How to Build and Share Ideas with Potential Customers [Startup IdeaFest - Aug 2021]

Welcome, welcome, welcome. My name is Martin. If you are here for Idea Fest Redo, you wanted to attend last week, now you're here tonight, welcome. You are in the right spot. Welcome to Airmeet. There's still a few of us coming in. So while we wait for the whole room to fill up, I want to get to know each and every one of you. So do me a favor, ladies and gentlemen, Welcome, but also take a look at the chat. Head on over to chat, say hi. Eli, you're already doing the right thing. Get to know some of the people that you might be networking with, that you will be networking with after I give you all a little bit of ups and downs on why we're here and how to do IdeaFest appropriately. Kayushi, welcome. Welcome everybody. Tell us where you're coming from. We're a global organization. We have people from all over the world. It's beautiful to see Chicago in the house. I think I saw Italy here earlier. Yeah, more Chicago, right? São Paulo, Brazil. See, this is what I like to see. I love this. Another thing too, ladies and gentlemen, don't get too crazy with it, but I want to see you go crazy with it right now. You'll notice underneath me, there's a whole bunch of little options here. Go to that little second one on the right, that one, that little emoji, click it, select one, and just let some emojis pop up. There you go. There's a heart. Oh, see, this is beautiful. For those of you that are going to be watching the recording in the future, you can't see this, so you should probably come to the live event next time and get to know everybody that's here. So fantastic, everybody. Again, my name is Martin Martinez. Let's dive right in, okay? Because I'm not here just to talk. I'm here to show you what it means to articulate your idea and maybe turn this idea into a company. So I'm going to do some magic and we're going to get into the presentation for this afternoon. All right. Let's go. All right, everybody, I know you can see the screen. I know, some bells and whistles, but this is nice. Um, welcome to Idea Fest. My name is Martin Martinez. I serve as the entrepreneur in residence for the Founder Institute based in Palo Alto. I'm actually coming to you live from Austin, Texas, capital of the Lone Star State. Been here for about 16 years. I'm a long-time Texan, multi-generational. I've been with FI as the Executive Director for our Texas chapters since 2017. Just recently joined as EIR for HQ, and I'm really excited to be able to meet a lot of you global people all around the world and showing you why I love FI so much and how I've seen it fundamentally change founders' lives for the better. So let's dive in a little bit to what our agenda is for this event. Morning, evening, afternoon, wherever you all are coming from. Alright everybody, and again, if you can't stay the whole time, no worries, recording of the event will be made available to you with at least 48 hours after the fact. So let's jump right in, okay? Agenda for this fantastic event: I'm gonna give you roughly a 30-minute presentation. I've been working on it all day, I hope you like it, on the basic pinpoints of understanding customer problems, how to articulate your idea in a succinct in a very succinct manner, but also how do you validate this idea? So these are just basic step-by-step things that I like to do with every entrepreneur I get to meet, and I meet a lot of them. So hopefully I'll get to meet some of you in the feedback launch portion. That's where you get to put some of the knowledge I'm going to give you to practice. Okay, so if you check the email that got sent out earlier today and yesterday, we're dropping that link in the chat. Bit.ly/idea-fest. Check out that worksheet, don't dive in it too much, we'll talk about a little bit later. And also, if you want the best experience, you know, you can watch this on your phone, you can see me talk to you, but if you really want to start the networking later on after the presentation, it's best to do this on a laptop or like a PC using Firefox or Chrome. Airmeet's an amazing networking tool that we've been using all year to really try try to bring together the community during these interesting times where we all find ourselves virtual, but it does still have limitations. So bear with us on that. It is a great tool and we've met a lot of people through this tool and a lot of people have connected with each other. Last but not least, we wanna see your face. So when we do the networking in the feedback lounge, be camera ready, you know, get your camera on, start talking with those kinds of things, get prepared on that. But either way, let's get to the presentation. All right, you also give me some emojis if you're all ready for that. Cool, sweet. Ah, awesome, awesome, awesome. Let's dive right in, ladies and gentlemen. All right, I gotta give you the little rundown on that. This is the only slide about FI, really. Um, FI, for those of you who may not know, is the world's largest pre-seed accelerator program. We literally help founders just like you at the idea stage. Maybe you have a working prototype, but you still need to figure out how to build the business. Turn that idea, turn that product into an enduring company. Um, we've helped over— we've helped 5,000. This is just— this is new data too, just happened over this past— over the summer. We've crossed the threshold, 5,000 companies launched since 2009. Um, we also just crossed the $1 billion mark in venture capital raised for those companies. It's an amazing milestone. We're really excited about that. And collectively those companies have created over $30 billion in value. Really exciting. There's really not a program that spans the world as well as we do because we focus on you, the founder. We focus on the idea before anything else to make sure that you have everything you need to become not just the entrepreneur, but