By Andy Budd, Designer and Expert in Residence at Seedcamp
As startups raise funding and grow their customer base, the demands placed on the engineering teams tend to scale quite rapidly. This is one of the reasons you need a solid CTO from the onset. Not only to get your product off the ground, but also to manage the complexity that comes from hiring and managing a large number of engineers.
On the design side of things, the received wisdom is that you need one designer to service five or six engineers. As such, design tends to scale slightly later than engineering and at a slower rate. That being said, there are plenty of startups out there with a 20-person engineering team, just barely getting by on two or three designers. So once companies have scaled their engineering teams, their attention generally turns to their design and product functions.
One of the challenges of hiring designers is that there are a lot fewer of them out there, so good designers are much harder to find. And it’s especially the case if you’re not that well connected in the design space. This is one reason why your first design hire is key.
Your Founding Design is your Best Hiring Asset
A good founding designer will have strong connections within the design community, so when it comes time to scale, they’ll already have a line of potential talent. These may be people they already know and have worked with, or people they follow and admire on social media. They’ll also be connected to other members of the community through events and social media. As such, they’ll be able to circulate your open roles to a much wider audience than posting to a generic job board will allow.
They’ll also be in a great position to review designers’ portfolios, understand what questions to ask at interviews, and set the designers up for success once they join the team. Just be aware that when you decide to scale your design function, your founding designer will naturally need to step away from their day-to-day design activities and take on more leadership roles. While it’s possible to be a player-coach for a while, this quickly leads to burnout. So at some stage, your founding designer will need to step up and become a full-time manager. Something not every design practitioner is comfortable with or prepared for.
What Roles to Hire When?
Early-stage start-ups benefit from hiring generalists. People who can turn their hands to a range of different tasks. As such, it’s not worth worrying too much about job titles and specialisms at this stage. However, you do want to make sure that within the team you have a broad mix of skills.
You’ll obviously need the creative visionaries, the craftspeople, and the user champions. Because you’ll be building your brand through your interface, you’ll benefit from having people with brand, illustration, and animation skills. Speed is important at this stage so you’ll need people who can move fast and work to tight deadlines. However, as you’ll be iterating towards product-market fit, you’ll also need people who can research and understand user needs. As quality and solution fit become more important you’ll need both conceptual designers as well as ones who think deeply and sweat the details.
Character-wise you’ll want a few social mavens who bring the energy and keep everybody feeling upbeat. You’ll also want the agony aunts and uncles who can steady the team when they’re feeling stressed. You’ll need a couple of strategic thinkers — folks who are thinking two or three steps ahead. However, too many strategists and stuff won’t get done, so you’ll also need a strong backbone of delivery-focussed people. As the team grows, more processes will need to be put in place, so having a few more operationally-minded people can’t hurt either.
Building a highly functioning design team is a balancing act. Your next hire is going to be informed less by job titles and more by the skills the rest of the team has (or lacks). To get around this, some leaders will take an inventory of the skills and characteristics their team currently have, in order to find the missing gaps. For instance, it will probably be a while till you have enough work to justify hiring a dedicated illustrator, but it may be worth hiring a product designer with a background in illustration to the team. Similarly, hiring a dedicated researcher may be a few steps down the line, so it probably makes sense to have research skills distributed across a few members of the team.
Scaling up is Harder Than you Think
Companies tend to start scaling their design team for a couple of reasons. The most obvious one is that the engineering team has scaled up so rapidly that design is becoming a blocker. While engineers are quick to request more resources, designers tend to take on more than they can manage, in order to be seen as team players. This generally results in the design team running too hot for too long, and then needing to scale quickly in order to prevent burnout.
Ironically this behavior can actually be a blocker to growth as the organisation gets used to the design team being able to deliver on reduced numbers, so generally question the need for more staff. The rest of the organisation ends up shouldering more of the slack, with front-end developers and product managers doing work that would be better served by designers. This has the effect of diminishing the value of design in the organisation by turning them purely into delivery people. It’s a framing that is often hard to escape from.
