I have now completed 3/10 weeks of MIT’s Momentum Startup Accelerator, so it seems like an appropriate time to publish a reflection.
The vast majority of my time was spent on 3 tasks:
- Talking to prospective users
- Reaching out to new, prospective users
- Coding
I’ve probably conducted 50+ startup-related calls these past 6 months, and roughly 7 people directly fit the user persona we are targeting (public equity analysts at short-term focused hedge funds). While this is a good base, and there are probably another 15 people we’ve engaged who somewhat fit the persona, we need to increase this number.
On the coding side, we built a demo app here (password is ‘alpha’). While the app is pretty cool, we made many mistakes in our customer discovery/prototyping process. Learnings that we plan to use to improve our process moving forward include:
- Users don’t want to spend time learning how to use a new tool. What they want is results.
- In the future, we will lead our prospective user communications with the specific output that we think is relevant to that person (for example, maybe the output is a trade idea or a couple of charts). This minimizes their cognitive burden and streamlines the feedback gathering process.
- Any feature we build should target a specific endpoint in the user’s jobs to be done framework. For example, the endpoint might be a trade idea rather than simply noting that something seems interesting.
- We need to increase the number of users that we’ve engaged who fit our target persona and from whom we can gather feedback on ideas and prototypes.
- Before we attack our next big project, we should survey our cohort of prospective users on how relevant each project/feature idea is to them. We are actively doing this now to better determine our next direction.
One final thought on why entrepreneurship is so psychologically challenging (at least for me):
Earlier today I sent a long message to several previously engaged prospective users. The message outlined 5 potential features we were thinking of building next, and I asked if any of the features would be useful to them. I experienced little bursts of anxiety before sending each message, but those jolts paled in comparison to the sense of dread (bordering on nausea) that I experienced before opening the first response to hit my inbox.
I think the entrepreneurial process is so painful because the entrepreneur puts a lot of effort and energy into something, shows it to users (or VCs, or people they respect, etc) and then is typically met with rejection (often sprinkled with a tinge of pity because most people are nice). Subsequently he must repeat this process again and again in a seemingly infinite cycle of failure. The only thing that keeps him on this treadmill is the belief, often erroneously held, that he will in fact eventually land on “the thing” that finally gets his users to beg for its deliverance.
7 weeks left!
Noah's (Life) Ark 