the founder that's going to change the world. It's going to hire hundreds of people and bring wealth to your community. That's why we're here, and that's why we do what we do. So how do we do that for you? How can you do that step by step here tonight? So we'll dive into this, but the biggest thing— and pleasure to see, and welcome. We'll see what we can do to get you a better link for IDFS. I think you need a dash for that, dash IDFS. But for the thing I notice mostly when I, when I run into founders who are struggling is that they're not focused. The worst thing you can do as an early-stage founder is to not be focused. And I know it's difficult. I'm a multiple, I'm a serial entrepreneur myself. I've started companies. I've had companies that failed, some that did okay. But the thing that killed us the most was that we tried to do too much too soon for everybody. Lack of focus is the worst thing that could possibly happen for you. As an entrepreneur when you're trying to get off the ground. And really it's the number one startup killer. You have two advantages, ladies and gentlemen, wherever you are out there, that is gonna help you succeed against the big players out in the world. You have speed and you have the ability to focus. When you use both of those things in conjunction, you can get ahead of the game, you can get ahead of the market and your competition before anybody else even knows what's going on. If you fall back and try and lack focus and try to do everything for everybody all the time, you won't get good at anything for anyone, okay? And so you have to start really early. I know it can be discouraging for some people that might have big visions, but I'm gonna show you why it's important for the very beginning, because as you build on that, as you learn from these simplistic focus problems, you can build into something that changes the world. So what does that mean, Martin, you ask? What does that mean? Here's the framework right here. Take notes, but also just pay attention. Again, you're gonna hit this video in a couple of days. Being focused means a singular rule of one. We're just gonna go right down the line, okay? You're gonna solve one problem for one customer with one product using one killer feature in one revenue stream. I'm gonna repeat that for you, okay? One problem, one customer, one product, one feature with one way to make money. Okay. Now this can be a lot. It can be daunting though. It seems easy, but for today, for this exercise, for Idea Fest today, we're gonna focus on the first 3 characteristics of that. Okay. Because without understanding those first 3 subsets of the framework, you're not gonna get to step 4 and you're certainly not gonna get to step 5. Okay. So this is a funny way to illustrate what not to do. Picnic tents. I don't know who decided to come up with this idea, but obviously it doesn't really work well. But again, it's illustrative to the point that I'm trying to get at to you all today. And I hope you get something out of this. People don't buy products, they buy solutions to problems. Okay? That's what they do. Now credit whoever thought this might be an interesting idea, but it may have just came in passing at a Burning Man event or at a music festival, but it didn't really serve anybody. It sounded cool and it sounded like it might be practical, but to me it seems like the saddest picnic anyone could ever have. There's much more problems out there that are ready to be solved otherwise. Picnic baskets do work just fine. So how do you figure that out? How do you understand a problem that would yield a great solution? And it starts by talking to people. It starts by understanding, is this really something that a lot of people have an issue to? The biggest folly, I run into a lot of big follies, but one of the bigger ones is that people that are very far down the line, they haven't spoken to a lot of found— or a lot of customers or potential partners or investors. Is exactly that, you know, they're trying to build a solution for a problem that doesn't exist, or at least doesn't exist at scale. So again, I'll repeat that: people don't buy products, they buy solutions to problems. So let's break down those first 3 things I was telling about: one problem, one customer, one solution. So for those of you that might already big into startup books, Eric Ries' Lean Startup method defines customer development as this: it's a process which you're finding a problem worth solving and you learn as much as you possibly can to build the perfect solution. So how do you do that? It starts with some questions and some validation things. We're going to get a little bit further down into tactical step-by-step ways to understand customer development with some baseline questions and approaches, But let's think a little bit deeper on that. It starts with the problem statement. Now, many of you, I'm sure all of you, appreciate the scientific method as entrepreneurs. So this is the same thing, and you start to see the parallels. You're experimenting, you're hypothesizing, then you're testing these things over and over and over again until that hypothesis turns into some kind of law, which is that solution. Thank you for the emojis. Appreciate that. So start with this. What is that baseline belief that you believe is a problem? Again, looking back at a picnic pants guy, did they believe that festivalgoers or people like to go outside don't know how to have a picnic without a table for pants? See, again, doesn't make any sense. So ask yourself, what is that? Here's a couple of examples. One at the consumer side. One on the enterprise side that we can build off of. For example, first-time mothers might have difficulty building supply or buying supplies that they need for their children before they run out. Being a mother is a two-time, it's a full-time job times 10. Sounds like, sounds reasonable, but we still need to test that out. Same