 Hello, I am Heath Nockand, Director of iCorps programs at VentureWell, former business faculty member, researcher and serial entrepreneur. I will be your moderator for today's global innovation through science and technology or just TechConnect conversation on your startup priorities, the five most important steps for your venture. I would like to welcome you, the viewers from around the world who have joined us today to discuss one of the most important topics to any entrepreneur. What are those most important first steps an entrepreneur should take when starting a venture? I and the expert panel here today will share our experience and advice and we look forward to answering your questions today live. The just TechConnects are led by the US Department of State and implemented by VentureWell. Just empowers young innovators throughout networking, skill building, mentoring and access to financing through its various programs. Today we are delighted to host a live web chat connecting you with experts on financing startups. Since its inception, just TechConnects have reached tens of thousands of viewers from more than 79 countries around the globe and discuss topics important to science and technology entrepreneurs. You can learn more about our programs and partners at our website www.justnetwork.org. Please use the hashtag just TechConnect when tweeting about the event today. We are also collecting your questions to ask our panelists. Please start sending us questions now and throughout the program by typing in the chat space beside the video or via Twitter. I would especially like to thank those of you hosting viewing groups and encourage you to submit your questions and live photos early for your chance to be featured during the program. Now let me introduce our panel of experts. First, welcome to Anna Maria Cunha, founder and CEO of Equita Accelerator. Anna Maria is a serial entrepreneur and has been involved in technology enterprise creation and consulting for over 15 years. Since 2000, Anna Maria has worked at and with Silicon Valley startups and organizations such as IBM, the Wall Street Journal and the United Nations. She is a global ambassador for CleanTech Open and a mentor in residence at George Washington University. Next, please help me welcome Jim Chung, associate vice president for innovation and entrepreneurship at the George Washington University. He has spent more than 20 years in the venture capital and corporate private equity markets. He currently works internationally in helping small businesses around the globe to accelerate and connect internationally. Finally, welcome to Keith Smart, co-founder and CEO of Physiclo, a fitness technology company based in New York City. Keith Boots trapped Physiclo from the ground up and participated in the VentureWell E-teams grant program before conducting a very successful crowdfunding campaign and then Angel Investment. His company is expanding into global markets as we speak. Thank you all for joining us today for this exciting conversation. As we wait for your questions to come in, I'd like to kick off the discussion by asking the first question of our panelists. Could each of you share with us the most important steps entrepreneurs should take in their initial stage of their startups? Ana Maria, what are your thoughts on this? I think it's very important to know what is your market. Look at what are the pain points that your potential customer have and how can you solve that effectively while you're making money for your company and saving money for your customer. I think that's an extremely important step. Instead of having a business model developed, just have a flowchart in front of you which actually explained to you, to yourself, what are the basic steps that you need to do to be successful and fulfill the customer's need and also make money in the same time. Jim, what do you believe is the number one priority for starting entrepreneurs? That's a great answer from Ana Maria. What are your thoughts on this? Well, me to go a little bit further along the line that Ana Maria started. I think that one step that a lot of, especially first time entrepreneurs don't do as early as they should is really connect to the customers. Especially if you're an entrepreneur who's building something from your own experience, the tendency is to think that you understand who the customer is because you want to use the product yourself. But you have to have the realization that there are so many different types of customers out there that you may not be the prototypical customer. You want to go out there and not just connect with the customers, but also try to figure out what does the customer segmentation look like and try to find those early adopters that may be the ones who are first going to adopt your idea, your product, your service and will actively give you feedback so that you're able to improve your business model. It's all about early stage, connecting to your customers and making sure that you understand really what the needs are of your customers. Great. Keith, you're right in the middle of this yourself with your own startup. Based on what Ana Maria and Jim have said, would you agree and what are your steps for the global audience? Yeah, no, I completely agree with Ana Maria and Jim. How we approached it is we went out and spoke to the customers very early. We wanted to make sure that there was a need for what we were building, that we weren't operating in our own bubble and that just showing them early designs, early prototypes and then getting their feedback so they could be our early evangelists was really important because then we could iterate based off of the feedback we got from those early customers. But it's really critical before you go too far down a path to speak to the customers and recognize that there is a market there because sometimes people will create things and it's just too small of a market to really be worth your energy. So we kind of like wanted to take a step back, get outside of the office and talk to the customers to see whether they really wanted what we were creating. I'm hearing a common theme of understanding the market and customer discovery as an important first step. Thank you Ana Maria, Keith and Jim for these excellent insights. Now, this has prompted quite a few questions from our viewers. Let's take some questions from our online audience. And our first question from our online viewer is, our topic today focuses on the positive steps to take to advance a startup. However, I'm sure there are common pitfalls for nascent entrepreneurs as well. What do you believe entrepreneurs should be aware of and how should they avoid potential obstacles? I mean, I don't know who wants to take