Spatial’s Techstars Journey?—?Update #2

Meaning from the madness

This week of Techstars was the infamous start to “mentor madness”. We met ~ 50 corporate mentors from companies like Ford, Verizon, Mapquest, Michelin, Magna, Munich Re, Dana, Honda, and McDonald’s.

In the tornado of feedback one must find the golden nugget in the midst of the debris and floating cows. The meaning in the madness. I’ll share our blueprint for tackling mentor madness to help other entrepreneurs deal with the onslaught of feedback that they will (and should) encounter.

Research like an ethnographer

On the whole preparation for mentor madness is not unlike preparing for ethnographic fieldwork. Although the meetings are short and somewhat shallow the fundamentals hold true.

Have specific questions to answer

It is always easier to find something when you know what you are searching for. Aligning with your team around a few key questions will set you in the right direction and make it look like you have your act together.

Unfortunately your questions are probably the wrong questions. At this point, I know ours are. But the mere fact that you have a direction in these interviews will lead you to deeper questions.

Do your research and know motivations

Linkedin is awesome. Spend a few moments researching the people you are meeting. Get a general sense of what the person is excited about and position your dialogue accordingly. Even better, look for where their areas of expertise overlap with your key questions and ask for specific advice.

Nail the pitch

Get over the hump of “what is this idea” as quickly as possible. Especially with Techstars 15 minute round robin the time you spend explaining your idea is time you could be learning. We captured feedback on our elevator pitch during these interviews to refine our idea to 35 seconds.

Capturing feedback is cash in the bank

All this feedback is wasted if you don’t have a method for capturing it. We felt this part so important that we shelved product for a week while Will our CTO focused on capturing notes. We recorded the meeting with Evernote giving us an objective sense of mentor feedback and how our own responses were perceived.

Debriefing is cashing checks

Debrief ASAP while it is fresh in your head. We used the sticky note method to group feedback, answer key questions, and make to-do’s. This is the part everyone wants to slack on and is dire to making meaning. It is really easy to

By the time we had finished debriefing we realized there were 11 potential ideas to move forward with. We arranged these ideas by ease and speed of implementation and prioritized them based how much they piqued our curiosity. In the end we chose three ideas to move forward with.

Validate ideas

Now it is time to engage in a dialogue with reality. This artifact strategy is inspired my hero Buckminster Fuller. The ideas we came up with from the last round of feedback are totally worthless in themselves. However, when you make a quick prototype (artifact) you can compound learnings. We made three one pagers describing the concept and showing a mockup that we are going to bring forward during mentor madness this week. Inevitably those ideas are going to come up again, now we are prepared with a prototype and can have more meaningful conversation, less brainstorming, more doing.

This builds on our learnings from last week and clarifies our path moving forward.

Bonus: Follow up fast

We followed up with thank you emails to everyone we met, striving to make specific small asks first in emails to get a better sense of who really wants to engage.

What we learned this week

We had two clear learnings from this week.

1. The platform we built has more use cases than we anticipated. Now we need to narrow in on the most meaningful version.
2. We learned why people are not activating our API. We built it for travel use case, but the folks requesting a key are not in the travel industry! To make the API useful to them we need to reformat the data. Secondly, we simply need to talk to more folks in the travel industry as they do not know we exist.

Shout outs

For folks who were awesome this week.

Ian White: VP at Thasos, past CEO @ Urban Mapping

Elise Neel: CRO @ Mapquest

Matt Wrase: Analytics @ Ford

Brian Mulloy: VP @ Apigee

This is part two in a series. Check out part one. Interested in enriching your application with local-live community understanding? Come schedule a demo and we can chat.