goes for the next example. We have the belief that HR executives at large companies have too many applications to sort through on an average day. Sounds reasonable, but how do we put this to use? All right, so now that's the first thing I want you all— and again, you're at Idea Fest, so you have at least one idea you want to share. Define that when we get into the feedback lounge. Start very simple. Who is the audience and what is the problem that you believe happens? Steps 1 and 2, right? So as we do that, What is that customer? All right, you might be thinking of a product for pets, but the, the dog isn't your customer. It's many cases it's going to be the owner, obviously, uh, but the customer is the exact person, that exact, that immediate person that's going to make that decision and pay for whatever that product that solves the problem that you're offering. Okay, some cases, as you see right here, it might be the person that influences the purchase decision. More often you see this in more business or enterprise-level tools where an end user might be an employee, but the hiring manager or the direct reporting manager is the one that actually makes the decision on whether or not to buy that product. So really understand that. You can't just have blanket audiences that are very generic and expect us to really think that this is worthwhile. I'll show you a couple examples right now. What's a great customer example? What's a bad one? Shows you right here. Here are some bad definitions right on the left. Okay, women. That's such a— just half of the world. You can't just say, oh, this product is for the entire, you know, half of the world women demographic. No, think of it a lot more refined. Single women aged 22 to 34 in the United States that practice yoga and work full-time. A lot more definitive. It's a lot more precise. You can actually start painting the journey in their head of what their day, what a day in their life looks like, what the problems they might face, and where does your solution fall into that, that specific audience. Now let's talk again about that example we had earlier with small businesses. Small businesses in general doesn't mean anything. Could be a mom-and-pop coffee shop, could be a law firm. You got to be a little bit more precise. And who within that audience, within that business is the actual purchaser of the product. And in this case, from that example I showed you earlier, it's gonna be HR middle managers for that category manager, whoever that is at software service companies within the US with over 50 employees. So when I see, when I get to talk to brilliant founders like yourself day in, day out, when I see a good customer definition, it's going to be that. They know very precisely, at least they think they do. So far, that's our hypothesis of what the audience is, what they do, who they are. One customer, right? One customer. Let's keep moving. And again, I know, I know this is like, I know this can be frustrating for many of you. You have a cloud of ideas, you see the big tunnel, you see the end of the tunnel, you see the opportunity at hand, but it's very hard to articulate because you want it to be for everybody all the time, everywhere. But even the big things that we use every day, They all started with a singular focus as well. Looking at Katarina Lake, Katarina Lake, founder of Stitch Fix, you see right there. Katarina just wanted a better way to get personalized styling without having to go to the mall and dealing with hundreds and hundreds of options. Stitch Fix now, it's a billion-dollar company, publicly traded, and does a whole bunch of other things. But for her, she had a very focused demographic, women like herself in her age group that also shared the same problem. Jeff Bezos, guy basically runs half the world at this point, richest man on the planet, had a singular focus because he realized online already had a certain subset of people that were already online that read books and noticed that the book market was severely underrepresented from an e-commerce standpoint. Only sold books. As crazy as it sounds for maybe some of you, Amazon only sold books for a while, and that's all they did. He may have had this vision, a very long-term vision of being the whole— being the online realtor of the world online, but they started with books. Mark Zuckerberg, again, great, great example there, um, built just a directory to help find and identify people that were in his dorm. It wasn't even the whole school. It was just a dorm. Now, just like Amazon, it's eating the world, doing everything for everybody in many cases. Sometimes those products are good, sometimes those products are bad, but they all came with a singular focus. Last but not least, a Texas-based company, Yeti. Maybe some of you know Yeti or own a cooler of them. Same thing. They wanted a cooler that didn't just last a summer, that didn't break down. They wanted a cooler that could keep their ice cold, they could keep the fish they caught preserved till they got back to shore and it's something they could use and own forever. One cooler for the rest of the world, for the rest of their lives. And they've built a suite of products with tumblers and bags and brand and all these amazing things. But all of these founders that you see right here on this slide, ladies and gentlemen, all started with one particular niche, with one problem, one product, and then expanded. 