this first. That's a big question from our viewer because there are a lot of obstacles in startups but maybe just around, you know, we'll start with go down the line again and see where we land. Ana Maria? First of all, you have to understand that 75 percent of the startups are failing. And that's a good thing because then you can redo it. But this is just keeping mind, you know, you don't have to be successful with your very first mission and vision or you have to pivot a little bit and maybe your first idea of what you came up with. It's not going to be eventually the startup but you actually going to take it and be successful. The other thing is that don't get a perfect enemy of the good. And we are talking about when you have a product or services, it should be good enough to take it out to the market, show it to customer and beta test. Early on, very early on, don't wait at home and don't take your time to develop this to perfection. The most important thing is speed. Whenever you're ready, just go and do it. Get your first people stressed, get the feedback and reiterate everything, you know, based on the feedback that you get from your customers. That would be mine. So that's great about the velocity of the startup and keeping going. Jim, anything about obstacles that people should avoid? So, I don't know about obstacles but in terms of pitfalls that people tend to fall into when they're starting out their companies, I think there's really two that I've seen most often, maybe three. One is, because I work mostly with science and technology entrepreneurs, is that there's the tendency to fall in love with your technology and fall in love with your idea and to be inflexible in terms of whether or not, as Ana Maria was saying, to be able to pivot to something when you find out that you may be wrong with your initial idea. So, you know, trying to avoid the pitfall of falling in love with your original idea. Second thing is that most entrepreneurs tend to try to raise money too early and when they raise money too early you get stuck in that inflexible route because you've got investors who you've told you're going to take a certain path and then it gives you less degrees of freedom and there's also a lot of other pitfalls with raising money too fast in terms of, you know, often it's just too early to raise money. You need to have that ability to understand really what you're building makes sense. Got it. And Keith, I mean any tips for about pitfalls, things you wish you would have avoided or things, just tips for the audience? Yeah, I think one of the things that I've seen in is it's important to have a really strong team. Team of advisors, team, the teammates you're working with day to day because you're going to be working on this all the time. So making sure that you kind of can be honest with each other about like your strengths and weaknesses and as well as having an advisory team that can take a step back and pull you out of the weeds and offer that 20,000 foot view of, you know, they've been there before they've kind of went down that path that you might not necessarily see what's around the corner because you're just so knee deep in building the product or service. So I think it's really important to have a complementary team of advisors as well as have a really honest conversation with your teammates so that you're always on the same page. All right, outstanding. So one of our next questions is from our viewing group at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo and they ask, how does an entrepreneur know if he or she is making progress with their startup? What benchmark could be helpful in determining if the entrepreneur is making progress? So I'm going to invert order a little bit. Keith, do you want to take a first step? What do you think progress is for a startup? Well, it really depends if you're making hardware or software but a lot of it is going to come on down to like how your potential customers will react and to like what you're building. You know, typically what we like to do is get that minimum viable product out and then you will measure their feedback of like iterating based off of it. So it's hard but you want to ultimately have people like wanting to buy more of what you're offering. So like if you see that there's more people that are eager to try out what you're doing, you know you're going down the right path. Okay, Jim, as far as sort of benchmarks, I mean you've done a lot of investment so where are benchmarks that you would look for in an entrepreneur just to see that they're actually making progress and launching their venture? Sure, I mean the main thing is revenue. I mean if you can show that you are getting people to open up their wallets and pay for your products or services that's really the ultimate benchmark. So if you're pre-revenue it's all about what kind of steps has the entrepreneur made to get to that point where they're selling. So that's about you know getting those reference customers to sign up for you know pilots or trials it's about being able to to basically to move closer towards a sale. Right, and Ana Maria? It's just are you making money? Do you have more customers? You know you're always sold out you cannot make enough. That's progress so that would be a good feedback for you. Would you guys all agree that you know having revenue is the easiest thing to count for progress for a startup from an investment point? Sure, I mean most venture capital investors which I think most startups think about are not even going to invest in you unless you have some revenue. The friends and family and some ancient investors will invest in you pre-revenue but that's pretty rare. Okay, so thank you very much all of you. So another online viewer asks does the priority of steps depend at all on whether your startup is focused on software versus hardware. So Jim do you want to fill this one first? Sure, so there is a big difference between software and hardware. In a lot of cases it's much tougher to do hardware because you have higher capital costs in doing your startup. It's harder to do a minimum viable product to try to get it out there because you have those manufacturing costs which is why you see a lot more startup activity in software and IT and internet. When you're doing a minimum viable product in those areas you can focus in on a low fidelity type minimum viable product where you're just doing landing pages and doing a little bit of A.B. testing to see what kinds of features are necessary in a nimble way that you can't do with hardware. Right and Maria? Well I think hardware is a really tough one you need to have some serious self-funding or getting a grant to be able to do your minimum viable product. I think