period of time.

You get to play with your pitch, edit it here and there, literally doing A/B testing and optimizing in a short period of time to see which sticks, which works to whom and doesn’t and so forth.

So in the end, you get tons of feedback, tons of contradicting views and mix of emotions – ‘mentor whiplash’ – which you have to distill and prioritize.

Fun week.

Targeting

Stark difference. Color, typography, photo.

Your User Base is Part of Your Product

It’s super important to keep your company lean until you hit product-market fit, but as Ben Silbermann mentions in his Startup School speech, the problem may not be your product itself, but a community problem.

It’s important to keep in mind that sometimes, your user base is part of your product. It takes certain amount of users to actually reach MVP.

Questions like…

How many users does it take to get the ecosystem going?
How many avg. # of friends/followers do you need to get the product run on its own?
How many avg. comments per post do you need to get the engagement up
… and so forth

There’s no one magic number for these kinds of questions, but obviously there will be a key threshold for almost all products that need some sort of networking effect to kick-in based on their product’s DNA.