'Cause once they knew that customer, once they fell in love with that singular problem, that community they built in that niche expanded. Okay, give me some love, give me some love in there on the, on the emojis. Again, for those of you watching in the future, hi, but you should come to the Airmeet events. They're a lot more fun, they're a lot more fun. Let's keep going, ladies and gentlemen. That third thing, one product. Again, it's hard enough to create one product. And a good one at that. So focus, oh, I got a typo in there, apologies. One product for one customer that solves a problem that they are willing to pay to solve. It's not just one thing building something that's great, it solves an issue, but you gotta make sure that that person's gonna give you money for it. Maybe not just once, but maybe over and over and over again. That's the Holy Grail right there. If I can give you money every month for this product or service, and you're onto something good, you're onto something great. So, you know, I get to talk to a lot of really smart people and a lot of these people come, you know, for the first time articulating these ideas and so I'm gonna give you all a couple things that I've heard that just immediately throw some red flags up because it tells me that you haven't really thought about a lot of things I just told you. Here are some rookie phrases I hear all the time. Okay. Family of products, a suite of products, all-in-one solution, lifestyle brand. Again, Yeti wasn't a lifestyle brand. Stitch Fix wasn't a lifestyle brand. They solved one problem for one customer with one product, and then they evolved into something like that. Suite of products. Again, try to do one thing and do one thing well. When you come out saying you want to do everything for everybody all the time, you're not going to do anything well for anybody with anything you have. I'm gonna hold that so you can really think about that. Okay. Um, so avoid these phrases, avoid them as best as you can, uh, because it shows people like myself that work in Founder Institute, try to turn ideas into companies and help entrepreneurs do that. Tells investors who might want to fuel those companies for their growth so they can go up into the right, tells us a little bit about how little you know about that problem and how little you might have really put effort into understanding it and the customer that's willing to buy that product. Okay, let's keep moving, ladies and gentlemen. One product, again, validate this, validate this before you build anything. I've run into so many founders who again have been building something, uh, building a product for, for a problem that doesn't exist, or they think, they think exists, but once they start to validate, they've already spent so much money. Uh, I've made this mistake myself. Where we've had to rebuild the product multiple times because it wasn't the thing that we wanted. It was the thing that we thought we wanted for the audience that we thought existed, and it wasn't. It wasn't. So how do you validate? This is where it's going to start getting tactical, and this is where I really want you to start putting some of this to practice when you go out into the feedback lounge here coming up very soon. All right, let's start by validating with some examples, just because with what we're doing, just as examples, These are some of the companies that have come out of Founder Institute. So some anecdotes of by following what I'm about to show you have yielded in terms of results from thousands, tens of thousands of people on waiting lists waiting for the product to go live, from getting pre-orders of monthly recurring revenue for a product that's yet to get shipped because they validated the market and the need, raising angel funding and recruiting top-tier talent, people that are willing to quit their high-paying jobs at tech companies to follow you into the unknown because you've done all this work, you have fallen in love with this problem and this customer, and you believe that this solution is going to solve that problem for that customer. So how do we get there without building a single line of code? I'm going to show you a few ways to do it. Okay, first one up, customer interviews. This is the simplest thing you can do, and I recommend every single one of you do this today, uh, in the feedback launch. Okay, notice in these questions that I have right here, not a single one has anything to do with your product. It has everything to do with the problem, everything to do with the problem. So when you go out into the wild, go and talk to, and when you talk to people, try not to talk as much as they do. Try to follow a 90/10 rule. They speak 90% of the time, you speak 10% of the time, okay, because you wanna understand everything about their life. In terms of their day, how does it tie in with the problem that you're trying to solve? Is this a big enough problem to solve? So ask them, what's the hardest part about whatever that is? Let's think of the founder of Stitch Fix. What's the hardest thing about finding new clothes to wear and buy? Why is that hard? Lots of options. There's a lot of places. There's things that might not fit me. I just don't have recommendations. Have you looked for a solution? Why? Why not? Oh, I don't know if there's anything out there. Understand the market. What you're doing is you're understanding the experience of the customer that you think is going to pay for your product. You're also understanding the market. What are other things that are out there that you may have not, you may not be aware of yet? Are there other websites or applications that might solve this problem but they don't do it as well? Maybe, you know, maybe you're too early to market and there is nothing out there, but there's a lot of other things technically that you have to figure out or have to get to as a market for this product to actually be viable? And why, if they do have the solutions out there, why do they suck? Why do they hate them? Why are they still looking for a solution that really does solve this problem? In the event world, I'm an event producer by trade, I'm an event host, it's one of my skills, I hope you see that, but you know, there's a whole ton of virtual event tools out there, most of them suck. Airmeet's pretty good and we use it, but it still has some issues, of course, of course, but it's great at what it does in terms of networking and