software is an easier way to go you're able to bootstrap, you're able to actually achieve much more in a less amount of time and less amount of money and a smaller team. So I think hardware is a really tough one you should look for accelerators incubators grants large corporations who actually happy to support your idea. Okay great and now Keith you actually have a physical product so what are you what is your opinion on this? So hardware is hard. It's but it kind of like for us like our first key step it was finding the right team right teammates partners and organizations that can help with grants and people with the skill sets to help us offer free advice around what we need to do to get that minimum viable product out there because there's a lot of pitfalls that you can make with hardware because manufacturing costs are so high and you so what we we spent a lot of time on was recruiting teammates and advisors that had done hardware startups that had that experience of explaining the timeline of how long it will take because unlike software where someone could kind of throw up a as Jim mentioned like a low fidelity product maybe over a weekend of coding a hackathon or something with hardware you would spend a couple of months a few months just getting that prototype up and running and it might not be as proven as some software startups can get something out the door so so what I'm hearing is the steps are generally the same get customer feedback and buy in early but it's much harder than the trajectory is much longer in the physical versus the the soft space if you will mm-hmm any uh so it's harder but I wouldn't say that I don't want to discourage the hardware folks from doing it I mean my two biggest investments were actually hardware products so it's I but I've done a lot more software all right fair point great so one from Nicaragua would like to know how a company that has only recently been created and is unknown can find investors and this is a question we always hear from the global community so you you did this yourself you know 20 something years ago I didn't say that but several years ago so what find your first customer your first customer going to give you the money what you need to start organically growing and I think you should not look for an investor in very early stage because first of all you're losing so much of your company or giving up too much and secondly most investors not even going to entertain the idea to put money into a half baked company you have to prove yourself so I would say if you have customers those are your first investors very good so Jim many comments on that I agree with Anna Maria but if you have reached the stage where you really do need to raise money it's about going out there networking making yourself known trying to find those connectors in the community lawyers accountants other businessmen previous entrepreneurs taking advantage of programs like GIST there's another international group called startup grind that has a lot of mentors and entrepreneurs in their group so all these kinds of different networking opportunities are the way to go outstanding thank you and Keith I know we talked about this before what are you know how'd you go about finding investors yeah so we we went through a process of applying for a lot of grants such as like with venture well and participating in certain accelerators and those really helped us get introduced to investors as well as mentors and then just kind of like expanding our network as Jim was mentioning just getting out there and talking to people and and then having we didn't want to take investment too early so we wanted to basically focus on building the product getting those early customer sales and then it's a it's an easier conversation to have when you can show a track record that we are able to execute versus it being an idea so we spent a lot more time focusing on executing a product and getting it out there but we definitely took advantage of a lot of the organizations that want to help startups get off the ground to that point where you could get a minimum viable product out there okay outstanding and just a follow-up on that Jim I know we talked about this previously so one of the statements you have made was if you can get revenue investors will usually find you right that's right so would any comment about this this idea that Keith said you know get your revenue put your head down and I think that investors will look for you I mean most entrepreneurs will lament the fact that there's not enough investors around but believe me when you're starting to hum along the investors will find you because they'll read about you they'll hear about you from your customers and they'll become interested and they'll be the ones calling you outstanding okay great so we have a follow-up question on funding Jason Jason in Guangzhou, China would like to ask Keith specifically a question when is the right time for a product to launch a crowdfunding campaign I know you just went through this so what is the right time this is often a big question yeah so crowdfunding campaigns it depends for certain typically you see hardware companies do crowdfunding campaigns because then you could get those early early feedback from your customers and early sales for us we wanted to launch when we had our prototype already complete so for the goal with our crowdfunding campaign was to fund our production some companies will do a crowdfunding campaign to get to a prototype stage but I think that's a little harder especially if you're looking to raise money afterwards because then you still have to prove that customers want it once you get to that prototype and stage because you still have a few more steps to do but so typically what I the most successful crowdfunding campaigns that we see that is that those that are ready to get to production so they've already created a prototype they've already gotten that initial feedback from customers about whether there's a demand for it and then they also have those earlier vandalists who typically like to support crowdfunding campaigns and once you're ready to go to production it really will help you have a successful crowdfunding campaign so what I'm hearing is when you're ready to actually get something in the hands of a customer sort of the best time from your experience in doing that any comments from Anna Maria on the crowdfunding topic just one comment what you probably agree with it's expensive and hard work to actually put together your campaign it takes a lot of time you have to have a team you have to produce a video it's just a lot of time and I don't know how much time you guys spent on that this time you can spend on developing your product go after