When it does come time to scale the team, it often doesn’t lead to the productivity boost everybody expected. In fact, you often see things slow down even more. This is because, in order to keep up with the demands of the organisation, the design team has been acquiring a lot of operational debt. This operational debt is usually in the form of inefficient or non-existent internal processes. Having a good recruitment process, a good onboarding process, a good managerial process, and a good team development process are all things that have probably been ignored up to this point.
You can generally get away with this lack of process when there are only two or three people on the design team and you’ve hired people you already know. However, as the team scales, this becomes increasingly untenable and the cracks begin to show.
Start Planning for Growth in Advance
I’ve seen a lot of design teams who struggle to hire quickly enough because none of the necessary processes are in place. This then leads to more stress and inefficiency as the team is having to deliver increasing amounts of work on reduced numbers for longer while trying to fix their operational debt. When folks do join, the lack of onboarding means it takes longer for new team members to get up to speed and start being productive, while the lack of good management practices often leads to increased churn. If it takes 6 months to fill a role, and a further 6 months to get your new hire up to speed, you’re already a year behind the curve. With designers potentially jumping between jobs every 12-18 months, this feels like a particularly poor investment.
The way to get around this is simple: founders and design leaders need to start planning for growth much earlier than they expect. If they see their engineering team starting to scale, they know that the design team will need to follow suit. If you’re planning to scale your design team off the back of a raise, don’t wait for the round to close before putting your plans in place. Instead, spend the previous six months setting up the groundwork. This will mean a variety of things including setting up a good recruitment and onboarding process, codifying your team’s processes and behaviours, and starting to engage the design community in order to grow your employer brand. That way, when it comes time to hit the gas pedal, you’ll have all the necessary infrastructure in place and won’t be caught off guard.
Even then, be aware that recruiting takes a surprising amount of time. I know plenty of design leaders who end up becoming full-time hiring managers during the scale-up process. This forces them to stop or significantly scale back a lot of the activities they were doing before, which can take a toll on them, their team, and their business. In fact, I see a lot of first-time design leaders burn out by the end of this process. The more support and upfront planning you can provide, the better.
In short, scaling up a design team can be surprisingly challenging. Despite being a lot smaller than your engineering team, finding good designers tends to be a lot harder, and they generally need a lot more support and management. So don’t underestimate the work and planning involved, or you may find that it slows everything else down.
Check our past blog posts in this Hiring for Design series:
Part 1 Hiring for Design Part 1: Why A Good Designer Should be One of Your First Hires
Part 2 Hiring for Design Part 2: Hiring Your First Designer
Part 3 Hiring for Design Part 3: Interviewing Your First Designer
Part 4: Hiring for Design Part 4: What a High Performing Designer Looks Like
What HealthTech pioneers can learn from FinTech
In any industry, when a gap between supply and demand is prevalent and existing regulation fails to step in, the role of innovation for the public good is often taken up by startups. Nowhere is this more evident than in the healthcare space. Large delays in innovation linked to complex and widely different healthcare systems around the world, as well as outdated legacy software all provide the perfect foundation for wide-scale disruption. The sudden shifts in what we considered to be “normal” life through the COVID-19 pandemic shed light on the tremendous speed at which HealthTech startups are able to deploy lasting positive changes in our daily lives when given the right catalyst.
Crises as a catalyst
There are certain parallels that can be drawn between the speed at which HealthTech solutions have been deployed to meet pressing needs and the FinTech boom over the last decade. We believe that the broader healthcare industry will follow FinTech’s trajectory.The 2008 financial crisis served as an inflection point; people lost trust in banking systems, which resulted in increased awareness in taking ownership over personal finances. Customers started looking for alternative, personalised and more engaging services as a consequence, coupled with the growing regulatory openings such as PSD2 on Open Banking.