being able to provide content in a virtual setting for people all around the world. And at the last but not least is, are you willing to pay for this? And if you can start getting more granular, how much? Is it a one-time purchase? Is it monthly? Is it something that you're really— is it really, am I willing to give you $5 a month, $10 a month, $100 outright to solve this problem? Problem. Get to that point right at the end. But notice, out of everything, out of all these questions, as I mentioned, not a single thing has anything to do with the product you're trying to build because you have yet to build it. You got to figure out, is this problem worth solving first? Let's keep moving. Uh, here's an example. I'm going to break it down a couple ways you can actually go about validating using these assumptions and, and building on top of it. First one is the concierge en Give me some emojis if you heard about that. Tell me more in the chat if you're working on a concierge MVP. But the concierge MVP is usually the one you hear all the time. It's very manual. You're like a hamster spinning a wheel behind the scenes and nobody can see it. You're behind the curtain building this manually. ZeroCater is a great example that came out of our Silicon Valley chapter a number of years ago, back when, you know, ordering and delivery of of restaurant quality food was a real big deal. We'll have another example right after this, but ZeroCater did this beautifully as they were coming to the program. Their assumption was, as they came from a small, medium-sized tech business, upwards of 100 employees, and noticed that their front of office managers were having a very difficult time ordering every day for their engineering and executive teams stuff at scale. And, and it was just a really, really bad problem calling up restaurants, putting in orders, getting everybody's, you know, dietary things, all that stuff. So what did they do? They built a spreadsheet out. They started with just a Google spreadsheet before anything else, and they called up the two segments of the market that they wanted to talk to: office managers that fit the same profile as they did, again, certain amount of size. And they asked them some questions like, hey, if we could provide you bulk orders in a very easy way straight to your office without you— with you only having to click a few things, would that be something you'd be interested in trying out? When they got enough people to say yes, they entered all this stuff into a spreadsheet, and then they started calling restaurants and said, hey, if I can bring you X amount of bulk orders, how much of a discount could you provide me? And they started keeping an inventory of all of these restaurants and their capabilities and how much the pricing would be. So they came back to those office managers and said, hey, we can give you all of this. And for the office manager, it looked as simple as clicking this, clicking this restaurant, clicking the amount of food, and then paying. But on the backend, it was just the founders working a bunch of spreadsheets, really, really, really, really, making phone calls, and then actually delivering the orders to those offices themselves. You can't scale this. Let me repeat, you cannot scale this. but it's a great way to validate that this is something that's worth building. At some point you will be able to raise money when you can prove that there is demand and that there are two sides of this coin from, from this kind of, uh, sharing kind of marketplace style product that they're building. That can get you to the point where you can go raise money and then automate this, because at the end of the day, the end user is not going to notice that, but you will. And that's the work that you have to put in early on. Concierge, I repeat, that's what most people think about when they want to really validate a product. Okay, so the next one, this one's a little bit different, but it leads into the next, the subsequent validation technique on this. It's the piecemeal MVP. So you're not necessarily doing everything manual. You're actually pulling third-party off-the-shelf tools and products and building on top of that. Sprig, again, to keep on the food delivery service ideas that we had. Sprig was actually the second company founded by one of our most famous companies that have come out of the FI programs. Udemy, one of the founders, bygone, started Sprig. So again, this was a bit— it's kind of a big, big thing happening for a number of summers about 4 or 5 years ago where you'd order these single or 2-person meal kits and you'd be able to cook a very high-quality dish at home. Without having to do all the research and go to the farmer's market and get all these high-quality ingredients. Very, very good stuff. So with Sprig and the piecemeal MVP, how'd they do it? They focused strictly in the general downtown San Francisco area where they're all based and effectively used Eventbrite as their ticketing platform. So for every dinner that they had, there was like VIP, super VIP, this kind of thing. They would just send their early adopters to an Eventbrite page. and you'd pay just using the Eventbrite ticketing tool for that VIP ticket for as these meal kits were coming out. And then they were manually kind of sorting this, sorting all that stuff, and then again similarly doing the delivery on their own to each of these. But on top of that, how do they map out logistics? They literally used a Settlers of Catan board and mapped out how they were gonna arrange delivery and drop-off in each zone, treating downtown San Francisco as settlers of Catán. Really funny story on it. Like many of the companies that, that, that boomed in that time for food delivery services, they lasted for a few years and then, and then kind of fizzled out, but raised a whole bunch of money in the process just to get Sprig off the ground. I actually used Sprig when they expanded