FI Alumni Panel: September 2022, featuring the Founders of BorderlessHR, Femtech Solution & Vieaura

Welcome everyone to today's Founder Institute alumni Q&A panel event. Uh, my name is Dustin Betts. Uh, I am part of the portfolio team, a community manager at Founder Institute HQ. For those who don't know who we are, the Founder Institute is the world's largest pre-seed startup accelerator. We've now helped to launch more than 6,000 companies across 200 cities worldwide. Alumni of the Founder Institute have collectively now raised over $1.75 billion in total funding around the world, and today are building some of the world's fastest-growing technology businesses. So if you're interested in learning more about the Founder Institute, we are currently enrolling for accelerator cohorts on all 6 continents, and you can see that full list of enrolling programs at the URL is fi.co/enrolling. So the agenda for today is I'm just going to give a really quick introduction to each of our 3 featured panelists. And then the full rest of the hour here is just going to be audience Q&A with our 3 FI alumni who we have here. I really want to emphasize that our alumni panelists are here to answer your questions, so please do not be shy. In the background is my producer, Elijah, and he's helping to kind of surface your questions directly from the chat. So ask away at any point, and then he's going to relay them over to me, and then I'll ask them to the panelists on camera. Yeah, please just don't be shy. Anything that's on your mind, you can ask at any point and we'll take a look at it. And we're really here to focus on your questions to our three alumni panelists. So with that very brief tidbit out of the way, I'm going to introduce each of them in turn and then we'll get started. So our first guest I want to introduce is Mande Batdorj. She's the co-founder and COO of BemTech Solutions LLC. This is an FI Mongolia portfolio alumni. Femtech solution that the actual consumer app is called Hello Baby App. It's a health tech company that's helping women to improve their health and wellbeing throughout their entire reproductive life cycle. So from period to pregnancy to parenting with expert information and support. And the mobile app is a market leader in Mongolia where my understanding is that they now have 150,000 users. Mon Batorj, please tell us a little bit more about yourself and about Hello Baby App.

OK. Hi. It's a morning here, so good morning to you guys. Good morning, afternoon, evening. The Dustyl already introduced to me so well, they have nothing left to say. So the startup has been— we started the company about 2 years ago. And now we have around 170,000 users and 30,000 children, which is like 600,000 users already within like 2 years. So I would just add this to Dustin's intro.

Awesome. Well, thank you so much for being with us, Maand. And yeah, excited to have you answer our audience questions. So our second panelist today is Srikant Yarlagadda, the founder of Vera, which is an FI Silicon Valley portfolio alumni. Although I believe you said you're now based in Chicago. Vera is making the industrial workforce more productive using AR, VR, XR, that's augmented, mixed reality for those who aren't in the know of those words, but as well as other tech that it enables even non-technical team leads to build their own custom apps and virtual experiences. And the company helps enterprises to retain their workforce, reduce training costs, improve productivity, and and the overall kind of work experience. Srikanth, thanks so much for being with us, and please tell us a little bit more about yourself and Veera.

Good evening, everyone, and thank you for that wonderful introduction, Dustin. Just as Maan had reiterated, I think you pretty much covered everything. The only thing I will add to that is this. We graduated from Founders Institute earlier this May, So I would say among all of us, we're probably the youngest from a startup, uh, from that perspective. But it has been a wonderful and exciting experience, so happy to share anything in from that perspective in terms of how— what are the— what are some of the things we learned, what we've gone through. So happy to be here and answer those questions.

Awesome, thank you so much for being here, Srikant. And our third and final panelist is Pascal Amachi, the co-founder of Borderless HR Incorporated, an FI Toronto portfolio alumni. Borderless HR is an intelligent talent portal that expedites the sourcing, vetting, and matching of the right talent for hiring engineering teams. And a quote that I think I saw from the website that I liked was very distilled: at Borderless, we build global, manage local, and hand over top-performing software teams. Pascal, thanks so much for being here with us. Tell us a little bit, um, yeah, more about yourself or about Borderless.

Thank you very much, Justin, for having me. Hello everyone, nice to be speaking and sharing with you guys today. So Pascal, pretty much like he said, Borderless works to help businesses around the world hire talents also from around the world. Today we have where our platform is live with thousands of talents, usually pre-vetted talents by the way, from over 100 countries around the world and working strong. And I'll take this time to really share that just like Shukran said, we finished last year, we didn't quite finish this year, but it's actually an interesting journey because I'm very proud to say that today we are cash positives in our activities and we continue to grow. We're a team of just about 20, cash positive and growing.

That's super exciting.

Thanks to FI, I have to point that out. Thanks to FI for the guidance, the early guidance, because it was very useful and it was at that point we got some of the foundations that enabled us to be where we are today. So I have to point that out as well.

Awesome. Well, thank you so much for being with us, Pascal. And yeah, that's super exciting to hear those metrics that you shared. I think, yeah, not having a team of 20 and being cash positive is awesome. Also sourcing this talent from 100+ countries, that sounds pretty awesome too. So hopefully we'll get some good questions from the audience about that. So yes, I just wanna reiterate for the live audience, I see some people are I see people already dropping questions into the chat. That's great. Yeah, please don't be shy, ask away. Elisha's gonna help us bring your questions to the surface to ask our panelists. But I guess just to kick things off, the first question that I want to ask to each of you in turn, some of you shared a little bit about when you graduated, but my question here is at what stage were you when you began the program at the Founder Institute? And what was the biggest reason why you chose to join the Founder Institute accelerator? And so that question is kind of, for each of you. So just kind of maybe go in turn in the order I introduced you. So Mon first. Yeah, two-part question. At what stage were you when you joined the program? And then why did you decide to do so? Okay.