For Healthtech, the COVID-19 pandemic proved to be the inflection point. As healthcare took centre stage in global discussions, individual awareness grew dramatically and an urgent need for personalised and alternative care solutions has arisen. This contributed to fast tracking deployment of services like telehealth, which now even allows for remote prescriptions under certain jurisdictions. Now more than ever, both patients and healthcare professionals (HCPs) expect healthcare to move faster and more seamlessly. The opportunity for HealthTech startups to leverage the wider FinTech stack within their products will help in facilitating global access to healthcare.
Breaking down the HealthTech value chain
At Seedcamp, we break down the HealthTech value chain by dissecting how someone would experience their personal health on a day-to-day basis. This covers four main categories: the first three capture the end-to-end patient journey – 1) getting sick, 2) receiving treatment, and 3) life after treatment. The final bucket covers the end-to-end software that HCPs engage with in their efforts to make the first three steps as seamless as possible for patients.
1. Medical Diagnosis (we get sick): Medical assessment tools, usually tech-heavy companies that may require both heavier funding and longer research/approval periods
2. Care Delivery (we get treated): Anything that involves interactions between patient and healthcare professionals
3. Quality of Life (our life after treatment): These aim to cover either the facilitation of recurring health-related issues (e.g. chronic disease treatment) or the enhancement of day-to-day life (e.g. healthier/longer life)
4. “Software as a Stethoscope” (software for HCPs): Our co-founders Bahbak and Connell from Elephant Health say it best, Software has the same effect as a Stethoscope: it bolsters HCPs’ abilities to reach certain decisions while enhancing the patient journey at the same time.
We’ve seen some outstanding companies lead the way on the matter, across all four categories. If you’re building something with the ambition to truly redefine the vertical you’re tackling, please do get in touch and apply for funding here – we’d love to chat!
Some examples of companies that are already spearheading HealthTech innovation include:
• Kheiron’s medical diagnosis tool Mia, supports radiologists in mammograms to ultimately better evaluate breast cancer
• Babylon’s reengineering of care delivery by allowing fast, personalised and seamless access to care for patients, while easing the burden on doctors through technology. We’re lucky to have Rabin Yaghoubi (ex-Babylon CCO) as an EiR at Seedcamp. He works closely with our portfolio companies on commercial topics.
•Maven’s ability to better the quality of life of mothers by supporting them throughout the parental journey
•Doctolib’s layering of software for HCPs in building their online booking tool (BMS), to a fully-fledged patient management system (PMS) for doctors.
Seedcamp’s Healthcare Footprint
Over the years, we’ve made a series of bets that led to backing exceptional founders throughout the value chain mentioned above. It has been inspiring to follow the 33 different company journeys in their efforts to break down the barriers of healthcare and improve the overall human experience across the entire healthcare value chain.
One of the toughest bets to hedge within healthcare lies within the diagnosis technology realm. Ezra is one we were happy to make with Diego and Emi (a second-time Seedcamp founder!). Ezra’s affordable and accessible technology provides early-stage cancer screening through AI & MRIs. From easily booking an annual screening with your physician to managing your results, Ezra ensures the end-to-end experience will be comfortable and hassle-free for patients. At the peak of the pandemic, Ezra successfully pivoted into screening for lasting lung damage for COVID patients.
We’ve all found ourselves scouring the internet to find a trustworthy, affordable dentist within proximity. The ToothFairy app aims to cure the toothache that comes with finding the right dentist and proper individual treatments. With their past experience in the dentistry space, we are confident that co-founders Deepak and Kian have the ability to continue making the dentistry experience less painful, less costly and more seamless. By covering everything from initial scans, to tooth alignment and even emergencies, ToothFairy are in the running to become a category defining one-stop shop for our teeth.
Hi.health is on a mission to remove payments from healthcare. By simply scanning medical bills on a mobile device, they provide instant reimbursement to patients. Through the layering of FinTech on top of their insurance aggregation product, Hi.health decreases the financial burden of healthcare, making it more accessible for all. The founders behind Hi.Health has a stellar combination of experience: Fredrik has previously built a HealthTech company (mySugr) that was later sold to Roche, while Sebastian has spent a couple of years at McKinsey.