in Austin. I think it was like 2018, 2019. Really cool idea, but that's the piecemeal MVP. Off-the-shelf products, no-code solutions. So that leads into the next piece, no-code. You can build a ton of things, it's so easy to validate using no-code tools. Take a note, take a screenshot, whatever, you're gonna get this stuff later, but from basic app building to websites, you can build a website on Squarespace or WordPress or Wix in a matter of an hour. You don't need to buy, you don't need to spend thousands of dollars on a developer. Same goes for e-commerce databases, and you can use Zapier to connect all these things out. There's a ton of things that you can pull off the shelf to validate this product before you actually spend your life savings trying to build it custom, before you remortgage your house and your children's college tuition. Don't do that. Validate. Try to do it as cheaply as possible. So that when you are ready, when you have proven the case, you can go out there and raise money and bring customers in and do it and scale it the right way, but don't do it beforehand. Don't build something that no one wants until you talk to them, okay? I'm gonna stress it, but last but not least, the audience one. I love this too. This is kind of a new thing. So leverage an audience. Maybe many of you are really big domain experts in the space that this idea that you're nurturing comes from. Maybe you're very active in online groups. Maybe you already have a community that you've been nurturing. So you can use, leverage that. Like if you have a Mailchimp email list or if you're very active on Meetup, Founder Institute actually drives a lot of Meetup traffic, believe it or not. We have a very, very dedicated group of entrepreneurs throughout the world that use, that leverage Meetup. Helps us, you know, reach out to new communities too and teach them about what FI can really do. Instagram, big, big communities on there. Facebook groups, big, big communities on there. And you notice there's a couple of examples. So I'm gonna give you some examples from some of the companies that have come out of the Texas programs over the past few years that have leveraged this successfully. First one's RGGG, also known as Radical Girl Gang. And Radical Girl Gang's an e-commerce platform for women-owned brands and creatives to sell their wares. Mostly focused right now to Gen Z consumers, but they actually started as a singular t-shirt line, just a t-shirt line, and cultivated a community on Instagram over 14,000 followers just with a t-shirt brand. They didn't have these ambitions yet for a big e-commerce platform building on, on top of these creatives, but they leveraged that community of 14,000 followers. And as they started to really visualize and validate that there's a whole community of women-owned creators and people willing to buy those creatives' goods, they, they could leverage that community that they had nurtured from Instagram and convert them into paying customers, but also brands that are inevitably featured on the Radical Girl Gang website. So take a look at them. They started as a t-shirt, and now they, now they're getting month-over-month meteoric growth. They're about to hit $1 million in revenue this year, and they just launched at the end of 2019. So this could be you. This could be you. but you gotta do the work first, ladies and gentlemen. Don't think it's all gonna come all at once. Don't think that overnight, you know, Elon Musk, Mark Cuban, they're all gonna be your best friends. You gotta put in that work. It's not like movies. It's not like movies. Second example just came out of our fall program from 2020, Step Outside. So Step Outside has been leveraging Facebook groups for a very long time themselves. The founder and the whole premise of the company is they curate excursions, outdoor excursions for team building exercises and for medium-sized companies. That for now, especially in this time and age where we're not in the office anymore, we're not getting outside as often and we're not seeing face-to-face our coworkers as much. It's a really interesting idea. The founder's already an avid outdoorsman, goes hiking, climbs, takes people on, again, on these paid excursions. And noticed that there was not, there was a big deficit in the market going for it. He's also been an avid member of the outdoors community on Meetup using Facebook groups. He sits on a nonprofit board for activities for underprivileged communities to go outside. So he's already very much part of his community on that end, and he's now becoming a thought leader in the space as well. So if you are a part of these communities, and if you're not, leverage them. If you're not a part of them yet, join them. Find out where they are, 'cause not only that, not only can you establish yourself as a thought leader in the space, you're gonna have a well of potential paying customers and the customers that you need to talk to and give those validating questions that I showed you earlier about their problems, their pains, all the things that they try that suck, that don't solve the problem that you are trying to figure out is a big one. Leverage those communities, okay, build that audience first. A lot of successful founders that I've seen start this way too. Give it up, give it up in the chat, give it up with the emojis, y'all. I'm having fun, I hope you all are too. We're almost done, we're almost done, we're almost done. Then we're gonna get to y'all. So please, I beg you, I beg you guys, every single one of you, don't build something that nobody wants. Don't hide this idea close, so close to the vest that you're too scared to share it Do not spend your children's tuition or remortgage your house and hire a development team without talking to at least 100 people on whether or not this is going to be something that they're going to want or pay for. I've seen many a founder fail that way and fail