So the company, we've enrolled the AFI program on the spring cohort of 2021. So it's been one and a half year already. And we were about to launch our second product right, right after we graduated the FI program. We've launched our second product and we've started monetizing right after we've finished the program. So that's the stage we were. So everything that we have built before enrolling in the FI program was MVP, MVP stage, lots of prototyping, iterating, MVP stage and So we will enroll in the FI program also right after we've closed our first angel funding round, angel fund investment. So it really helped us to spend our investor money wisely, to, you know, to not to spend on stupid things about the fund we have. So after the program, about 1.5 years later, we've doubled our customer base. It went from 80,000 to 2.5x. Yeah, 80,000 to 200,000 users already. And almost like 10% of our customers are converting to paid customers. So it really helped us to, you know, to grow our revenue perspective and everything. So both of the— I have another co-founder. Both of us went from we have zero experience on a startup thing. So both of us, we have came from a really corporate background with more than like 15 years of experience working in the corporate world and started to have— have started— decided to start to build our own companies. So, so it really helped us to see things in a very different angle. It really helped us to build your company And really, like, how to say, it will really saves you a lot of time, the program, and do things differently in the building company, scaling and speeding up and everything. So the speed and the intensity of the program was super high. I didn't expect that much intensity of the program. I thought mentoring session here and there or some speaking sessions here and there, but that never happened. So the Corp Core 14-day, 14-week program was super, super intense. So it really requires you at least 4 to 8 hours a day to finish every, the assignments and everything, but not to finish the assignments for the sake of finishing the assignment for the program, but the sake of building your company. So it really helped us, you know, it was the first ever accelerator that we have participated. Before launching our product.

Awesome, awesome. Yeah, so I want to get to a lot of questions here, so I'm sorry to cut you off, Man, but I just want to kind of get to more of them. So we'll have more questions and dive into a lot of the topics that you kind of introduced there as we go. But same question for you, Srikanth. So you joined our Silicon Valley program, I believe. At what stage was Vira, when you joined the program and then, and yeah, I forget even the second part of my own question there. Yeah, at what stage were you in the—

Yeah, what is the reason for joining it, right? Yeah, absolutely. So I'll keep it short but very succinct. So I will say this, we just had, we have been ideating the idea for a while, but that was in back in 2021. And we started our build, I would say in terms of getting it into a model that would build and come out with the alpha release, if you will, our alpha MVP, by December of 2021. And one of the things we were looking at was really starting the whole product-market fit. We had already done the customer discovery and all that was done, but we were really focusing on how do we prove this out, how does it really work in the field. And as we were starting to venture into that, one of the things really we realized was we needed more structure in terms of how we were going about this. Not only from the perspective of the product, but in terms of as an organization, as a company, right? We grew from a 2-member team to about 6 people during the course of the process as we went through the program. I think the key was in, in the reason for joining the program was really getting that structure in, the methodology, the idea behind it, rethinking the revenue models. We started with some ideas in mind, and everything was push, push, push, get it right. Are you really thinking the right way? Because we were playing in the enterprise SaaS space, right? It's a completely different space compared to a B2C model. And really, and we came from the enterprise space, don't get me wrong, but it's just the fact that we were more on the services side, not on the product side. So it's a completely different fit and thinking that, that was required to be able to do this. And that is one of the key reasons why we chose to join the Accelerator program.

Awesome. Thank you, Srikanth. And finally, you, Pascal. Yeah, same question. What stage was Borderless HR when you began the program and what was sort of your biggest reason for having decided to join?

Yeah. So interestingly, we joined fi pre-this business. As a matter of fact, I was working on a different, I was working on a different thing entirely. I joined fi for the first time with it, as a matter of fact. And it was within FI that the idea of what we're doing today came to mind. And that came largely because speaking with lots of other founders in FI, lots of them kept saying, oh, I need a technical founder, or I need people to build, I need engineers to build my stuff. I have this idea, I don't know how to get it started and whatnot. And that was the idea. That was how the idea started. So we used to have groups, small groups where we get around to meet and then each group I joined, everyone had the very same issue. In the meantime, the idea I was working on at the time wasn't quite scaling. So I felt, you know what, I think it's time to jump ship. So that was when I said I was going to jump ship. So I ditched the earlier idea and started the next idea. So that was how it went about. As to why FI, I can't exactly remember how and when I came across FI the first time. I would say at least I've known about FI for at least 5 years right now. But naturally, when I was about, um, getting started, um, I'm new to Canada, I'm based in Canada, I'm new to Canada, I feel like, hey, why don't you just meet up with other guys who you could, um, get things done with? And naturally, FI came to mind and I signed up. Incidentally, it was time of the pandemic, so everything was remote, but I'll still say it was very helpful at the same time.