the customers you know it really depends where your company at but just calculate that it's a great and appealing idea to have a crowd sourcing campaign but it is a lot of work and a lot of time yeah I think most entrepreneurs also think about crowdfunding really as a raising money but I think actually the more valuable thing about crowdfunding is the validation that you get to see whether or not there is something that customers are willing to pay for before it's even built and that's I think the most valuable thing about crowdfunding so our next question is from Jorge from Honduras who would like to know how you all maintained your faith in your company and your discipline in the face of setbacks especially financial losses in the early days and Maria smiling so maybe we'll go with Keith first and then we'll come back around Keith again it's about like having like that support of advisors and teammates where it's hard you know we touched on a little bit of crowdfunding is a lot of work and like just getting a product up and running takes a lot of work and it costs a lot of money so having a team or advisors that have been down that road before will help you weather the tough days because they can kind of reassure you that sunny days are around the corner you just kind of have to persevere and have faith in what you're doing being an entrepreneur by nature you're taking a big risk because most businesses will fail within the first couple of years so you have to believe in yourself that you know what you're doing is the right thing and the only way you can believe that is if you get that early customer feedback going out there doing customer discovery to learn that people really want what you're working on I'm standing in Maria and then I have a follow-on for Jim on this topic you know you have to believe in your mission and your product and you have to know you have to have that validation this is gonna succeed and when you have thank God for credit cards but when you have $80,000 on a credit card and you're thinking this is crazy I don't know why I'm doing it oh my god I just should have a stable job and leave and quit then you have to have a partner in crime either your significant other or a co-founder who believe in you and and help you through this really deep dark times dark times so I'm hearing that you know there's this perseverance and having people along this journey with you is very important now Jim you've invested several companies who I'm sure have seen the dark days of this how did you sort of keep them going? well in some of cases you don't keep them going right so most of the investments I've made have not panned out and unfortunately I've had a few that have done really well and even those that have done really well there are those dark days so as an investor I mean we really have to kind of do a little bit of triage and think about well you know when is the right time to shut something down or to keep it going so it's just keeping a level head and being honest with yourself and not falling in love with your technology and being able to pivot and adjust as necessary right so believing in the mission is one thing but going counter to marketing information is a different thing right I mean you know if the evidence is showing that there's not a market for what you're doing at some point you have to realize that it's not going to work out so alright so our next question is from Shulia who is watching with the Baku American Center's viewing group and she has a two-part question so do you think that the nature of startup culture has changed that's the first part and then would you say that the startup market has been globalized so we'll go with the first question first so do you think the nature of startup culture has changed I think yes dramatically changed the last I think there's been two big shifts one big shift is that startup culture has changed because it's become a lot easier to do startups in terms of expenses and costs so the internet for example it's a lot cheaper to launch an internet company now than it was 10 years ago and then it was easier to do an internet company than it was a software company 10 years ago and then etc right right so it's getting cheaper and that's changed the dynamics of the culture a second thing I think that's been a big change in the startup culture is this idea of the lean startup lean startup has done a lot to kind of democratize the entrepreneurship culture in the past if you were an entrepreneur you really had to have those kinds of connections with the old boy network and you had to have some kind of connection with the government or something like that but nowadays really with these new methodologies around the lean startup anybody can start investigating whether or not there is a way to launch a company and get that feedback so I think it has changed quite a bit all right great Anna Maria I think social media is a huge supporter of having more startup around us and also open sources you can use so many open sources you don't have to pay for the data you don't have to pay for a lot of things and you can do it you know early on by yourself without having any investment having just an idea easy to validate it's just easy to you know oh let's just test this landing page is it gonna work do we have any traction and I think you can do it without having any money you know the global connection via social media I think it's fantastic you are exposed to new ideas you are exposed to a new community and that helps you to be more productive and innovative great now Keith so I'm gonna sort of shift this a little bit the startup culture that you were a part of as you sort of were growing your venture and working with other startups at the same time did that strike you in any ways being productive or different than you expected yeah I think the thing that I found really beneficial and was a surprise is how helpful other startups are when you're going through your business regardless if it's in the same vertical as you or not because you know there's just so many things you have to work on and when you're a small lean team having like people willing to help out like we're giving feedback on your landing pages or like providing like just opportunities to like do different things through social media to promote your business or just being early testers of like prototypes those those are things that we found really helpful and then just leveraging their resources like in terms of legal services accounting services because you when you have a startup culture where people are very supportive it helps everyone grow because everyone is able to like just kind of like open their network up and I found that really beneficial for us