dramatically that way. I can't stress this enough. The whole point of IDFS is to show you what not to do, and this is certainly what not to do. So last but not least, all right, tactics are done, heading into the feedback lounge. Now we're gonna get into the next bit, and I'm gonna disappear here in a little bit, but let's go through some ground rules to talk about what the interactive portion on Airmeet's gonna look like, okay? Give me some thumbs ups with the emojis if you're down with that, okay? Give me that, come on, there it is. Y'all are a great audience, can't wait to see y'all again. So again, ground rules. Ground rules, ladies and gentlemen. As I mentioned at the beginning, and if you are just joining us again, you are welcome to Airmeet. We are at Idea Fest, we're about to get into the feedback lounge portion. So for the best optimum experience, please be using a desktop or a tablet, laptop, whatever. That's how you're gonna be able to interact with everybody. You need a camera, you need a mic, all that stuff. And come with intentions to learn, okay? I know for many of you, and this is about kind of breaking down a little bit of that ego so that you can get feedback to build something that matters. And if you argue, you're just limiting yourself the amount of feedback you're actually gonna receive. That's the last thing, you don't wanna get defensive on this. This person might be the best person to talk to and you wanna listen to why they're giving you this feedback, good or bad. This person might not be the best person to talk to, but you wanna understand what's not your customer as well. And if it's not that person, understand why it's not. Listen, come in to learn, come in to build, and you're gonna learn a lot because of it, but don't argue. As soon as you start arguing, you get defensive, you immediately lose. And not just for the room, just for yourself, because you're not spending that time again, trying to build and improve, okay? 90/10 rule, let them speak for 90% of the time, you speak for 10. Okay, flip that. You're listening 90% of the time, you're talking for 10. And of course, don't be a jerk. Come on, we have tons of moderation tools. We can pull these people out very quickly if you report them, but just don't be a jerk. You know, nobody— you don't want to be that person that knows everything about everything. You cut people off before they have a chance to finish. You already have the answers to all of it. And then of course, you know, why are you here? Why are you here if you already have all the answers? Don't be a jerk and don't be mean to people either. Maybe the idea isn't great, but don't rip them apart. Don't tell them they're an awful person. Give them some honest feedback as to maybe why this is not a good idea, but don't be a jerk. There are ways to give critical feedback without you coming off as just somebody who's mean. And again, life's too short to be mean. It only shortens your life anyway. Be mindful of your time. You can get so enthusiastic and energetic about why you're doing what you're doing, that you can get— you can lose sense of time. But try to hold each other accountable in the room, whichever room that you sit at. Any of these tables you're about to sit at, stick to about 5 minutes. I trust you all to self-regulate. We're all adults here, uh, but please be mindful of your time, uh, try to get to the point quickly so that you have more time receiving feedback. Okay, so 30 seconds to a minute, spend the rest, 4 and a half minutes to 4 minutes, getting that feedback. You you so desperately need. And then on last thing too, don't just come in, get your, like, pitch your idea, leave, you know, sit there, listen, because I tell you this more often than not, I host group office hours for our founders. And I tell them the same thing, sit there and take notes. Because in many times, you're gonna find even with completely different ideas that the feedback that that person might be receiving is gonna be very applicable to whatever it is you're doing. You're gonna learn a lot more about from watching other people give and receive feedback than necessarily you just sitting there getting feedback. So be mindful of that. Listen to the advice and the perspectives that are coming from the other people in the room for other ideas. You will learn a lot just by watching, okay? And try to juggle, spend about 5 minutes, 3 yourself, but maybe about half an hour. We're going to be here all night. Room's going to be open. We're not going to kick anybody out. We've had people here for hours and hours and hours. Um, our awesome producer Felicia behind the scenes tells me stories where she comes back 12 hours later and there's still 15 people in the room. Like, guys, get some rest. But that's why we're here. Um, everything else, anything else here is a rookie mistake. Okay, so give me some love with the emojis if this is cool, if y'all are cool with those rules. I'm cool with you. Awesome. All right, y'all, we're almost there. So as I mentioned, head over that Bitly, Idea Dash Fest, if you haven't already. Get that worksheet out. It's gonna be really helpful. It's gonna be really, really helpful. And when you use those 5 minutes, try to follow a similar rubric. Now, you know, here's some refreshers on just examples and things I just discussed. State that problem that you're hypothesizing needs to be solved. What do you believe? What is the defined audience? Don't just say small businesses, don't just say dogs. Be very, try to be as specific as possible as you can in this setting, okay, with a specific problem, right? Then briefly talk about the solution once you start getting some validation on whether or not this is a problem or not. And then ask questions to the audience, questions that have nothing to do with your product, just about why is this a problem? Is this a real problem for you? Are there other solutions out there that help you solve