Awesome. Yeah, Toronto is like a really interesting entrepreneurial ecosystem. So yeah, meet other co-founders. And yeah, you did the hard thing sometimes, like making that personal pivot from what you were working on before more working on, you know, your next startup idea, it can be really hard to make that jump. And so yeah, that's cool that FI sort of helped you make that leap. So let's start getting to audience questions. We have a good amount coming in here and yeah, I want to get to as many as possible. So the first question I want to ask is from Ryan who is asking, I think, Manju, you alluded to this a little bit maybe, but so this is for all the panelists, but were you working full-time while going through the program? And if so, how were you able to balance that out? You know, what was the kind of level of dedication or kind of a balance between your full-time job and your startup when you started. Does that apply to anybody? Did I have that right, Mon? Or was anybody working? I guess you said you came from a more corporate background, but were you already full-time on your startup when you joined FI?

I was working full-time on my startup. And then both of the co-founders, both of us has participated the program. And then during the daytime, we focused on the company, and during the nighttime, we worked on all of the assignments and everything. So you really have to squeeze time for this program— early mornings, maybe in the evenings or nighttime. And sometimes you have to give a call to, you know, make sales even before launching the product. So sometimes we have to get to call to 50, 100 person during the daytime that was connected with the assignment. And you really— you can really balance and you can squeeze it out into your daily working flow. So that's doable. It's hard, but it's doable.

Awesome. Yeah. Thank you. Same question to, I think, Pascal. Well, you kind of alluded to this too, saying that you were moving from sort of one idea that you were working on and then began working on Borderless. But yeah, how was that, I guess, the balance for you? Sort of, um, you were coming into it fresh, so was it— was that hard to, to balance, I guess, the assignment workload with the other, you know, early stage business development that you were, that you were working on at the time? Or did that kind of all fit together? Were you full-time or had other employment at that point or no?

Right, so I, I'm gonna make a confession in the course of this tough, um, response, but then I was working full-time at the time, to be perfectly honest. I was working time. Of course, like I said, I was new to Canada and I was working full-time at the time. But at the time, I started out with Montreal. I didn't finish with Toronto. I started in Montreal. And if anyone knows anything about the Montreal director, he's a very tough guy, right? And so he's a really good guy, by the way. He's a really good guy, but he's really tough. And one thing he's gonna— one thing he's gonna— he's always gonna make— he's always gonna put in, so he's gonna put in lots of pressure to make any course of this. It wasn't just about doing assignments. He tried to really put us under pressure and he was gonna say something. He's like, he's trying to simulate real life, what it looks like running a startup. And the truth is doing FI, doing a full-time job, being a new dad, and working on this, we have so much to do at the same time. But the truth is running the business itself can be a lot more intense.

Intense.

I know that right now doing the business, when you begin to grow, grow your team, have lots of different people working for you, begin to grow the business, chasing after customers, having lots of this, it's a lot more intense than FI. So FI is a really good starter to get started with this. Um, so yeah, I just thought to put that out there. Yeah, I was doing this full-time, um, it was really intense, but it's always— it all boils down to time management. But it's always going to be worth it because The journey ahead is gonna be a lot more intense.

I, I really like that answer, Pascal, because yeah, that's something that FIHQ, I've just heard over the, over the years, it's like that, that the Founder Institute is, is hard. It's challenging on purpose because building a business is gonna be ultimately even harder. So yeah, it's pretty, pretty good to hear you, I guess, reflect that sentiment back that, that you felt the same way. How about you, Srikanth? I don't know if this applies to, to you or not, but yeah, were you, you were working full-time, I think already on your startup point when you joined the program, right? But how was kind of, I guess, the balance of working on the different assignments throughout the 14 weeks of the accelerator versus whatever else you were working on at the time?

Yeah, I was working full-time. In fact, we bootstrapped our entire operation between the co-founder and myself. My co-founder was not full-time at that time, which is one of the things that we had to balance with, given some of the activities that he had to devote his time to. But I think we had clear demarcation of who was doing what, and I think that was really important, uh, so that we were able to clearly focus on what we needed to do. So I was a product owner, he was more the engineering guy, he made the magic happen, and I was the guy with the ideas, right? And that's what you really need in, in anybody trying to find a co-founder. Really need to find a partner who's really going to be with you for the next 7, 10 years, right? That's very critical and absolutely important that you find the right person for that. But I think those are all the aspects that you kind of go through. But one key thing that came out of FI was it is a journey by itself, right? It's— you got, you got good, good days, bad days, uh, the perspective that you need to keep in mind where you're going through this program why you're going through it, it's super critical, 'cause that helps a lot down the line.

Yeah, speaking to your point about co-founders, I can definitely see that there's people in the chat who are on that co-founder journey right now who are, you know, they know that it has to be, it's a really important decision that you're looking for that right person. And so yeah, others here are definitely going through the earlier stages of that. There's a couple questions in here about just like general startup tips for early-stage founders. And so this is another kind of two-part question. I'm gonna loop to you, together two of the, the questions, and you can feel free to answer either one or both of them, but I'm going to ask each of our panelists in turn again. So Ankit is asking, what were the biggest challenges, um, for what— for you, for in the early stages of your company? And Carissa is asking, what questions do you wish you had asked when you first started? So maybe something that you came to see differently throughout your startup journey from, from the very earliest stages. But yeah, so 2 general startup tips. Yeah, biggest challenges for you and questions you wish you had asked earlier on. Feel free to answer either or both of those. Mons, do you want to answer first?