Outstanding and I think to your point what I'm hearing is that the you know working with other startups along the way that are sharing your journey can be a very helpful thing and there's this culture that has sort of enhanced the sharing and competition if you will between startups even if they're working in the same space That's right Okay great so Jim I'm going to target this next part of this question to you is would you say that startup market has been globalized? Well I wouldn't say it's completely been globalized but it's definitely moving in that direction and there's a lot of evidence for that when you look at the success of countries like Israel or the programs in Chile you can see that they're taking a very explicit international approach one of the programs that we work with with the Korean government for example is where they're sending their teams of entrepreneurs to the United States and going through our training programs here in DC so that they're learning how to connect with customers in the United States because they've realized that they have to do startups that are globalized from the beginning so in that respect I think that those kinds of programs are very important and I'm also reminded of some of the I actually went to a boot camp for GIST in Bangladesh and I was really struck by some of the startups there that were taking you know very advanced technologies from the from the United States and other areas and applying them to local problems that I thought was just really creative and very interesting things that someone from outside the country would never have thought of even though they were the experts in whatever telecom communications they didn't know what the local problems are so that connection between the developed world and the developing world I thought is something that's very is burgeoning and exciting right and the and the program you speak of where you're actually bringing companies and offering them a home in a place to work in a new market globally is definitely of interest and a resource to many of our viewers I'm sure so Anna Maria any comments in the global culture of startups yeah I think it's interesting it's much more global than it was before and I think one of the things that I would like to add for the previous question is that incubators accelerators shared co-working spaces really opened up this secretive I'm working on my mission not going to show it to anyone people are more collaborative and getting feedback early on and I think it's it's supporting everyone's idea I think having outsourcing some of the things that you need to do in your company to another country because the experts are there it's much more in the in the mind of people who are working in startups now than 10 15 years ago and outsourcing in a way when you find the right expert for your company or product and services and uh so Keith before we move to the next question I know your company's been sort of thinking globally from day one and that's something you know that's important you know for everyone to be thinking about so you're just a brief word about what you're doing globally for your company how you guys are thinking about leveraging the global community for moving along yeah sure so we actually our goods are manufactured in China and we have customers from all around the world thanks to crowdfunding so because of um we ran a successful crowdfunding campaign we were discovered in places in Europe South America and Africa and we've shipped our products all over the world and it's great because we also get a lot of inbound leads for people that are interested in being a distributor in their local markets because of they see the application of our product so we we're constantly thinking about how do we strategically expand globally because the world is a much smaller place than it was a decade ago due to the internet we can easily communicate with anyone around the world and and then we can ship pretty much anywhere in the world so we're always in terms of our website we're always thinking about how do we make sure the copy language is easy enough for anyone to digest from around the world we want to make sure people are able to like just appreciate what we're doing and we we're constantly thinking about that Outstanding so it looks like many viewers are asking all of you to speak a little bit more about customers and clients so MC does car asks what is the most effective strategy to succeed in targeting your clients and I think we probably want to talk about what's the difference between the customer and client or is there one and then get into this so any any comment on do you guys view customer and client as sort of the same thing I guess I don't I don't know what the difference would would be maybe client gives the impression that it may be someone who's you're spending more time with so if that's the case then if a client is someone who's your earliest your first customer the the point is to just understand everything about your customer what their needs are what are the things that they want to be able to what they need to do their job better those are all the kinds of things that you have to understand about your client means spending a day with them means you know putting one of your staff members in their their office to understand what they're doing whatever it takes they understand sort of their needs yep and Maria ongoing dialogue it is a dialogue but you have to have that constant feedback but we are saying from the beginning you have to have the feedback from them and you have to listen so many times I talk to start-ups who are not listening to the customer feedback you have to implement immediately what your customer are saying to you how you can make the product better for them it's not you it's for them so just let it go and make those those changes and listen to the customer before I move on to Keith on this topic what the things you said sort of struck me is that oftentimes it's really easy for entrepreneurs to only hear the good stuff and not listen to the honest the real pain points the customer might be talking about that's right would you have anything to say about whether the you know the customer in that ongoing dialogue you mentioned Jim and Maria in that ongoing dialogue when they say oh that's a great idea and then but here's all the problems with it anything to say about being honest about what you're hearing and really discovering the day you know day in the life of I think it's you know should be taken out from this conversation I know I have a PhD or a master's degree in this but the clients who actually using it so even though you have a better knowledge a deeper knowledge maybe in practice they have a much better