I wrote this first blog just before the Covid-19 situation had really shaken up our lives. We are all feeling the effects of covid-19 and I think there is a special perspective to be heard to try an build a company during this time. That being said the core learnings I write about are more true now then ever. Future post will dive deeper into how we are looking at covid-19 when building companies.

Stay home if you can and stay safe!

Last week marked my 6th month into a brand new role, Entrepreneur-In-Residence, which was a job title I’d only heard about 6 months ago. The start-up world is full of acronyms, VCs, PMF, MVP, ARR, PPC, MRR, DAU etc. but EIR raises the most eyebrows.

So what is an Entrepreneur-In-Residence?

Andrew Chen put it pretty succinctly that an EiR is someone that brings in some form of expertise and given time and some resources to start a company. Typically EiRs are found in venture capital firms (or venture studio in my case) but universities and enterprises have also embraced the concept to drive internal innovation.

Leaving behind the security of a great job for the insecurity of starting a SaaS business is scary but the lessons from being a product manager has made the transition much easier. I’m sharing below some of the things I’ve carried over that have help drive our opportunities forward.

Getting to the Problem

The first thing you will read on any blog about Product Managers is that the focus needs to be on understanding the problems of their user. As a product manager you do customer interviews and review the analytics. Get to understand the user’s pain and what motivates them to use your product. Depending on our goal, increase revenue, get more users, increase retention, adding a feature etc. I add or remove questions from the list below but this was my starting point for all customer interviews, which is adapted from this post .

  • What made us your product of choice?
  • What do you like most about the product
  • What do you like least about the product
  • How are you using our product today?
  • What do you wish you could do but can’t right now?
  • What do you like about how you do X today?
  • What don’t you like about how you do X today?

As an entrepreneur, I’m applying the same mindset, because building a business is already tough and much more so when you are not solving a ‘hair-on-fire’ problem. I want to understand what keeps the customers up at night and what’s stopping them from achieving their goals. I’m still trying to empathize with them but the scope of my questions is broader because I’m looking for unique insight to an unsolved problem.

  • What keeps you up at night?
  • What’s the first thing you would change about your work?
  • How are you currently solving X problem? or What are you doing to work around it?
  • How are you planning to solve X?
  • Why is X a significant problem?
  • What would be the impact of solving X?
  • How many people would be affected by solving X?

I’v taken the questions from this post on Lean B2B. It is important to note that in the early stages of customer interviews, I’m not pitching or trying to close clients, I first need to know that there is a problem worth solving.

Always Be Testing Ideas

You can’t read a start up book or medium article without coming across some variant of the now infamous Lean Start up and it’s Build, Measure, Learn loop. Favouring experimentation and quick validated learning helps bring value to customer faster. In an establish product this may come in the form of surveys, interviews, presenting clickable prototypes to a clients, or running a closed beta on an MVP. One of my first experiments in Product Management was to identify the best interface and user flow for a Meeting Minutes module. After talking to the client on theirs needs and what they wanted to accomplish, we put together a prototype using only HTML, CSS and JS. Nothing about the code we had or how we attached the file uploads were scalable to more then a handful of clients and would not pass our QA process. But that wasn’t the point, we needed to answer the fundamental assumptions in our solution. As it turned out, our solution did not work for the clients and we took the learnings away and iterated on them to be re-tested until the clients were satisfied.

When it is you and your co-founders brainstorming and dreaming big it is easy to convince yourself you have uncovered the golden ticket. That is why testing and validation is all the more important as an entrepreneur. Every decision we make needs to be validated by our market. In the early stages the experiments we are running take on a different shape, it can be as grass-roots as finding 5 potential clients who agreed with your proposed product as solving a significant problem to a landing page with ads to drive sign-ups and gauge interest. I will be dedicating an entire post on experimentation and validation in the future.

Know the market

Most product managers will do a market analysis to understand where their product fits in the market, often with the lens on how the current market share compares to that of the competitive landscape and the total addressable market. As part of being the Product Manager in my last role, business cases had to be presented when we wanted to make major changes or significant feature additions. By looking at the market opportunity stakeholders could make informed decisions about where to invest the companies resources when comparing against other opportunities.

For a start-up knowing the market helps define what segments the product will address; often you are looking for a wedge through a specific segment that will lead to a much larger total addressable market. It also helps with forecasting sales but I would argue the true value is deriving the total potential the product has, a key metric that investors are looking for.

So what has the last 6 months been like? It’s a lot of discovery and deep dives into problems, industries and markets; its spending time talking with anyone willing to give up 15 minutes of their day to discuss their ‘hair-on-fire’ problems, often without a solution in mind yet. Choosing the path of entrepreneurship is markedly more uncomfortable then building a new product or feature in a established company.

But I can’t imagine a better way to apply everything I’ve learned to find and solve a real and expressed in the world.

Next update I’ll go more into the Venture Studio process and what challenges we’ve come across and learnings we’ve adopted.

– Kevin Nguyen, EiR @ FutureSight Ventures