Mentor Dan Martell flew into Vancouver today for a short visit with the GrowLab cohorts before he headed over to his Lean Crossroad event (also featuring our own Boris Wertz). Dan’s the co-founder of Clarity.fm a startup that enables anyone to get paid for their advice. Dan’s been an advocate for staying lean as you build businesses, and shared a ton of insight with our founders.
The format today was that of an informal chat, allowing founders to share war stories and pick Dan’s brain on the challenges they face.
Founder Feedback & Takeaways
Paul (Skyscrpr) - The biggest take away for me was all the little protip things. The little bits of information that you only get from people that have actually been in the room, doing exactly the same thing you do. Dan is a killer entrepreneur that has had lots of experiences, both go od and bad. Great mentor session.
Nick (Wantering) – My favourite take-away was a simple, but clever, fundraising trick: Get one intro from a prominent entrepreneur, then forward that quote as an example when asking for other introductions. The social signal of the first name improves the close rate of all the others.
Kenny (BlueBat)- Martell kindly shared his hard earned entrepreneurial wisdom with the rest of us. The first big take away is that we must validate customers early, and this means early paying customers, not just users. Once we get the paying customer down, then it’s a matter of being repeatable and scaling.
Jon (Foodee) – My top takeaways: His insights on how to raise money , how to validate your hypothesis, why to prove out the biggest risk first, and how to ensure your first customers pay you.
A huge thanks to Dan for stopping by; always great to see him in Vancouver!