understanding of your products so let them guide you and obviously is not one person so you have to have a beta tester group who giving you that feedback one of our company did they are software company they have a Google beta testing group who are giving them constant feedback and this is amazing in development it is very helpful to make that that software the best for your audience and so thank you very much so Keith you're you know obviously you talked a lot about crowdfunding as sort of an early way to target clients anything else that you would add besides just the crowdfunding aspect yeah I I think what Anna Marie said is spot on because you might think the customers want one thing but then once you deliver it and you start getting that feedback it's up to you to respond and build off of their feedback so and that's something we discovered with crowdfunding is because of we were able to get it in the hands of those early supporters we heard heard their feedback around like what they liked and they didn't like and removing our ego and pride around like no this is what it should be we synthesized what they said and like you know what let's take a step back there they are right let's let's build off of this feedback to make an even better product for version two so your customer is gonna be the ones that make or break your business because ultimately they're gonna recommend you to their friends and they're and you want them to have a positive experience so if they know that you're listening to them and you're digesting their feedback and building off of it they'll they're willing to support you more going forward outstanding so we have a great following question from Alim Halami in Pristina Kosovo Alim asks working in an environment where things are still done in a culturally traditional way meaning there is any focus on analytics or market research how can one approach the market and get the most accurate feedback from customers I think how do you talk to customers is the is the fundamental question here any magic there Jem, you want to talk about that? Can you give me that? You know whatever way that you can get in touch with their customers it's whether you're if you're in a more conservative culturally restricted community you can still use your connections there use whatever resources you have available to you in the United States we can do everything from your alumni network at your college LinkedIn your community service organizations professional organizations in more culturally culturally different areas it may be family ties I don't know exactly it depends on the country but whatever resources you have available get those introductions connections to the customers Okay, Anna Maria And I think when you have a traditional culture you have to use your traditional approach so if if it means you have a cup of tea or a cup of coffee in person with your potential customer do that you know it's not going to be a connection or a communication via internet you have to sit down with them and listen and ask questions and don't ask targeted questions just try to know the person first make that connection have that trust and then you can get the honest feedback and the honest opinion and really the the desire to help you so I think in a traditional setting you have to follow this traditional cultural engagement what you have in your culture being Hungarian I would do business differently in Hungary than how I do it in Palo Alto, California and I do differently business in Washington, DC so even in a country you have like this micro cultures what you have to follow and follow the tradition follow the etiquette what you need to do I think this is important to recognize it right and one of the things we're going to go to our next question in a moment but one of the things I've often seen in some of the just boot camps is there's a fear of trying to break out of that cultural norm and you know but I've constantly been amazed that if people really think about it to your point Jim and they really try to use whatever networks they can they can while abiding to cultural traditions still make new connections and reach out to new people and get that market inside that they need to get to be successful right one more point I want to make is that the entrepreneurs within the communities need to also band together and help each other this was also to your earlier point and that can be extremely powerful so it's you know maybe not just thinking about the existing cultural norms but also banding together and trying to create new ways of reaching out and actually changing the norms and changing the norms exactly right so Siwan from Iraq is launching a company offering a service in this case accounting that's new in this country so do you have any recommendations on how to stimulate demand for service that is not well understood in the local market in this case this would be educating consumers on something they don't know they need yet I guess so any comments about that Keith? yeah people didn't know they needed your your products that's right I think in the early days you almost have to offer it for free so like just initially just so they can get that see that there's benefit and that's what we had to do initially as well where we had to give free products out just in advance of doing our crowdfunding campaign we wanted to like see if some you can really build like that early support early benefit like early vandalists and in his case with accounting there's always businesses that need bookkeeping services they might not value it initially but if he use those as just as a for potential testimonials and they can and in loot and then in exchange for that he could promote them as his early customers I think that would be the first thing to do is just and he also gains experience right so so just to build on this because often I hear give it to them for free to get them to try it first did you just give it to anyone free or did you try and sort of target who you gave it out to that's a that's a valid point yeah so we were very targeted in terms of who we gave it because we wanted to touch people that would essentially speak about it to people that had a larger network so you want to like if you're going to give it to for someone for free you want to make sure that they have a broad enough network where when they speak to other people they're willing to pay for it and that's how we approached it Jim or Anna Maria we're going to try and get to the next question but either one of you want to respond to the accounting question sure just show the value you know what is your value add you have to explain that it's the customer education so you even eventually if you're very new and they have