Changing course for a new focus

Laura Gomez, an expert focused on product marketing, user experience, technical account management and international operations met with the teams today to refine which markets we should focus on.

Lunch was provided by the SVG Partners and gave us yet another opportunity to talk with teams. I was invited to sit down and talked with another startup that is working in the same building, but isn’t part of Manos.

It is fascinating to talk with different people, on different technology than I am working on, yet be able to completely understand what they are doing. It is almost a learning process from the moment I wake up to the moment I got to sleep.

I suggested a different path that their product could take, excercising my mind with thinking outside the box. They said they had thought of and implemented my idea, but it had a little too much friction for their liking and they decided to go a different direction. This conversation was great because it validated that products constantly change and that no one should be afraid to change their focus or roadmap if there is friction that can be avoided.

In fact, changing the direction of a young company is critical to its survival. To lead in innovation, you have to move fast and keep on top of where you’re heading. There’s a saying that you should move fast and break stuff. If you’re not doing both, well, in my words, you must be a big corporation. The Manos program has really helped focus what we want to do. The next part is how to move even faster.

After lunch, another Manos team came over and learned about our product and gave feedback on being cautious in certain strategies we are pushing. They have been burned by investors and didn’t want to see us repeat the same mistake. They also gave us a whole new direction to consider and some connections they know that can help make it a reality. This is amazing at how completely different companies can share experiences that can make a big difference in the life of our startup.

As the sun disappeared outside, our team practiced our pitch deck and refined it for tomorrow’s meeting at BrightStar.