Elephant Health is laser-focused on digitizing frontline healthcare in emerging markets. The first thing that made us excited about Elephant wasn’t the mission (and it’s an awesome mission!) but the founders, Bahbak and Connell. They embody a lot of the characteristics we love to see in founding teams: deep topic expertise as both are experienced A&E doctors, a relentless hunger to build (Connell, underwhelmed by the tech in his emergency room, once built his own patient system); and the ability to talk fluidly about big, meaningful ideas. We made a bet on their vision after their initial four-month pilot program deployed in mobile refugee camps in the Middle East, supporting some 40k patients with digital health passports, while empowering clinicians with infrastructure to facilitate care.
What we are looking for in companies moving forward
We’re now at a time where the leaders innovating the healthcare industry have widely acknowledged that capital should also flow into health management processes rather than just deep into R&D. Many systems are broken and outdated, meaning there is still plenty of leeway for startups to innovate. We are at the point where we’re moving from reactive to proactive healthcare, which has the potential to improve both individuals’ health journeys and the health systems at-large. There are many more problems to be solved in the healthcare space and many founders in Europe tackling them head-on. If you are an ambitious founder who’s building something groundbreaking, we’d love to hear from you! Apply for funding here — we look forward to learning more!
While we highlighted some of our companies in the post, our portfolio includes many more ambitious health-related companies, a list of which you’ll find below:
Medical Diagnosis
Care Delivery
Quality of Life
Software as a Stethoscope
by Felix Martinez, originally published on Medium.
It’s hard to believe almost two years have passed since I joined Seedcamp. It’s been an incredibly fun, intense, and rewarding journey during which I’ve learned a ton from the range of pretty awesome people I’m lucky enough to spend my days with.
Two years ago, I would never have thought I’d be fortunate enough to have a semi-front row seat to see the likes of Hopin, Sorare, Harbr, Ezra, Graphy, Elephant Healthcare, THIS and Sylvera, among others, go from one or two-man bands to becoming category-defining companies which, cheesy as it may sound, are tangibly affecting many people’s lives for the better. I also didn’t think I’d have the opportunity to learn from and be mentored by some of the best investors in the business.
This two-year milestone has prompted me to reflect on some of the stand-out learnings from my time in VC. I’ve purposefully tried to stay clear of lessons I’ve learned where the outcomes are solely related to investing or startups. Rather, I wanted to give a few tangible examples of my own experiences at Seedcamp — right from pre-internship application in 2019 through to the current day — to highlight key learnings which I’ve come to realise regularly manifest themselves across many facets of my everyday life.
I hope these can be helpful insights for anyone who is thinking about embarking on a new career path — be it VC or other — as well as to my peers in the industry who, like me, are very much in the process of learning the ropes.
As with most recent graduates, the prospect of deciding what to do after university wasn’t obvious for me. I’d come from an engineering background before moving from Cape Town to London to pursue a Masters in the hope of keeping my professional options as wide open as possible. Whilst studying, two friends and I decided to explore the viability of a startup aiming to streamline the returns/refund process for online shoppers. After raising a small amount of angel capital to pursue the concept, we quickly realised it wouldn’t work out as a scalable business. Still, the experience had been enough of an eye-opener into the tech scene to make me realise that whatever I did next had to allow me to keep immersing myself in this world. I got to reading everything I could get my hands on about startups, technology, and venture capital.
Given that experience, I was relatively up to speed with the main names in the European VC landscape. That included Seedcamp — partially because I knew of their history in the European seed ecosystem, being first investors in the likes of Revolut, TransferWise and UiPath, and partially because I was already an avid listener of Carlos’ This Much I Know podcast. When I saw they were looking to hire an intern, I jumped at the opportunity for a number of reasons.