never used this you have to educate them why is it important for them and I think most importantly how they can save money with it I guess I have another point an alternative approach is that you should really try to find out you know maybe why why is it not in wide use and then try to figure out well they don't seem to need it I mean they haven't used it in the form that I'm thinking about it but what are the things that I can solve for them that may be related get that niche need that they have right now get in there and then start start understanding you know how this could really help them address the problems that they do have today okay got standing thank you all so Fatou from M.C. Miseru asks what's the best strategy for a startup to be competitive with already well-known companies in the same sector I mean you know I know I've often heard well I'm working on a smartphone thing that can never compete with Apple saying no offense to Apple but as a startup you got to have a good reason that you want to go head to head with an established competitor I see a lot of startups where they come out and they say yeah I can do a you know a marginal improvement on what the existing product is today and that makes me nervous for a startup because there's usually not enough to to really compete so unless you've got something that can really be you know 10 times better than what the incumbent is you may want to rethink your strategy right and any comment on that just what is your differentiator from the existing product you do not want to replicate existing things if you don't have a very significant differentiator great and so this is an important part point to bring up Jim if you're just you know 1% better incrementally better is that enough to allow you know some large industry group to acquire you know deal with the switching costs it's going to take to go to some new unproven solutions so that's a great point to make sure you're really set up to be successful so Embassy Wagadogo notes that a startup can have several levels such as the idea stage funding growth etc their question is at what point do entrepreneurs know they need to move to the next level you know I think we've sort of talked around this before but anybody want to respond to that how do you let's go with the easy stage because this is a lot of stages let's say going from say idea stage to funding stage because we talked earlier about don't take investment too early and Keith you mentioned a point about well we didn't want our investment yet so when do you know it's sort of the right time to go from idea to funding I guess you it's based off of like customers like if you feel like you've hit that wall for us where we were kind of like in order to scale up properly the only way we could scale up properly would be to like start thinking about different funding opportunities because you know when you're in the idea stage the next step is to get into like a prototyping stage a minimum viable product that we kind of touched on so you want to like move move from idea to like that minimum viable product and then once you've gotten that minimum viable product and you see that there's real demand for it and you're trying to scale that minimum viable product up to another level and maybe the funding will help you by bringing on more teammates or marketing but it's when you're kind of like bumping up against the ceiling of okay we can't we can only go so far now is when that's when you'll know when it's time to look at funding as another potential solution so what I'm hearing is basically you'll know you need funding when you can't do anything else without it does that sound right to both of you? you will know you will know when you'll actually have to get to the next level so Jim you know just to sort of tie this around from a funding perspective you know the do investors look at startups when people say give me a million dollars you're probably asking what are you going to use it for? right so you know funding funding a prototype or funding an idea is a tough sell for for most entrepreneurs my old firms I mean we were really early stage I mean probably the earliest stage out there so maybe I'm a bit of an exception but most investors will not fund just the customer validation or customer discovery stage most of them will only start funding once you've identified some customers and some concrete reasons why you need that money to actually secure those customers and deliver the product okay great so I think we have time for one more question today roughly maybe two more we'll see but Igor from Macedonia's Newman's Business Accelerator has a question about team members in a startup and he asks what kind of team dynamics and startup culture do investors look for as they decide whether or not to fund that company so there's two parts here you know if you can briefly Keith talk about how you assembled your team and how you guys have sort of stayed together and then either Annemarie or Jim you could talk about whenever you guys look at a startup you know do you what what indicates a disaster team versus a good team and yeah so I'll just in terms of our team what we ended up doing was we looked for complimentary skill sets so that we weren't all going to be working on the same thing at once and how we found those team members was through networking with other startups and networking with people in our community what LinkedIn was also really beneficial but just speaking to people of will we still see that there's a hole in our skill set right here do you know of anyone that would be that could help plug us and then then once you find those candidates you really have to spend time with them to see whether you can like sip aside them for 12 to 15 hours a day because if you're going to be working on a startup it's a major time commitment and it's a major life commitment so if you're just not going to gel properly together it'll come across when the times get tough and when you have those investor meetings and they can see that you're talking over each other you're not like receptive to the other person's idea so you want to make sure that you have complimentary skill sets as well as that you can work well together that's really important is your and before we go to Jim and Anna Maria is your startup team the same as it was when you started it isn't so when we first started we were most we had a team of five medical students and myself since then we've shifted where we went at four out of the five returned to med school and the fifth he stayed on and we brought on a guy for marketing so we kind of have three of us doing three different things at once and we're now looking to add more team members but we're being very judicious and