Okay, the biggest challenge was linked to, I think, the product development stage. So as a first-time founder, you feel very tempted to make a product beautiful. You add whatever you think the beautiful— this button, this feature, this, you know, you know, you add everything, you know, many, many things. And after, you know, after releasing the product, you see that product is becoming like the customer wanted, for example, a bread, but you gave them like a wedding cake, you know. That was the biggest, I think, the mistake, or, you know, I think as a first-time founder, it really like happens a lot for all of us, you know. And then so you go back to your product and ask yourself, what's the core job that your mobile application wants to do? So after that, we have like Deleted or eliminated like 90% of what we have built already. Every day features this tracker, these tools, and everything. And all of it was unnecessary to our customers, but we found out that we've built it already. Founders thought they knew everything. Our CTO, our tech guys thought it's the best thing. And your product become a mess. And investor came, they tell you what to do. And then investor's wife will come to you, they say, oh, maybe this will be some cute little thing that you can add to your product and everything. And you started listening to your customer, and customers will want to add like 100,000 different things to your product. And really, the prioritization and asking the core question from your company, like, what's the one job that your product must do? And that really has to be really focused. It's really the job of a founder. And that was very challenging for me. Building everything and starting to like de— rebuild everything, you know, deleted like 80, 90% of what you have built and started from scratch. So I would say that was a very challenging thing and very, very selectively listen to your cost, listen to your customers, but really in a very selective manner, like what they're trying to tell you and everything. So that's my one cent.

Yeah, yeah, that's a— yeah, that we've heard, heard that called like the rule of one, right? You know, build, you know, one solution that addresses for one customer their one major pain point. And yeah, that, that other term like feature creep, definitely true, as you say, like for early founders that they can just— it can compound upon itself and you need to like have that focus. Your job as the founder is sort of to distill those— that customer feedback down and make that make sense. Awesome. Yeah, Great tip. Yeah, same question to you, Srikanth, next. It was a two-parter. So biggest challenge in the early days or questions you kind of wished you had asked earlier on, on your startup journey?

So I would step back and say this. We were clear in terms of from a problem and a solution perspective, we were clear about what we wanted to do and what we were going for. What was the biggest challenge was articulating that in a simple and easy way that a 7-year-old or a 6-year-old could understand. We never could get that right, and that was our number one challenge we had right through the entire program. So I kid you not, if I go back through all my scores in all the 14 weeks of training, I think we were— we did maybe twos most of the time, Maybe we've got one for— but that is the biggest challenge, is being able to distill what you're doing into a very meaningful way that a common person can understand what you're doing. And I think that is something, because we all come from that background of technology and think about, hey, I'm doing this, this is, this is great. And that's kind of that tunnel vision we have. When you turn around, you have somebody who doesn't know what your product is and is looking to invest in you. If you cannot speak that language, if you cannot turn around and tell that story, and that's very critical storytelling, right? You need to get that right. And that took us a while, and that was our biggest challenge, I would say.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And yeah, you kind of mentioned, so for those who don't know the Founder Institute, we emphasize pitching, you know, throughout the full 14 weeks where you're working on kind of building up that storytelling muscle, so to speak. But that, that the rating our rating system is like 1 to 5, but no 3s. So where it's like you're 2 or you're 4, you know, we try to not split hairs by having a lot of 3s. And so, yeah, it's tough feedback. But as Pascal was saying earlier, you know, the program's challenging, but in the sense that, you know, building your business is ultimately going to be the bigger challenge to come. So to ask you the same question then again, Pascal, yeah, just about these early-stage startup tips, you know, biggest challenges or, you know, questions you wish you had asked yourself earlier on on in the process of your startup?

I'll say, so for every founder, one of the most important things you wanna do is you wanna have an MVP. That's a no-brainer, right? Everyone says you have your MVP, the minimum viable product, out there in use. But the real big challenge, well, personally I experienced it, is hiring the right people. Because everything from building your business to building the MVP to whatever you're doing, you need the right people around you. Right? Without the right people, you find yourself going around in circles for a very long time. Um, startups are about speed, speed of execution, because everything you're doing, in most cases, whatever you're going to be building, there's always someone else thinking about the same thing or doing someone else doing similar things, sometimes better funded than you are doing the same thing. So it's always about speed, um, and get executing right. So the most challenging thing I'll say is hiring right. Now, when a business of hiring, it's actually interesting, but I'm going to tell you that even we initially had those issues. Thankfully, we were able to crack it. We now have a system of getting some of the very best people within our teams that has enabled us to continue to grow, and that we've also distilled it, enabling businesses that come onto our platform to hire right. But off the cuff, one of the biggest challenges we had early days was hiring the right people. And I'll say it's very critical. When you start another business, ensure you have the very right people in your team if you actually intend to grow or even start in the first place. That's my—

Awesome. I actually have a follow-up question for you, Pascal, because it's related. And David from the audience posed this question to you directly, and he said, what's the most important consideration when launching a global team? And so since you were just speaking about, you know, challenge of hiring being one of the most important things, As you said, you're sort of in the business of hiring. What would you say to David there about the most important consideration in building maybe, or a fully remote team, I guess would be another way to think about it, distributed team like that?