I remember watching this video a few times before applying. What immediately struck me was how tight-knit a family the core team and the Seedcamp-backed founder community seemed to be (I even remember saying as much to Tom and Kyran in my first interview when they asked me ‘Why Seedcamp?’). Meeting the small team over the course of the interview process made me realise I was right about that. I could also tell they all genuinely loved what they did. I knew that joining a sector-agnostic fund would give me the chance to meet multiple experts in their respective fields on a daily basis. This exposure would translate directly into opportunities to learn about things I was genuinely curious about and afford me the chance to do digging on my own areas of personal interest. The prospect of learning from and working with the next generation of Europe’s most ambitious founders in the very nascent phases of their companies deeply excited me personally. It was the same excitement I’d seen some of my friends have when staring down the barrel of their own potential career paths — from doctors to clothes designers to rugby players.
Looking back, although I frankly wasn’t sure I wanted to pursue a job in VC at that stage of my life, the one thing I was sure of was that I wanted to contribute to the powerful role technology is playing in the world, no matter how small my contribution. It was clear that Seedcamp would give me that opportunity.
The first thing I noticed after joining the team was the speed at which decisions got made. Everything ran at 1000 miles per hour. One of the many ways that manifested itself in the work I personally did was in the process of ‘screening’ companies for investment. I had to get used to making quick decisions with limited information while reviewing pitch decks and/or tagging along with one of the five Investment Team members in meetings with founders.
Impostor syndrome in those early meetings could be extremely real. In weekly internal meetings with the Investment Team, I was very aware that I had little to no valuable input when it came to helping them come to an investment decision. They’d been doing it for many years and I was new to it all. Even though I was always encouraged to voice my opinion, I’d almost always opt to just keep quiet and listen. It was a similar story when it came to the early meetings with founders, especially those with experienced entrepreneurs operating in non-obvious sectors. As much as I loved being part of those meetings to establish relationships with the founders and understand what they were building, I would still silently think to myself ‘WTF am I doing here’ whilst wondering how I’d ever discern between whether what they’re building was interesting for us or not — in my eyes, it was all interesting.
To compound that, the overwhelming majority of investment conversations we have with founders unfortunately ends up in having to decline them for funding. Although I wasn’t the decision-maker on whether we’d invest in a company or not, if I had the most interaction with the founders, I would often be the one communicating the decision to them. Saying ‘no’ to top experts in their respective fields on a daily basis, many of whom have quit their high-paying jobs to build something impactful, was something I struggled with. On the other side of the spectrum, although one does quickly start to develop a nose for what traits companies have which could make them a fit for investment, the prospect of ‘missing’ a future billion-dollar company was also daunting.
In hindsight, being put in those situations every day was a great forcing mechanism to learn how to deal with being uncomfortable. Learning to face up to difficult conversations and dealing with my own insecurities about being an impostor has proven to be something which has helped me grow as a person. It’s taught me invaluable lessons about the importance of preparedness, the value of being upfront, and the power of trusting your gut.
There’s a great scene in one of my favourite docuseries on the life of Dr. Dre and record producer Jimmy Iovine, The Defiant Ones, in which Jimmy talks about the need for humans to use blinkers in the same way that racehorses do — “If you look at the horse on the left or the horse on the right, you’re going to miss a step”. Building conviction and being decisive is a key trait to have in your arsenal and it’s something I’ve witnessed playing out first-hand many times in our investment process.
For context, the companies Seedcamp considers for investment are extremely early stage — often just a couple of founders, an idea of a product (or a very basic MVP), and often no revenues. The investment decision usually is made after two meetings with the founders. The main thing that struck me was that there are always a million reasons not to invest. Though if there were just one or two key things which resonated strongly enough with the team, it would often be enough to warrant an investment offer. In the case of Hopin, Primer and a few others, the partners just committed halfway through the 45-minute meeting. There would be no looking over the shoulders to worry about which other investors had said ‘no’ or over-thinking what might happen if the company fails — rather, it’d be a case of backing the collective judgement of the team, showing the founders that you believe in their vision, and pulling the trigger.
