“If it doesn’t make money, it’s a hobby.”
That was the message of serial entrepreneur and JFDI mentor Melissa Clark-Reynolds when she spoke to 50 entrepreneurs last week at the JFDI–Innov8 2012 Bootcamp. Hugh Mason asked her about her mentoring experience:
More advice below…
Melissa gave invaluable advice to the JFDI startups on how to best take advantage of a seed accelerator program. What was their reaction?
Four of her points really stood out:
1. Make as many mistakes as possible
“The team here today who makes the most mistakes in the fastest period of time is the team that will win longterm. You should be doing everything you can to fail fast if your idea is bad, and if it’s not bad you are going to want to make so many mistakes so that you’ll never make them again. If you do everything you can not to make mistakes, you are just going to delay them. And if you are attached to only doing it right, then you’ll never build something great.”
Even post-bootcamp, the minimonos.com releases weekly, with a running joke that one day they’ll release hourly.
2. Know your numbers and measure them
Melissa is a scientist by training. Her constant attention to the numbers has led to her success as an entrepreneur. She urged everyone in the room to be scientific about getting costs down and revenue up: use a hockey stick graph for customer acquisition and know where you are on that curve, measure and analyze key values, including Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), Average Revenue Per User (ARPU), Viral Coefficient. Constantly try to improve those numbers and think about how the design of your product or business plan affects/limits those values.
3. Put it up today
Melissa told the story of her first workshop with Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup, at which he told participants to put it up today. Melissa & team built a mock payments page during the coffee break. Much to their surprise, a user had clicked through to the payments page by the end of the workshop. “It made us see that someone was ready to pay…I reckon we would have [delayed our progress by one year] if we hadn’t listened to Eric’s advice.”
4. Take advantage of the mentors
Melissa and her team had a saying: “you can sleep in 3 months.” During the day, they took advantage of mentor sessions, and supplemented that by working late into the night.
Melissa is currently building minimonos.com, a virtual world for children, which she launched through Springboard, a seed accelerator and member of theGlobal Accelerator Network.