So interestingly, we hire from around the world as well. We have people that work with us from around the world, but one of the key considerations would be, and I know this might sound like it's been over said, You want to find the right fit. It's about culture. You want to find— so there are lots of smart people, there are lots of very good people that could do things, but you want to find the right person for your startup at the stage you are. You're not hiring for someone who's going to drive for 5 years from now. You want to find the right person from now. And oftentimes it's someone who is willing to wear multiple hats, a number of things. Usually when I'm hiring, there are 3 key things I— especially when I'm hiring early about people that are going to be close to me, the 3 things I always say I look out for. Firstly is sense of ownership. This is something we're doing, I'm not going to micromanage you, I'm not going to do any of those. You understand what needs to be done, you take it and move. So the first is ownership, the second is communication, ability to communicate right. So these are some of the things I look out for at the time we're hiring. So ownership, communication, but particularly while One, we're early stage and there's a prospect of us growing out together. There's always a chance you're going to be a director sometime in the future of the business or something, or lead teams at least. The next thing I look out for would be leadership, right? So I know character is involved in all these things, but 3 key things I look out for at this point— I mean, character is always a given, right? So that's always a given. But 3 key things I look out for would be ownership. I need someone who's going to take ownership because and we are multiple hats where need be. I'll give you a simple example. We just before this call, we had, we were trying to close out a deal with one of our clients, with a client in New York, and then he just calls and says, hey, Pascal, we need ABC and we need to hire these guys very soon. And then I reach out to the guy who is immigrating, who by the time zone should be sleeping. I say, hey, we need to get this stuff done. What do you do? Like, oh, don't worry, I'm gonna do this. And then quickly he jumps in and does what needs to be done. On at that very point, right? So to us at this point, we need a level of flexibility and ownership. So that's, that is, those are some of the few things I would say are very critical. Starting out early and when you're hiring from a global pool, when hiring globally.

Yeah, I really like that answer, those three parts, especially, yeah, the first part. Yeah, I've heard about, you wanna have, for co-founders as well as early hires, GSO people, which stands for Get Stuff Done. Sometimes it's not stuff, it's another word that starts with an S. But at any rate, yeah, those are the kind of like the people who you need, especially early on in your startup. A question here from Alexi that I want to ask is how do you, how did you successfully network and how important was that for you in the early stages of your startup journey? Certainly when you get to the stage of fundraising, having a network is sort of everything to be able to, to close a fundraising round, but that question sort of not necessarily just about fundraising, but maybe about, you know, finding that early co-founder or your early hires. Yeah, could I— any of you speak to— feel free anybody to jump in and take this one, but sort of the role that, you know, having a strong network has played in the early success of your company.

I can take that. So from a networking point of view, I think we looked at it from two perspectives. One was, We were in the stage of product validation that is very critical, and networking played a key role in that because at that point we, we didn't have the bandwidth or to do any kind of lead gen or any of that. And that's kind of further down the line, if you will, from a timeline perspective. So for us, the immediate network, who we could reach out to, who were the enterprises that we could work with, was super important in terms of getting validation right, right, right out of the get-go. And so that, that's where networking was very critical. The second part was it added on to helping us do the subsequent— and we are right now in a pre-seed round that we are going through right now— and the networking process that we went through when we, when we were doing the early program with Founders Institute kind of piggybacked on what we were doing subsequently as part of the investor as well. So those relationships help leapfrog some of the connections we needed to make in terms of that process, right? So these kind of feed into each other, and that's very critical. And from that perspective, so because everything that you can do from here, from particularly from an interesting networking perspective, you can amplify that. There are people out there who can speak about your, your product, about what you're doing, and all these things. So it's very important that networking plays a huge role there. And that's not only from an attraction or a product validation and networking perspective. It is also from a hiring perspective. I go back to what Pasha was talking about in terms of hiring, and it's rather than trying to go cold and trying to put an advertisement out there, trying to hire people through the network makes a lot more sense and you get the right connects from there. That's my experience.

Yeah, that's super interesting, both of those parts. Yeah, during the validation and kind of how that network compounded upon itself, or it was still super valuable when you were ready to start, um, raising for your pre-seed as well as on the hiring side. I know Founder Institute itself has hired like our alumni of past programs have like come to work for the company. That's something I've seen over the years. And so similar experience with you, or especially, you know, if you're in the enterprise kind of space, you know, when you move through those networks, you kind of learn where the talent is and that that played a positive role on the hiring side too. So yeah, super, super interesting answers there. Either of our other two panelists kind of want to jump in and share any of your own personal experiences on how networking impacted early success?

So I'm going to add, I'm going to add to it quickly. So I'm going to say everyone here, I want to think most people here either thinking of building a business or in early stages. I'm going to say get out there, create luck for yourself is very important. Now I'll say this again. At the time I was starting this, at the time we're starting out, at the time I was in FI, we started out in FI, I was new to Canada, zero network, I wasn't studying, I came in here directly to work, and then the pandemic hit. So I had zero network in Canada, but I had to start a business that had to operate globally at the same time. Key thing is create luck, put yourself out there in networks that would amplify what you're doing, that would complement what you're doing, whatever term you want to for it, right? Put yourself out there. FI was critical to that. It was very critical early day work for us. But beyond that, we joined a number of other incubators and accelerator programs. We joined lots of other startup groups. Everyone now again, we have made our time when COVID rules allowed for it, went out and hung out. Till tomorrow, I still get calls from startup hours or founders and say, hey, Pascal, what's up? Can we have a drink? Let's Or every now and again, I also call up others, right? So I would say, put yourself out there. It doesn't matter how introverted you are. Put yourself out there as much as you can in groups that would help what you're doing. And like Shrikant said, it's going to help from everything from getting markets, getting customers, getting co-founders, if you may, sometimes even getting early employees. There are lots of magic that can happen when you let, when you put yourself out there and let luck happen for yourself. So very critical, take that advice.

