The repository of all things resulting from my past, present and future
Dr Sharmin (Tinni) Choudhury is currently an entrepreneur and consultant CTO. Formerly, she was a researcher on topics include data management, knowledge management, ontology-based technology, smart wearable research and visual analytics.
Hey, remember when I was part of Your Happy Place? I was only in the startup for seven months, but it was my first prolonged exposure to personality tests. Just as I was wrapping up my involvement, I ended up taking to different personality tests. I have wanted to write about my thoughts on personality tests for some time. I finally put fingers to keyboard and got the article published on Medium! Please check it out and give a clap if you like it.
I spent the first Friday of March by attending a group mentoring with Nyree McKenzie, the founder of Bidhive and a fellow MIT Bootcamp Alumni. She also won the AWS 2019 Founder of the Year.
It was a great session that covered Nyree’s journey and the lessons she learnt along the way. She emphasised the need to have your personal life aligned with your founder dreams. She talked about how her previous business, Thought Bubble, that she spend 16-year building was both a source of inspiration that lead to Bidhive but also something she now has to exit to commit to Bidhive.
She pointed to some tech she found very helpful. Namely Canny, which she is using to gather customer feedback to help her map out a product roadmap that will lead to her releasing exactly what her customers want. It’s a great idea. I will note that tool down for future use.
Speaking of tools, and a slight aside, I don’t think I ever mentioned Kiite.ai, which can be used to create a sales playbooks. It was recommended to me during a sales workshop I attended. But I don’t think I ever blogged about it. But I think it’s worth noting here. Because sales strategies were something Nyree covered at length. She mentioned that from day 1 she only went after enterprise, using language that would cause small businesses to self exclude. Enterprise can be a mixed market to go after but it has its downsizes. Namely, procurement processes for Enterprise are long and complex. So the conversion takes time. Also, per Lewl Jury’s mentoring talk last month, Enterprise customers are very needy when it comes to customer care attention.
Nyree has earmarked Robotic Process Automation (RPA) as a way to help ease some of the pressure currently on her small group of staff. RPA is something I am familiar with through my work with Comprara. I will definitely watch Bidhive to see how Nyree’s strategies workout.
Overall, it was a great talk. I am glad I attended. I asked a bunch of questions. But I left straight after and thus missed the River City Labs, First Friday Bytes. I wish I stuck around but I was “peopled out” as they say. But maybe in April, I’ll get to attend the First Friday Bytes!
Last Friday, I got out of the house again! I attended Group Mentoring with Llew Jury (which I wrote about in more detail in a different post) and the newly revamped River City Labs Pitches, which are now called River City Labs First Friday Bytes.
The big change was that the first talk of the afternoon was a from an entrepreneur who had “made it”. Last Friday the found was Bradley Rasmussen of Sizztech. He shared some tips and tricks he learnt along his journey. He explained that his current business grew out of his first business. He also explained that Sizztech was self-funded. I think a lot of people miss opportunities when they become too focused on their current business. Also, too many get caught up in raising capital, when they can create a perfectly viable business by bootstrapping. So it was great that River City Labs highlighted a business that opted not to raise money.
Finally, we went onto the pitches for the night, and AI was over-represented. We first AI pitch from a founder who has created a sleeve that is looking help people with upper limb loss to have fine motor control of their robotic prosthetics. It’s interesting, and I am keen to see how the startup grows and evolves.
The second AI pitch was from Red Realities whose pitch is that they want to free creatives from doing low-value artwork. So one way of putting it is that “AI is now after artists jobs!”
The AI heavy pitches prompted a man with a gorgeous beard to go up and pitch his business Blue Life AI. He offered those in attended a free trial of his training program. During the questions, he mentioned that he has already taught millions of people online and mentioned his main business is called SUPER DATA SCIENCE!
It was then that the penny dropped and I realised the speaker was Kirill Eremenko, or as he is known to my brother and I “the R guy”. I clearly blanked out when they announced his name. So yes, I got to meet that man whose online course my brother and I took to learn R. It was like meeting a minor celebrity. It was fun; I took a selfie. 10/10 would go to another First Friday Bytes!
Last Friday, I attended the Group Mentoring with Llew Jury, at River City Labs. It was a great event that sent me home with some essential tools. The first one was the correct way to fill out the business model canvas. For me, this was a refresher. Still, it’s always good to remember that your focus should be a problem -> customer - > unique value proposition -> solution before moving on to other things. Many startups make the mistake of either trying to start with the solution and looking for a problem. Alternatively, having problems, solution and customers but not having a unique value proposition.
The other concept Llew Jury talked about was market product fit, instead of product-market fit. I think this is a very venture capitalist way of thinking about it. I have heard Steve Corlett express that he isn’t as concerned about a business’s product beyond it can effectively address the problem for which there is a market. I don’t think inventors and innovators want to hear, but it’s true. You can have the greatest product in the world, but if no one is willing to pay you for it, you can’t make a business out of it.
The completely new concept I learnt during the group mentoring was the SaaS Mission Matrix. Llew Jury credited Edward Ford’s Advance B2B Blog post on the topic. The matrix posits that the same sales strategy does not work on businesses of all size. You can’t be hands-on and in-person with a small business who have a meagre customer lifetime value. Likewise, you can’t be hands-off and automated with huge enterprises who are injecting millions of dollars into your business. So you need to work out what you are and focus on the sweet spots. I would like to kickoff a SaaS business one day, and I know that marketing can make or break, SaaS. So getting introduced to the SaaS Mission Matrix made the trip to attend worthwhile.
Following the SaaS Matrix, Llew went on to discuss marketing. It wasn’t anything new per se. But I liked how Llew laid it out (see photo). I need to start marketing Start with Tinni. So I need to start thinking about personnas, marketing channels, brand positioning etc.
One of the last things Llew covered was how to raise money. It flew by quickly. But the biggest take away was that sales speak louder than anything. But he also mentioned team building, and once again, personality tests made an appearance. Llew said that his venture firm uses the Belbin model of personalities. I am currently working on writing an article for Medium on personality tests. So I’ll talk about Belbin more there. But it fascinates me how big personality tests are in startup land.
Llew Jury ended the session with some book recommendation. He recommended Good to Great, Scaling Up and Secrets of Sand Hill Road. I will be adding them to be Audible list, Overall, it was a good session, and I would recommend attending the next one!
January was much slower event wise then I would have liked. But as an Impact Boom Alumni, I couldn’t miss the Brisbane Social Enterprise Drinks & Networking!
Congratulations to the cohort of 2020. It’s going to be the strong group and very different from my cohort because the mix includes lawyers, investment-oriented social enterprises and more! I am looking forward to the pitch event later this year.
During the event, I also found out that the Brisbane City Council is sponsoring a Social Enterprise Hub at The Capital. I guess the hub will be in level 4, which used to be Little Tokyo Two. I think it’s a good idea to go niche. Because I feel as if Brisbane is suffering from too many co-working spaces, I don’t have any stats to back it up, mind you. It’s just how I feel. But any rate. I will be checking out the Social Enterprise Hub when I get a chance!
