Supporting local entrepreneurs, and staying active in the Vancouver business community, is important to us at Allocadia. Not too long ago, Kristine and I were in the very beginning stages of building our own company.
Earlier this month, Kristine and I volunteered as mentors at Startup Weekend Vancouver, an event designed to bring budding entrepreneurs together in a quickfire weekend of business-building. Our role as mentors was to help teams think through their business models. While we don’t necessarily have all the answers, we’ve spent the past few years with our heads down, building a business. We’ve worn every hat possible and gone through the highs and lows of entrepreneurship. Now, we’re ready to share the lessons we’ve learned. We loved asking each startup team questions and helping members pinpoint potential challenges and holes in their processes.
What We Learned from Startup Weekend Teams
One thing that surprised us about the business plans: Very few of the teams were working on B2B ideas. It’s always surprising to me that entrepreneurs largely ignore B2B in favor of the more glamorous, prominent world of B2C. There’s a ton of opportunity for great B2B ideas! In Vancouver alone, there are a lot of exciting companies making waves in the B2B space (like Clio, Mobify and Unbounce), and I’d love to see more young entrepreneurs bringing new B2B ideas to market.
We saw several teams whose processes and ideas really impressed us. We’ve written before about the importance of talking to customers to test your ideas before you implement them, and one team at Startup Weekend was doing just that. Team members interviewed prospective customers, asking questions to validate their ideas. I loved seeing this kind of customer interaction. Sitting around a table talking to your internal team is great, but to really add value, you need to validate your ideas with your customers and end users early and often, and adjust your plan based on what you hear.
During Startup Weekend, we also watched teams learn one of our own biggest lessons as founders. Early on when we were just starting to build Allocadia, we learned the most successful founders build their businesses based on a specific pain point they’ve personally experienced. If your idea isn’t solving a specific pain or gap in the marketplace, your business probably won’t last.
Allocadia was born because we’d experienced the pain of not having a comprehensive marketing performance management tool. We’d struggled to show ROI through Excel reports and disjointed systems. And we knew other marketers were facing the same challenges. Experiencing that specific pain has given us the passion and drive to keep moving Allocadia forward.
We never had to prove that the challenge was there — we’d already experienced it first-hand. The reminder for anyone that’s interested in founding a company: Make sure you know what pain you’re solving, and stay focused on your solution.
Thanks to the Startup Weekend Vancouver organizers for including us in this inspiring event! Learn more about the weekend on the official Startup Weekend blog.
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