I really like that. That's kind of like boots on the ground advice because like you said, you had no network when you arrived in Canada and I really liked, yeah, the create your own luck. I think that's definitely true to the extent that, yeah, and networking is like a huge part of that. So yeah, awesome answer, Pascal. How about you, Manz? Want to share any anecdotes or stories about your networking early on if it played a role any of your early success?

So all of the key players, key person in my company, my co-founder, my CTO, my investor, they all came from, from networking, through networking. So especially the investor and the CTO, we bumped each other in different events at that time and introduced our product, the vision and values that we're bringing, and then The networking, and you have to be like, what do you say, it's better to just hard knock somebody's door and ask them for investment rather than you can be introduced by somebody who can, who they, who they can trust. And then that's really helpful for, you know, for especially the first time, the, for the startups in the early stages, using your networking skills and the power to attract the right people into your company. And, you know, my co-founder, CTO, and investor, they all came from networking and recommendations.

Awesome. One follow-up question for you, Mons, because this was one that the audience also addressed specifically to you. So the question is from David, and he said he's also trying to build a health tech startup and just asked about how you went about about your customer validation with your idea specifically. He says expected mothers. I know your kind of full user pool is a bit wider than that, but yeah, how did you go about your early customer validation in the health tech space?

Okay, so it all started when I first became mom, and then it really started seeing this You know, problems that we're facing, that the customers need expert information, you know, expert information, tools, and resources that you— that they can have in their own smartphones when they first become moms. It's really challenging. I think it really resonates with you, Pascal, because you become a dad, and then everything is a mess, and people face a lot of challenges when they become first-time parents. Parents and mother and fathers. So I become mom and then I've see these big problems that people are facing. And Mongolia didn't have that mobile application at that time, only books, encyclopedias and some events and etc. So I'm first customer that faced these problems. And then as for the validation, Before building a product, we've really like started to meeting a lot of people, a lot of mothers who are pregnant or ready to give birth. And we visited a lot of hospitals during the area and asked a lot of questions about them. You know, I, I still have it in my, my documents that I first, you know, wireframe. They, you know, sketch the wireframe and uses some tools like a basilic or something. I'm really bad at drawing and everything, and everything looks really messy on the paper. And then I've sketched some, the front of my applications at that time, and visited the hospitals and interviewed like 200, 300 people at that time, and then show my sketches to them. Like, do you really understand this project? About the product. And some of them say really, like, how do you say, important things for me when we start, you know, some of the features that really don't— they don't understand, maybe they don't need. And then really, like, meeting a lot of people really helps during the customer validation time, even if it's messy sketch on a plain A4 paper. So after that, you can use a lot of tools also to validate and interview focus groups, meetings, maybe Google Forms, SurveyMonkey, and everything. And then you have this prototype, you know, how to say, clickable prototype on a Figma sketch file. And then you ask us, ask again about them. What was the— do you really understand this product? Can you really understand this button? Can you like— where are you like stuck in your journey to get the job done, etc.? So I would advise to meet a lot of people Get out of your room or office.

Yeah.

And meet a lot of face-to-face connections or interviews with your early stage customers. And that's how you get the customer validation, I think.

Yeah, a lot of great tips there. So hopefully that's helpful for you, David. But yeah, even this is a sequential process and yeah, really emphasizing like getting out, showing those early sketches, even if it's, yeah, just kind of napkin sketches and getting feedback. So yeah, that's awesome to hear kind of how you tackled that. In sequence. Really interesting. We have a lot of questions in here about whether the Founder Institute Accelerator is a good fit for businesses that are past the idea stage. Specifically, somebody's saying in there, you know, I already have an MVP that I'm testing. Just to kind of address those questions sort of altogether very quickly, the answer is generally speaking, yes. So the Founder Institute program, the accelerator is sort of a dual track. There's both like the launch track and the growth track. And, you know, we're industry agnostic, we get businesses of all different kinds. And so every Every case is a little bit different. It's sort of between you and the director, whether you decide if you're like Launch Track or Growth Track. But generally speaking, the borderline is like, are you pre-MVP or post-MVP? And so, yeah, just to kind of answer that. And you can read like a lot more if you want to see more sort of stories of our alumni besides the 3 amazing alumni we have here today. If you go on our website, fi.co/reviews or fi.co/graduates, you can kind of see the whole scope of, yeah, different alumni stories and stages of when they join the program and what they achieve post-program. So just to kind of wrap all those together. Another question I wanna ask here, it's a good one because it sort of depends on the business. And so feel free to answer it as it relates to your business specifically. But David's asking, which is more important to prioritize, the sort of being scalable or building your monetization, right? So growing big or growing profitable. Uh, uh, does anybody have a strong opinion about that either way? I know it's like unique for every, every business, but for your own business, you know, how did you think about, uh, those two, two sides of the coin are a very common sort of, uh, balancing act with tech startups? Yeah, please.

