Summer Recap

I completed the 10 week MIT Momentum startup accelerator last Thursday. My goal for this post is to reflect on my summer, and to begin forming a strategy for my upcoming fall semester. Before I dive in, here is some context:

My professional goal is to build a business. I shared some thoughts over a year and a half ago as to why this is my goal, but to reiterate briefly:

• I have an intrinsic desire to find out what I’m made of, and the only way to do that is to get in the arena
• I place an extremely high value on autonomy and on owning outcomes, both positive and negative
• I want to make enough money to never have to think about money

I’m working on a data science platform to empower non-technical analysts with big data and advanced analytics. Fundamental hedge fund analysts are the initial intended customer.

I stated 2 goals for the summer accelerator:

1. Find 2 paying customers
2. Validate the question: Is pursuing this idea worth my time

I did not find paying customers, although I made a lot of progress on that front. I am confident that this business is worth pursuing, and I intend to focus on making it work.

So what did I actually do this summer?

• Got on the phone with users
• Spoke with advisors (profs, VCs, founders)
• Improved my data science knowledge (via academic papers and convos)
• Built a working demo
• Pitched at Momentum’s demo day
• Helped organize Momentum and connected with people from across the MIT entrepreneurial ecosystem

What did I learn?

• Users don’t really care about analytical rigor (i.e. train/test splits), but they do care about model interpretability.
  • Ultimately the user must be able to quickly explain any trade rationale to his portfolio manager.
• Users are extremely busy, so the product needs a high signal to noise ratio such that the user can derive value with minimal time investment.
• The MVP-level product is more of a vitamin than a painkiller. This can change over time, but in the short-term I have rethought my customer acquisition strategy.
  • It will be tough to land a full blown design partner without providing some initial value from the outset. Consequently I need to continue building a higher value-add product before I land paying customers. Some would argue that this is the wrong approach, and I remain open to contrary opinions.
• I’ve concentrated my focus on long/short hedge fund analysts who trade on a 3 – 9 month time horizon, but I should niche down further into a specific sector.
• LinkedIn cold outreach began to work much better when my messages offered explicit value vs asking the recipient for time to chat.
• Co-founders need to be aligned on pacing/time commitment, and I am looking for another data person who wants to commit.

How best to approach this upcoming fall semester?

My goal at Sloan has always been to work full-time on a business upon completion of the program (if not sooner). In order to build confidence in this endeavor, there is one metric to target: find paying customers. Given my summer learnings, I plan to continue spending my time on 3 things: engagement with potential customers, product improvements to increase value-add, and the hunt for co-founders.

If there is someone you think I should speak with (customer, collaborator, etc) please let me know.

I’m all-in on Xpanse Data (the new name) and excited to continue on this journey.