- 6 Februarie 2024
Techstars Diary: mentor madness
It’s the beginning of November and we’re feeling a bit overwhelmed, doing our best to keep up both with the Techstars program, as well as with our startup and the JTBD findings. For those of you who haven’t read the previous articles, JTBD stands for Jobs To Be Done.
Our Managing Director, Neal, teaches this methodology at the beginning of the program to help founders uncover the real reasons why customers ‘hire’ or ‘fire’ our products.
In this article I will detail how it all came together with the help of our mentors.
It seemed like the perfect time to have 7 consecutive days fully booked with Mentor Madness, one of the crown jewels of every Techstars program. We had 5-6 daily meetings with mentors coming from various backgrounds: tech, marketing, sales, product, VC, even legal.
We had to do research on our mentors' backgrounds, prepare our questions and send an overview of our startup and the agenda, so that we could make the most of each meeting.
It was a very divergent experience, we got a ton of perspectives on our business. So much so that at the end of it, we needed a couple of days just to analyze all that feedback and decide what to integrate.
This coming on top of the JTBD really felt like a dissection of our startup. Once we managed to settle down our thoughts for a bit, we saw the huge opportunity that was presented to us.
We could rearrange and reshape all the parts of Chambr however we saw fit and we had access to a big group of incredibly talented people who have either grown or mentored unicorns and who were willing to help us succeed.
In the words of Steve Jobs ‘It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it.’
Honestly, this catalyzed my favorite part of Techstars because we could choose a couple of these awesome mentors to continue working with for the rest of the program.
Both Gabi and I were super intentional and carefully selected our mentors based on their expertise, as well as our business needs.
- Harper Reed for fundraising, since he is a serial founder who had raised over $10M with his previous startups.
- We chose Amir Eskafyan to help us with our sales process because he has over 10 years of experience in this field.
- Sarah Brown, former marketing VP on various SaaS companies, was super helpful with our marketing strategy, positioning and website.
They were our lead mentors and we couldn’t be more grateful for all the help they gave us each week.
We also had ad-hoc mentor meetings.
- Marielle Briant (10+ years xp in Product & UX) was incredibly helpful for our product design.
- Basile Senesi (Chief Revenue Officer at Arc) was the perfect person to tell us whether Chambr was addressing his sales teams’ needs and his suggestions for how to improve it were pivotal.
- Colleen Pimentel (GTM Advisor at Google) taught us her own proprietary GTM method and helped us implement it to gain new interest from enterprises.
Last but definitely not least, Collin Wallace (serial exited founder turned investor), radically shifted our perspective in order to better understand how investors think about pre-seed startups.
I’ve always resonated with the expression ‘Standing on the shoulders of giants’ and I feel like this is exactly what we did during this part of the program.
I cannot speak about the mentors in our program without mentioning the great Troy Henikoff. He was our Entrepreneur in Residence and I reserved a special place for him in the next article.
It was around this time that we completely changed our roadmap, opting to build a brand new product from scratch that would complement the existing one. That meant a lot of work for Gabi and Aurelian. At the same time, I started experimenting with a couple of sales automation tools like Apollo and Lemlist. But more about these in the next article.
You can follow me, Gabriela and Chambr on our Linkedin accounts.
And if there is anything you would like to know about being accepted at Techstars, feel free to ask us.