So I'm gonna say, right from the very good goal of starting a business, you are building a business. Always think about building a business that would grow and Europe. Now, you're not building business for— I mean, it's always very nice to appear on the paper and have very good— I'm not saying that's bad, uh, for the press, uh, it's always good to raise funding to enable you grow, but you're always building for your customers. Irrespective of how much you raise, if you don't build what people love, it's most likely going to fail. So prioritize on building what people love. Initially, you might start with things that don't scale, to be perfectly honest, and that's fine, provided you're beginning to build what people love, right? Focus on doing what people love. If you can get more of what people love, try a number of different things, focus on speaking with the customers or your users, continue to do that. And as far as you can keep doing that, and again, I'm gonna say try as early as possible as well to begin to make money, right? You want to start monetizing as early as possible in a very scrappy form. Go very scrappy, get— ensure that people love what you're doing, but start monetizing. That is when you really know people love what you do. It's not enough to, to go and ask your friends, do you like this? Everyone's gonna say, oh yeah, because they want to be polite, right? And, um, if you even ask strangers, sometimes they'll say yes because they want to be polite. When you really know you're onto something is when someone says they take some money out of their pocket and give you, that's when you know you're on to something. So start early, begin to monetize early, begin to focus more on building what people really love. As far as this is done right, it snowballs into scalability, it snowballs. And trust me, VCs and investors always like to see success. They always love to see that you are heading in the right direction, there's progress. So if you have built something, people love it, you have users, you're monetizing, chances are you'll raise funding. But if you're building, optimizing to raise funds, then you're prioritizing on the wrong thing. So optimize always to satisfy your customers and go earlier, start raising, get monetizing your products as soon as possible. That's my take on that.

Yeah, yeah. So to cut, yeah, that there's a lot of good, it's always a balancing act, but it sounds like you were sort of saying saying, like, focus first on the value that you deliver, even if it's not scalable, something that you can charge customers for, and that, you know, eventually, like, the scalability will sort of follow if you're able to deliver that, that value. But yes, any other from our other two panelists, other opinions on the, the dichotomy here of prioritization of scalability versus profitability, other diverging thoughts, or agree with what Pascal said? There.

No, I agree with what Pascal said there. I mean, that is spot on because that is something you need to learn very early on, uh, because the technology is there to make things scalable pretty quickly. I mean, you can get that right, but scalability is a very subtle art. And what we— what I mean by that is you need to be doing unscalable things early on. You need to have boots on the ground early on to really understand how it is done on the field, right? We— it's kind of that analogy of crawl, walk, run. Until you don't get good at crawling and getting it done right, you're not going to be able to scale. You need to, you need to build that scalable playbook, uh, playbook early on to be able to say, okay, you know what, here is my team now who's going to take over everything that I've learned. I'm going to have them do it because you got that, those lessons early on. And that's super important, particularly in a B2B space where we are in. That's mandatory. You need to know how to get it done right first.

Yeah, makes sense. Okay, well, another question here from, from the audience that I think is interesting. There's actually multiple questions sort of about this, which is coming from a non- technical background, basically. Ankit asks, how challenging is it to start a company from scratch if you don't have a tech background and how did you overcome that gap? And I see Dolores in here is asking a similar background saying, I don't have a, or I was saying a similar question, I don't have a tech background, I have some basic coding skills with a business background. Would that be a deal breaker to join the program? No, it's not a deal breaker to join the program. We have lots of non-technical founders who go through the program and go on to build very much tech-scalable businesses. So it's definitely not a deal breaker. Eric or Dolores, but to each of the panelists, sort of, I don't know if it applies to any of you who didn't, who don't have a technical background, but for others in your cohort, what sort of have you seen with founders who come from that background? If it's not you, that's for any of you who want to jump in and take that one.

I am the person who does not have a techie background. When I started my company, then my technical education or knowledge is even worse than 2-year-old. I can only watch YouTube or draft an email and use some Word, Excel, and that's it. That's it. That was my background. So, you know, I remember writing a word, what's— what is Java on the Google, you know, what is Python in the Google. And then that was my level of technical knowledge at that time. And then if you really find— if you are building a product with really heavy coding and stuff, then you have to find your CTO or really good software developers in your team. That's mandatory. But it's not mandatory for the founders to have a techie background. If you can, it's better. It's really good if you can understand understand their language, understand how to communicate with them, learn to communicate with them, to put them in a, you know, at the same road with you, to give them, let them understand your vision, your value of the product, and then learn to communicate with your developers, then you really don't need a techie background.

And Mon, you spoke about earlier about specific tools that you use to communicate with those. So I think you mentioned Balsamiq or Figma. I mean, are there other tools that you kind of learned in order to communicate as a non-technical person, you know, to your developer or CTO?