this problem? If not, why? If so, why? Do you believe that what I'm trying to do might actually be able to solve? Maybe, maybe not. And if so, then why? And then last but not least, is this something you think would actually pay for? Is this a problem so tough that I'm willing to give you money to help me solve? Why? Why not? Okay. I think you're gonna get a lot of stuff out of here too. You may catch me bouncing it from table to table. You never know. You never know, I ain't got nothing else to do tonight. So Airmeet, as I mentioned, maybe for some of you, you love Airmeet, you've been to many Founder Institute events on Airmeet. For those of you who may be here for the very first time, Airmeet's pretty fun, it's a pretty fun tool. So once we close this main room out, I'm gonna disappear, this is all, and then you're gonna see what happens on the top, that top image right here. You're gonna see a bunch of virtual tables. and also again, you can toggle over here, toggle over to people. You can see all 43 people that are in the room right now. You can sort them, you can see where they're coming from, you can connect with them online with their profiles if they haven't connected, you can direct message them if you want to, you wanna have one-on-one conversation. You can see them sitting down at those tables, each of those tables, and each of those tables have a specific theme to them, and you can actually put, you know, messages and all that fun stuff. And message each other there. But it's— that's where you're going to have the bulk of the conversations. You can also, right at the very top, do one-on-one chats. They last about 6-7 minutes, but allows you, if you want to just have more one-on-one, if you don't want to deal with all of the people all at once just yet, you can do the one-on-one. So hit the speed networking tab, there'll be somebody else on the other end that you'll get automatically matched with, and then you all can spend, you know, the— that time kind of going back and forth and seeing, you know, if this is something that you all want continue the conversation with them. If it's— and if there's somebody that you really resonate with, either at the virtual tables or in the one-on-ones or in the chat right now, you can hover over on that right side on the people section and connect with them afterwards. Again, if y'all— if y'all having fun, drop your LinkedIn right now, get ahead of it. Okay. But otherwise, that's Ermi. And again, and I just want you all to really know this last and final thing, because this is also a huge, huge hurdle for many an entrepreneur. No one's going to steal your idea, especially in this setting, ladies and gentlemen, and I'll tell you why. Because starting a company is one of the hardest things you can do. If you today tell me an idea that I think is amazing, do you really believe I'm going to spend the next 60 hours a week for the next 3 to 5 years just to copy it? Really? Do you think that? Is it that much of a compelling idea that I'm going to quit everything I have, I'm going to quit all my work at Founder Institute as EIR, and I'm going to spend the rest of my life building a product that you told me here in this room? Highly unlikely. Highly unlikely. I used to tell people over cocktails, because you normally would see this at like a happy hour, but no one's going to steal your idea. It's all about execution. And honestly, if it is an idea that can be stolen that easily, it's probably not a good idea at all. No offense, but it probably is. So no one's gonna steal your idea here. Be honest, be open. That's the only way you're gonna grow. It's the only way you're gonna improve and get better. That's the only way this idea is actually gonna turn into something that people are gonna pay for. Okay, ladies and gentlemen, I see the emojis coming up. I think this is resonating with a lot of you, but otherwise, That's it for me. I want you all to have fun. Again, my name is Martin Martinez. I'm the entrepreneur resident here for FI. You can call me Martin if that's hard to say. But if this resonated with you, you know, please learn more about FI. Head on over to fi.co/over. We'll tell you a little bit more about what the program entails. Applications are open, not just for the programs in Texas right now. If you do find yourself in the Lone Star State and want to turn this into reality. But we have programs all around the world. I think, I think we've had, I don't know, like 70 active chapters right now globally that are recruiting. So head on over to fi.co. Maybe there's a city that's active near you and there's a community near you just like us right here that want to help you turn this idea into reality. And you can apply for free right there. Head on over to fi.co/join/ideafest. Get that application. All of our fall programs, again, as you see on the website, are are open right now. We'll be starting all within the next couple months. So we'd love to have you in the family, as I like to call it. But otherwise, that's it for me, ladies and gentlemen. It's been a joy being able to share a little bit of knowledge that I've accrued over the last few years with all of you. I hope it's been valuable. I hope it's been useful. And I hope wherever it is you take this idea this evening, tomorrow, next year, turns into reality. And, uh, no give up on that either. So from all of us here at the Founders Institute, I wanna thank you again for spending some time this evening, morning, afternoon, wherever you're at. I'm looking forward to having you again for a future event. You'll feel free to stick around as we close this out and have a seat at the table. Maybe you'll catch me in the one-on-one rooms, who knows? I'll be bouncing around for a minute. But for all of you out there, please be safe, please be well, take care of each other. It's a crazy world these days. Without that, we're nothing. So take care of yourself. We'll see y'all again.