Building in Public 1#: Final prep for our NYC launch & accelerator🗽

A recap of what's happened while building Mane Hook-Up.

Oct 23, 2024

Hey there 👋🏾,

Welcome to the first building in public post! Every two weeks, I’ll cover the progress, problems and plans that me and my team have encountered while building Mane Hook-Up. Here’s a quick recap of our progress, problems and plans.

Progress🏅: Final prep for Mane Hook-Up relaunch + got a pitch deck upgrade
Problems🤕: Intense week (running on 4 hrs sleep a day)
Plans💡: Final preparations for the San Francisco accelerator

🏅 Progress

🗽 Completed the final preparations for Mane Hook-Up 3.0

Four months ago, our team decided it was time to rebuild Mane Hook-Up. Mainly as we could build faster, and with somewhat less headache using another solution.

And I loved that, this time around, we have more customer and user feedback to really help us build more intentionally than before. We also made quite a few major strategic decisions such as:

Narrowing our focus: Both in terms of location (London and NYC) and stylist type (natural hair stylists and braiders). We want to dominate in a particular area first and really support our community in two core cities before pushing onwards and upwards.
Simplifying the design: Given stylists and customers have such a horrible time of finding each other, it was really important that the design felt smooth.

By last week Wednesday the platform was ready, and I had one job left… start adding users. The objective being, get 100 stylists on the platform before going live. That meant, collecting stylists details, price lists, photos and creating their profiles one by one.

Word to the wise, if you ever have to create the first set of profiles for your users… give yourself more than enough time to do it. Break it up into manageable by powering through for a few hours a day, but don’t follow in my footsteps and try to do it all in one sitting.

That mistake had me adding users for hours on end and in bed at 5.30am, running on 4 hours sleep (basically fumes) for two days straight 😭. Don’t get me wrong, that was definitely my own doing as I wildly underestimated how long it would take to create a profile page, and being side tracked by a few unexpected tasks cropping up.

Despite being sleep deprived for a few days, our new platform went live on time and have already had some positive feedback.

Can’t ask for much more than that.

LAUNCH ADVICE: However long you think it will take to build a platform, and however much you believe it will cost, add 20% to your estimate and you'll probably be fine. Underestimating is a huge time suck that no one wants to deal with!

🎉We got a pitch deck upgrade from a world-class designer (for free)

Problem and solution slides are often two of the toughest designs to put together.

Especially when you have a two sided marketplace with two different types of users, with different problems and you have to demonstrate exactly how your solution serves both of them equally.

I’ve been fighting with this for a few months.

Even though I landed on a (somewhat) better design, it still didn’t feel quite right. It had way too much information and not enough visual aids. But in a stroke of luck, I came across this post on LinkedIn, where one of the world’s best pitch deck designers had teamed up with Jonathan Crower to redesign a few pitch deck slides for three lucky start-ups.

Long story short, I applied and we ended up being one of the luck three. So, for the past few weeks, our problem and solution slides have had a serious make over and I’ve been working on creating a ‘story-led’ approach with our deck ever since.

All of this is time well spent, especially given we’re off to San Francisco for an accelerator next week where I have a chance to test out the new deck and see if it does, in fact, help us to better communicate our value to investors.

TIP FOR STORY-LED PITCHING: Investors (especially at the early stages) are buying into the story, the team and the potential to serve a market. Nailing your story plays a huge role in not only getting an investor interested in the first place, but also whether you manage to close the round.

Thanks for reading Inside Small Giants! This post is public so feel free to share it.

It was an intense week (operating on 4hrs sleep or less)

Not having balance is inevitable when you’re building. Work will ramp up, deadlines will move back, and you will be expected to step in and complete things at a moments notice.

All of the above happened as we prepped for the launch, and that led to several days of functioning on all of a few hours a night. While I’m not here to glorify this (because trust me, it wasn’t fun), I also believe that running a company of any kind means that balance comes in swings and roundabouts.

There are weeks I have a lot of high priority and urgent tasks to take care of, and others where I can take it easy. Handling the change of circumstances well stems from acceptance. Having signed up for building a tech company (that will one day be global), means making tough calls about what to do with my time.

And, in the long run, it also means creating the necessary systems to safeguard my teams time and minimise the chances of this happening in the future. While I can’t necessarily prevent the late nights from happening now, I can always think about the kind of company culture I want to create and can lay the foundations for them.

This means asking questions like:

Who are the people most at risk of experiencing long days?
What characteristics do you need to see in leaders to maintain a healthy culture?
Are there certain values that the business needs to live by?

Personally, I’m a big fan of thinking forward like this. I’ve already thought about things like maternity and paternity cover, working 4-day weeks, holiday entitlement and integrating self-care days. These are also the kind of things that will help you to retain team members — but we’ll cover that in more detail another time 😉.

For now, I accept when the work needs to be done (and how I can prevent all nighters from cropping up too often).

TIPS FOR FOUNDERS WHO ARE STRUGGLING TO FIND BALANCE: Instead of looking for balance (which you may not find for a while), look for progress and opportunities to make your start-up better. Start thinking about the policies that need to be formed and type of people you need to hire to maintain a healthy culture that promotes working smart.

💡 Plans

Final prep for the San Francisco accelerator

About a month ago, we were accepted onto an accelerator called 1000 Black Voices. Every year, they take founders who intend on expanding in the US on a trip to better understand what American infrastructure looks like, make connections and pitch (more on that here ).

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So, next week, I’m heading to San Francisco to do just that. But it also meant juggling the new product launch with pitch practice, deck upgrades, booking in calls and more.

While I made a point of pulling together a list of great potential investors, I’m also taking the time to reconnect with people that I already know in SF.

Given I’m based in London, this is one of the few time I’ll be able to focus on building relationships with American investors face to face. I don’t take that lightly, nor will I take it for granted, so for the next few days I will be focussing on outreach to keep my calendar booked and busy.

Wish me luck!

TIPS FOR FOUNDERS WHO ARE CONSIDERING ACCELLERATORS: I mentioned this in the TikTok video above, but not all accelerators are worth the time and energy. So do your due diligence before applying to make sure they really can deliver. Also, look for non-dilutive accelerators that will provide you with education and pitch opportunities without nabbing some of your equity.