To this point, I often think back at the chat I had within the first few months of my internship with one of our partners, Reshma, who founded Seedcamp back in 2007. Her advice for a successful career in venture was crystal clear and, given the context, unsurprising: “Don’t be scared to have strong opinions — build your own conviction and voice it”. The reason I think it resonated strongly with me was because it made me realise that my opinions on the companies we met perhaps weren’t as obvious to the team as I may have initially thought. Our team is made up of people with different professional backgrounds, genders, nationalities, and ages — we all form our opinions uniquely and view opportunities through different lenses. Favourable outcomes are based on well-informed decisions and the foundation of well-informed decisions is diversity of thought.
Funnily enough, I’ve been told before by my closest friends that I have a tendency to be indecisive — a trait I can be quick to point out in others. Being in an environment where sitting on the fence is simply not an option has taught me to take the time to build my convictions, put my blinkers on, and go for it.
It’s no secret that, as the intern, I was pretty much always guaranteed to be the least knowledgeable person in the room. With founders, there have been plenty of times where I didn’t quite understand something they said — be it a concept, a technology, or an acronym. On occasion, out of fear of sounding stupid, I’ve been guilty of pretending to understand what was said when I in fact didn’t follow. Bluffing can be a very dangerous game to play, especially with smart founders, as it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to work out when someone isn’t following something within your realm of expertise. From my experience, being honest about not fully understanding something or being upfront about not pretending to be an expert in the space has often even had a very positive effect on leveling the playing ground of the discussion, getting the best out of the founder and having a frank dialogue.
Post-investment, the same principle rings true. Even though I wasn’t the main person from the Investment Team a founder would primarily interface with, I would often fear I’d bring nothing to the table if a founder we’d backed were to ask me for specific help on a functional area of their business. It may sound obvious, but realising that founders didn’t expect that of me was a big thing (at Seedcamp, we have a wide range of functional experts within the wider team and my job would be to connect the dots and introduce founders to the right person). More importantly, I realised that founders, no matter their seniority, are first and foremost looking for strong human connections with the investors they partner with. They look for people they know they can ring up to be candid about their doubts, ask for opinions on tough decisions, ask for introductions to potential key hires or ask for a helping hand with their pitch decks ahead of their next funding round. The first call I got from a founder venting to me about the doubts they were having about their upcoming fundraise was hands-down one of my best days at Seedcamp.
Being honest is the building block to instilling trust and establishing a healthy relationship. After all, as with most jobs and with most of life, dealing with people is what it’s all about.
Having made the transition to a permanent role on the Investment Team early last year ahead of announcing Seedcamp’s fifth fund in late 2020, it’s hard not to get excited when thinking about what lies ahead.
Seedcamp was founded on the belief that European founders have the potential to compete on a global scale. The last two years have shown that the world is waking up to the fact that Silicon Valley isn’t the only place to build category-defining technology companies. In the last few months from our portfolio alone, UiPath has become Europe’s most valuable private company with a $35bn valuation after Seedcamp’s seed investment in 2015. Hopin has become the fastest-ever growing software company, reaching a $5.6bn valuation less than 18 months after we led Johnny’s preseed round in September 2019. The quality of founders we’re seeing on a daily basis tells us that the virtuous cycle of talent, capital, and infrastructure for the next generation of European success stories is in full-swing.
The future of European tech shines bright and I look forward to keep traveling down the road with the wider Seedcamp family.
We’re going to be hiring a new intern starting in May — keep your eyes on our twitter page for more details!
Big thank you to my awesome colleagues Natasha and Kate for their help on this post.
Any startup that has successfully raised follow on funding (angel and beyond) is going to find itself with external investors to keep happy and to do this effectively requires some form of governance structure to be put in place. Achieving this is not actually that complicated but if you’ve never set up a startup Board before then it could feel like a daunting task.
Building a Board, and managing it effectively, is a key task for a startup CEO and founding team. Whilst no one will expect you to be an expert Board facilitator from day one, the way you manage your Board will be (to your investors) a reflection of how you manage your business. Your investors don’t sit with you in the office all day, so remember, it is at the Board meeting that they really see you at work. No pressure then! Actually there isn’t. Structured and managed well, a Board will add huge strategic value to your business and you should benefit from direct mentorship from your investors.