Okay, for communication, we use Slack as our main channel. And then for the— if you are prototyping your product, then I would advise two products. First one is Figma. It's a design tool that, like, most of your team can work collaboratively product manager or techie, your techie people, or you or your designer, you can really work collaboratively. Or Adobe XD program. And then for the sketching and everything, you can have Balsamiq, or you can just handwrite it or use a whiteboard, the Miro tool, M-I-R-O, Miro tool. That's really helpful for brainstorming and everything. And then for the communication, you can You can use Slack, and then that's it. That's it.

That's awesome. Yeah, that's a lot of tools. And yeah, some people are talking in the chat about no-code. There's a whole movement of no-code out there of things where you can build products, websites, mobile apps with no-code tools. But those are a lot of really, really good ones I think that you shared, particularly for the product development kind of prototyping and having that communication, communicating visually with the developers. So yeah, that's awesome. I know we're getting close to the end here. We've gotten a lot of audience questions answered, so that's been great. But yeah, we're getting closer to the end. So maybe time for one more or two more questions. Let me see what's in here. Sorry, I lost track of the question I was going to ask you. All right, I'm going to come to this question here. This is the question I usually wrap up on, which sort of open-ended and ask to each of our panelists in turn. But what would be the final tips, I guess, that you would give to a prospective founder, somebody who's thinking about joining the FI program, somebody who's relatively early stage, say MVP or earlier? Yeah, just tips for this founder to be successful in the FI program itself. And I wanna ask this question to each of our panelists. So feel free to jump in. Does anybody want to go first, kind of tell your, the tips too that you would give founders to succeed in the program? Pascal, how about you? You want to share your tips?

So I'm gonna say, get out there, make magic happen for yourself, create luck for yourself. It is very important. I can't overemphasize how important it is. Please get out there, create luck for yourself. Very important. Secondly, hire right. I hear people saying, how do I get the right person? I'm not techie. Come to Borderless, come to Borderless HR. That's what we do. We get you the right people. Right on. But very seriously, get the right people very early to work with you because it's important. You're growing a startup that could take you years to build, and that is really a grind. You wanna make sure you have the right persons beside you if you really wanna succeed. So create luck, get the right people around you, and I really hope everyone here succeeds at, at their startup as well.

Awesome. Great answer, Pascal. Yeah, I really like emphasizing that, creating your own luck, particularly if you're somebody as you were, who were like entering a, a new startup ecosystem, like doing that networking and yeah, the hiring, getting the right people around you. So, so important and definitely connected to that whole element of creating your own luck and getting out there. Yeah. How about you, Shrikant? Sort of what would be your sort of number one tips for a prospective founder to be successful in the program?

I would say three things. One, be prepared for the roller coaster. You're going to have good days and bad days. The team around you, the cohort around you is the right audience where you can really hash hash out and talk about everything that you want to hash out. You can really get connected with the cohort and really go, go from there. That's very important. And you're not the only one, you have everyone with you there, so you can easily share ideas and, and figure out solutions from there. The second part I would say is perseverance, very important, because this— you are building this for the long haul. You're going through this journey for the the long haul. So perseverance. And the third is grit. Very important. These two are very critical to be able to take you all the way there. Because keep in mind, this is not the 14-week journey that you're talking about. You're talking about 7, 10 years out. What are you going to do? You're working towards that vision. And so this journey prepares you right here for that. It's an excellent program that grounds you in that reality in terms of where you want to go.

Awesome. Yeah, I love that advice too. And just like you said, perseverance and grit. 14 weeks is nothing compared to how likely, you know, how long it's really going to take you to realistically grow your business. I mean, over the years. And yeah, I think somebody said earlier, it might take a couple years. You're building a startup, it's going to take at least a couple years. I mean, or it could become a lifestyle company that is your, the rest of your career possibly. So Yeah, any of those things are possibilities, but grit and perseverance, definitely required attributes. How about for you, Manz? What would be your kind of parting advice for a prospective founder thinking about joining the program? What would be your number one tip to be successful?

Well, I think Pascal and Shrutna already covered a lot about the mindset and perseverance and everything. So I'm going to go to a very basic stuff in the program. Finish your assignments on time. If you delay, it's gonna be a mountain, you know, and then you just run around trying to finish up the assignments. Apply, join the program, and finishing your assignments on time, because one day you think it's gonna take 2 hours, but the other day you woke up and it's gonna take you 20 hours to finish the assignment. Assignments. So don't fool yourself to write down like TDB or NA or something in the, in the, you know, answer box, because they will write you an email if I going to find you and write you an email, finish this box. Because, you know, don't, don't fool yourself in because you started building your own company. So that's my, you know, very basic advice to finish the program successfully.

Yeah, very, very practical advice for success in the program, and it definitely translates over, I think, you know, to having that sort of mindset of not putting things off, you know, post-program. Hopefully you build some good habits by, yeah, completing things on time and sticking to it. And yeah, so great advice also, Mon. Thank you. I just want to say thank you to each of our panelists for being here and to audience for all your wonderful questions. This was a really, really great event. Everybody who's here live on the webinar, as long as you registered via the event on the FI website, then you'll get a replay of this in the next couple of days. But thank you again to each of our panelists, Mon, Srikanth, and Pascal, for joining and sharing your insights with founders today. It was wonderful to meet and hear from each of you.

Thank you very much, people. Best of luck in your businesses and your startups.

Awesome. All right. Yes. Thanks so much, everybody, for joining. Stay healthy, stay safe out there. Take care. Bye.

Take care.

Bye.