Building in Public 3#: Creating focus for the last two months of 2024
A recap of what's happened while building Mane Hook-Up.
The accelerator was intense… What do I focus on next?
After a week in SF, I came back home with a tonne of ideas, thoughts and feelings about what the team should focus on next. This meant everything from:
Establishing targets for our growth (especially as the platform has relaunched)
Following up with the connections that I made in the States
Applying feedback to our business model and deck
Create a better communication structure for the team
That said, I’ve spent the past two weeks doubling down on all of the above to put the team in the best position possible to succeed, and here’s a quick run down on how it all went.
As always, I appreciate feedback, so feel free to leave comments or reply to this email with your thoughts.
🏅 Progress
Following up with Stateside connections
It’s one thing to meet new people…
But, it’s an entirely different thing to continue building and maintaining relationships with them, especially across time zones. From Founders to investors and start-up operators, there are now a tonne of new people for me stay in contact with since the trip to San Francisco.
One of the most challenging things I’ve experienced as a Founder is balancing the time I spend with my head down building, with relationship management. Building a great company not only means having a product that your customers love but also finding the right people to be your advocates.
To make it more manageable, I’ve put my new connections into one of three categories:
🎓 People to learn from: this means anyone who has been there, done it and worn the t-shirt when it comes to building a start-up. They are potential mentors that I’d love to work closely with to make sure Mane Hook-Up is being set up for success.
🙋🏾♀️ People to help: anyone that I can support through introductions to other founders, investors or operators in the space. I want to help people get ahead, and bring them up the ladder with me.
🫱🏽🫲🏿 Potential investors: Most of you have heard the term ‘not all money is good money’. Investors that are a good fit are few and far in between, so it’s important for me to stay in contact with the handful of good ones in the mix.
All of this in mind, I prioritised taking calls with people who fell into one of these three categories during my first few weeks back and I’ll circle back to them again around Christmas/NY.
Relationships are vital as you’re building, not just in supporting business growth, but also in providing an essential support system that helps keep Founders sane.
TIP FOR KEEPING IN TOUCH WITH NEW CONTACTS: There's planned (e.g. every 2-3 months) and unplanned contact. Plan reaching out to your contacts once a quarter or every six months just to check in and see how they're doing. But also send messages sporadically when anything crops up that they may find useful -- think event tickets, articles or even valuable introductions. Remember to be the helper so the relationship is mutually beneficial. Applying feedback to our financial model
Feedback (when applied in the right way) can be game changing.
I recently connected with a venture studio leader who loved our deck, and our platform but not our financial model. Which, at first, was heart breaking when so many hours had been spent putting it together 😭 but also provided me with a much needed kick to turn it around.
This also made me realise that even now, there are still things I don’t know about the expectations that investors have of Founders. In my minds eye, our model was simple, easy to digest and provided people with all of the essential information they needed.
But the reality is, things were missing. Simplicity for me, was a lack of information for them. And that is something that had to be fixed, sharply.
Fast forward a few weeks later and (with the help of the same person who offered the feedback), we have a new and improved model that now offers the detail that potential investors would expect to see.
This also reinforces some of what I said above. As much as you need to have a great product, it’s important to connect with people who have more experience, believe in what you’re building and have a willingness to help.
TIP FOR BUILDING A MODEL: Templates are a saving grace here (and there are a few you can find online for free), but it's worth running them past your advisors - or other founders - to make sure it's up to scratch before you get started. Establishing our growth targets for 2025
My views on this have changed a lot in the past two weeks.
I started off with a very concrete idea of what I thought good growth looked like and how to get there (mainly by helping stylists increase their income and get a certain number of bookings a week).
But after heading to an amazing community event on Wednesday, I heard something that really made me consider approaching targets in a different way.
When asked what the focus was for the team, the Founder of this community said they ditched their KPIs in favour of doing one thing… building a platform and product that their community loves.
That meant, instead of pushing a tonne of metrics onto the team, they have really opted to pursue customer centricity in a very different, but interesting way, that has made me reconsider how we do this internally as well.