Here’s the key messages from a session we recently ran at the Seedcamp Academy, with Richard Hughes-Jones from Firewerks.
Why do you need a Board?
Credit to Mark Suster here who sums up perfectly the functions of an early-stage Board. This is a really important reminder that, when you choose your investor, you are not just taking the money but a whole lot more (or at least you should be).
How you build a Startup Board
My own mentor, himself and angel investor and Board Chairman at StudentFunder, told me that for him the perfect Board required a combination of experience, competence, personality and network. So how do you go about finding this expert mix? Here’s a few tips.
How do you manage a Startup Board
Managing your Board takes time so be prepared to factor this in. If you think you can turn up to a meeting once a month then you are missing the point of the meeting and neither you nor your investors will get value from it. Here’s some more advice for preparing for your Board meetings, and running and closing the meeting itself.
And here’s some final advice to remember (not necessarily from Warren Buffet himself).
Richard Hughes-Jones is The Boss at Firewerks. He is a trusted advisor to startups and organisations that support entrepreneurship. Drop him a line if you need help setting up and managing your Board. This article first appeared on his blog where you can view the full set of slides on Slideshare.
Four times a year we host our Seedcamp Week, twice in London and twice in Berlin. The application process is competitive; throughout the year we receive 3000 applications from 70 countries. We invest in 25-30 startups per year, meaning only one percent of applications get investment. However, don’t let this put you off as during each Seedcamp Week we invite 20 startups from all over Europe to join us, receive invaluable business advice and mentorship from experts at the top of their industry.
The week’s schedule typically looks like this;
We are on the brink of holding our third Seedcamp Week for this year in London, and applications close this Sunday 17th August.
To give you a sense of the levels of talent, experience, and connections from the mentors that attend, we thought it might be useful to highlight a few of those who are confirmed to be joining us for Seedcamp Week London. We’re incredibly proud to work with all of our mentors so please bear in mind this is just the tip of the iceberg, and there are many, many more extremely skilled mentors not included in this list.
Wednesday 10th September
Thursday 11th September
If you want the chance to be able to meet with these mentors and have them give you advice on your business there is still time to apply for Seedcamp Week London! You have until 11.59pm on Sunday 17th August!
Michael Zirngibl, co-founder of interact.io (SC 2014) , shares his learnings from a recent Seedcamp Academy onboarding session led by Rob Fitzpatrick. Rob lives and breathes startups. He’s a founding partner of Founder Centric, a YCombinator alum, and author of The Mom Test. Rob joined us at Seedcamp HQ to help onboard the eight new teams joining Seedcamp this February by sharing insights into customer interviews.
At interact.io we think a lot about conversations between sales people and their (potential) customers and how they can be improved (shameless plug: our software connects to sales peoples’ phones and then delivers the most relevant pieces of CRM and public information about a sales contact so they can adjust and perfect their ‘pitch’ in real-time), but our focus is mostly on companies selling well established products or services.
For early stage startups whose product hasn’t been fully built or developed yet, the main objective for customer conversations is to do smart ‘customer development’, which includes getting lots of meaningful feedback on your product idea or beta product from the people most likely to buy your stuff in the future.
So the Seedcamp Academy ‘deep dive’ session by Rob Fitzpatrick – one of the leading experts in customer interview techniques and author of The Mom Test, was a great way of getting a healthy dose of reality checks from some of the best in the industry on that topic.
Kicking off the first part of the session, Rob immediately got my attention by saying that he thinks the ‘WORST outcome’ that can happen at the end of any customer interview is the following statement:
“Your product idea is brilliant – let me know when it launches”
At first this sounded a bit counterintuitive especially when I realized that some of my most recent conversations with potential channel partners, which I deemed as ‘really good’ or even ‘great’ actually included a variation of exactly that statement, but it made perfect sense quickly, when Rob started stressing that
Every successful customer conversation or interview needs to have a commitment of sorts by the customer.
