Day 3 started with a meeting with Joshua Holmes, who is the Operations and Community manager at Muru-D.
Muru-D is a startup accelerator backed by Telstra. They currently run 6-month programs in Sydney, Melbourne & Singapore with partner programs in Brisbane and Perth. Check out Muru-D.
It was great to have a chat with Josh to understand how Muru-D runs and what they look for in their application process. Where in the project phase do you have to be, do you need a team, how is the selection process done, what happens after the term is finished are some of the questions that Josh shed some light on.
And I had a surprise visitor to the meeting. It was Ben Sand who is a resident entrepreneur at Sydney Telstra Labs. It was quite an intense session but was amazing to be in front of him and pitch my idea. I got a great understanding of what a VC looks for in a startup idea before they decide to invest in it.
Some of the questions that I can recall from the session are :
Who are your competitors ?
What are the alternatives that are currently available that solves this problem ?
How is it different from others out there ?
What is your competitive advantage ?
Who are your team members ?
If tomorrow you have to pick your team, who would they be ?
What qualities do they need to have ?
Have you assembled a team before for anything ? How did you get them to support you to execute your vision ?
If Amazon launches tomorrow, how are u going to compete with them ?
Think big and with less constraints : What would the world look like if this was a reality say in 5 years ?
What is your bigger vision ?
Why are you building this ?
What is your biggest strength ? What is your biggest weakness ?
After that great session it was time for customer interviews. So I bought 15 coffees from a nearby cafe and decided to head out to a food court and ask people if they can spare 5-10 minutes for a free cup of coffee. A free cup of coffee was a fair deal in my opinion but it did not work out that well. A lot of the people thought I was selling something and walked straight past without listening to what I was saying.
So I decided to go with Plan B which was to step inside the Telstra building and speak to people in the Foyer.
To my surprise, everyone was really nice and I got to speak to 5 people and I got some great insights. I discovered scenarios that I has not considered before and would be a great feature.
Day 5 Highlights:
So I think its time to refine my app designs and accommodate the additional features and rethink the process a little bit more. I am amazed at how much of an advantage it was to speak to even just 5 people. Their insights was incredible. I think this is just first of the many customer interviews I will be doing before building anything !