When you’re creating a great product, sometimes you have to go against the grain and do what the majority of people choose not to. So, for the next 3-4 weeks I’ll work on creating a roadmap focussed on making sure our customers and stylists continue to fall in love with our product.
TIP FOR CUSTOMER CENTRIC GOALS: In theory this sounds great, but in practice it can be tricky. I once worked at a start-up where customer centricity was measured by the number of customer interviews a team held and how they actioned that information. Even if this sounds good, it can be a jarring experience for team members who are used to hitting targets driven by metrics. So, if you do go down this path, take the time to really communicate the value to your team and rope them into the process so they're more invested in creating a goals system that they will stick to. Launching our crowdfunding campaign
I have always wanted to include an element of social good in our business.
Years ago, I worked for a company that donated 10% of their profits to different charities (there was an internal nomination process and everything). That inspired me to look for opportunities for Mane Hook-Up to give back to our community consistently every year too.
After a lot of thought, we decided to launch a crowdfunding campaign that will help us channel some funding into growth while also helping vulnerable children get access to free hair care and education.
We have a committee and group of stylists who are dedicated to helping these young people as well. It has (and will continue to be) a tonne of work to close the campaign, but all of the hard work has been worth it so far.
More than anything, it has opened my eyes to the realities of crowdfunding (as this is often considered the easy way to raise), which is far from the truth. More on this in a deep dive article, but for those who are considering crowdfunding, think about what you have to put in to get the result you’re hoping for at the end.
TIP FOR LAUNCHING A CAMPAIGN: Give yourself enough time (and resources) to promote the it. Remember you need volume to hit the numbers necessary to close a campaign and if most landing pages have a 2% CVR, you could need visitors in the thousands to raise what you need. 🤕 Problems
Bouncing back from some serious jet lag
🛫 11 hour flight.
⏰ 8 hour time difference.
😴 24+ hours without sleep.
All of this added up to my body recovering from jet lag over the space of two weeks. That meant taking short naps in the middle of the day, allowing myself to wake up slightly later than usual, knowing when to say no to upcoming events and pushing calls back when I could.
While all of this was necessary, it also meant I didn’t have the time or headspace to get as much work done as I wanted to and falling behind my schedule. As normal as this may be, time is my most valuable asset and I knew this could very quickly lead to me being a bottle neck for the rest of the team.
A challenge that I come up against time and time again is letting go of the plan that I had in my head and accepting what currently is. Something as simple as not keeping to a schedule, meeting a deadline or completing a project as well as I’d have liked can throw me off balance. Mainly because I care.
When you care so much about the product you’re building and the community that’s being served, it’s very easy to beat yourself up unnecessarily. I’ve done that for the past two weeks.
And you know what? That didn’t help either 😆. So I will learn to give myself some grace on the odd occasion that exhaustion hits.
💡 Plans
Create a routine for customer interviews
The Mom Test is a book that I recommend all Founders read at some point.
More than anything, it will help you understand where you’re going wrong with customer interviews/research and how to create a process that feeds the best information into your development process.
One of my objectives is to speak to 4x customers or stylists a week. But before I start reaching out to people and running these interviews I need to know what questions I should be asking, how to ensure none of them are biased and how to feed this information back to everyone in the team (especially to our Head of Tech).
To me, there is nothing more important than making sure Mane Hook-Up is a customer centric start-up, so it’s my duty as a Founder to put the processes in place that empower my team to do that. Interviews is just one of many ways, but they’re about to become a staple in our process.
I’ll explain what we’re doing step by step via one of the next deep dive articles to give you and idea of how we have created a structure that makes sense for our customer base and business model.
TIP FOR CUSTOMER INTERVIEWS: Try not to ask leading questions and focus on exploring your customers existing problems and how they solve them (if there's a solution of sorts in place). 🤔 Questions?
Feel free to drop any questions in the comments below! Until next week,
J x
P.S. Here are some of my other posts:
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