So I am in week 2 of the entrepreneurship program with BEC (Boston Entrepreneurship Center). It feels like I am doing the right thing for several reasons. First I am 'exposing' Pingwyn and talking about it to many new people, without trying to sell it. I've 'gotten out of the building' and I am getting a lot of encouragement to continue doing it. Then I am also dissecting the business plan - from defining the customer problem, to how the solution solves it, etc. It all happens in the awesome spaces and meeting rooms of the Cambridge Innovation Center.
Small changes can mean big improvements. Just the other day we had as a speaker Javier - a Babson MBA from the Dominican Republic, who is running two companies of his own. He had a very interesting reaction to Pingwyn's problem statement. His first suggestion was to remove the top 3 and just leave - opportunities for people in the same location to connect are lost all the time and businesses lack an automated system to manage employee location. For some reason however, Javier only commented on Pingwyn as a job-search tool. It is a clue that my pitch is still not refined enough to give a better overview of the product.
On Monday we had another very interesting speaker - Fady Saad - founder at ePowerhouse, who made some powerful analogies and offered compelling lessons: How companies are mostly challenged by managing complexities and those who fail - fail because of that. Management is mostly a Tempo-setter and systems are there to help manage these complexities. A no brainer, but I never thought about it this way. Hope I still remember Fady when the complexities come for Pingwyn.
There will be more to come after tomorrow and the top two take-aways so far are - 1. Get out of the building and 2. Make an app that people use. Simple, right?