In most cases this might not be a monetary commitment (great when it is, of course!), since often you don’t have a ‘Generally Available’ product to sell yet and getting actual pre-payments on your lovely PowerPoint or beta app is a challenge for even the most talented and persuasive startup founder.
So Rob quickly helped us put together a list of alternative commitments (mostly in the form of ‘Time’ and ‘Reputation’ for the person you interviewed at the prospective customer) that every startup can ask for and which can be even more valuable in the long run.
If your interview does NOT end with a ‘NO’, you as the startup founder most likely haven’t done a good enough job or wasted an opportunity asking for the right amount of commitment.
This is the startup founder version of the Sales ‘ABC’ (-> Always Be Closing), but frequently is forgotten, since a lot of founders have a tendency to feel that simply getting ‘confirmation’ from potential customers is sufficient validation for their own brilliance.
The feedback on your product you received from a person who is not willing to give you any meaningful commitment in return for your time, does not deserve any prioritization.
This can be a tricky one, since most founders are generally grateful for any feedback they can get, but it’s actually great advice in the framework of Lean Startup where prioritization of functionality is everything.
The second part of the session focused mostly on actively driving the customer interview away from non-essential ‘fluff & chit chat’ and towards meaningful and specific insights.
Using a number of real-word examples and a mock interview with one of the other startups present, Rob quickly illustrated the key signals that every founder should watch out for in customer interviews that will most likely pinpoint the most valuable insights and the key areas worth drilling deeper into.
Rob recommended that each of the key signals listed below (along with strong associated emotions) should immediately prompt a set of smart and focused follow-on questions to further clarify the customer situation and hopefully lead to a realistic assessment if and how your product fits into the specific context.
Numbers – if the customer mentions a specific metric critical in their business
Goals – if the customer is able to articulate a key objective (especially ones that affect them personally)
Obstacle – if the customer mentions specific real world challenges that prevent them from being as smart, fast or efficient in their job as they could be
Person – if the customer mentions a specific person or role in their organization that is particularly impacted by an inefficient process
Workaround – if a customer mentions specific ‘hacks’ or other steps they take to get to a specific result or to circumvent an inefficient process
Actual Amounts of money – often the ‘kingmaker’ of all interview results – if a customer can identify a specific amount of money lost repeatedly because of inefficient processes (that could be addressed by your startup’s product).
Rob concluded his session by putting his finding and recommendations in the broader context of a S.P.I.N. selling (Situation, Problem, Implication, Need-payoff) strategy, one of the most commonly used sales methodologies used in the Western world and shared with us the most important question for every customer interview:
“What are you doing about [it] now?”
The more efforts, resources or money the customer puts into workarounds to address a specific problem, the better your chances that they will jump at and pay for your startup’s solution, when you’re finally ready to address their specific needs.
Just make sure to keep everyone at your early customer sites engaged and increasingly committed along the way.
In the third video of our series ‘Advice From Founders’, we ask our startups to talk about their own products, and what’s important when building it. You can find the entire playlist here.
There’s a lot of juicy advice in the short video, here are three top tips for Founders who may be currently building their MVP or product.
All the product details need to be right…from the buttons in the app to the email text in invitations
Sometimes there is no shortcut. To find out what your customers respond best to in your product, you just have to try, trial, and test. Most startups use A/B testing for this but you can also give Growth Hacking a try.
Focus is really, really important. At the start, we were all over the place.
Bill Cosby once said ‘I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.’ This is a message startups can learn from, especially in the early days of creating your product. Focus your product on one specific area and become the master of it. Don’t let yourself be distracted by new features, different verticals, and designs. Build it, ship it, and evolve.
When people start talking about your product to you, before you mention it to them, it’s amazing
This is the aim for a lot of startups and it’s a nice one to keep in mind. Word of mouth marketing still exists and is incredibly powerful. How can you encourage this with your product?
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