who we bring on because we just don't want to like change the culture too dramatically so we want to like take our time and finding that right fit great so Jim and Anna Maria any comments on team dynamics? I'm really looking for teams that have a growth mindset as opposed to a fixed mindset and what I what I mean by that is I want people who are able to take adversity are able to look at learn lessons and are very coachable as opposed to people who just I know what's right and that's the way it's going to be because the one thing that's very certain about startups is that there's going to be uncertainty and there's going to be failures and there's going to be problems so you want somebody who you want a team that can run with an idea but I can also pivot accordingly okay great Anna Maria and Justin add on most of the investors going to invest in your team the idea is important but the team is important as well and I know for sure you have to have a team where you have the synergy you're able to work together it's almost like a marriage you know you're gonna see them forever day and night weekends doesn't matter for a couple of years and you have to have that personal connection as well not just the work connection that's not a large multinational corporation when you four p.m. put down on your computer laptop go home this person gonna call you text you email you show up at your house you work together on the weekends so you have to have that synergy you know we're great raised a great point it's a common joke is how many hours of the day does an entrepreneur work and basically all of them so we have a question from Twitter Andrew Zia and Nicaragua ask how do you best use technology to grow your business and that's a broad question I know so I think some of the common things we've heard is using social media and testing pages to test you know for customer feedback is a great way to start what else maybe on the open source topic you know trying to really leverage those tools any comments well I mean best use of technology to grow your business is find all the technologies which are sophisticated free and you can use it you know it's just use everything but you can I think it's extremely important to see and know what is out there what are those open sources what are those commonly used open sources by others and you know the validation from them because so many times when you learn something new and sometimes you have to learn new things throughout this process you know you have a better tool or not so good tool you have to find that you know instead of wasting your time trying different things go to social media validate that you know just just find the right tools so it looks like we do have time for one last question now we have a lot of viewers who tell us they come from countries where it may be more challenging to promote an idea or startup because there isn't a well-developed entrepreneurial ecosystem particularly with regard to a lack of investors to your point earlier Jim I may from Namibia ask is there in these conditions where there may be not be investors can entrepreneurs find investors in other countries like the U.S. and if so how there are some investors in the United States who specialize in foreign countries and investing in there some venture capital firms have even set up professional offices overseas but as a strategy I would not try to bank on getting foreign investment necessarily from these channels I know that it's tough in a lot of communities to try to raise money to the extent possible I mean bootstrapping is something that you need to consider networking you can network to those international investors but it's pretty rare to the extent that you can try to build a critical mass in your community and support each other as entrepreneurs that's when you may start to attract foreign investment but you've got to try to work on creating that ecosystem in order to provide a stable enough environment for foreign investors to become interested great any other comments on this question I would just add one thing where you can also find some of your early customers who will be your investors through sales through using technology so like there are a lot of platforms like you can run social media contests or you can crowdfunding campaigns there's a lot of opportunities where you can find those early international customers without necessarily going through investment and again to your point earlier Jim the networking events that happen all over the world through a variety of programming are a way to sort of get to that eventually so as we finish today what one takeaway would you want all our audience to have about becoming a part of the entrepreneurial community what's the one thing you want to tell our audience who wants to take this first well I guess I'll do it because I did it don't be afraid of failing and I know coming from a culture where failure was not an option it is a really hard thing to do and but it is you know most of the times I had a couple of business many of them failed and you have to get over it and when you're an entrepreneur you're going to do your next business and that's going to succeed so you have the mindset of succeeding but if you fail just don't give up do it again very good Jim I would say along those lines you know don't be afraid to ask for help too don't be afraid to use the resources that are available and also to give back to people who are asking you for help because you need to build up that critical mass in your communities I'll stand and Keith I would just building on for that find mentors find people that have gone through the path before entrepreneurship is a lot of peaks and valleys so if you can find mentors people are willing to help so just always be receptive to getting feedback from mentors all right great and I'm going to throw one in myself I think being creative about finding resources to help you is the best start best advice I would give so I'm afraid we're out of time thank you so much to our wonderful panelists and everyone viewing today also want to give a special thanks to the host of the viewing groups around the globe we have with us embassies from Baku Baghdad Cairo Dakar Kingston USAID and Macedonia Managua Miseru Mexico City Ouagadougou Pristina and Tunis hosting at an American corner we also want to thank local organizations for hosting viewing parties that's Protagon Innovation Center in Albania in Colombia Colsensius and EFIT Newman's Business Accelerator in Macedonia the Polytechnic University of Malawi Unitec Universidad Technologica and Mexico City UTech Ventures in Lima Hitec Park in Baku UTech Jamaica and finally in South Africa we have the Guiculcha in Pretoria the African Leadership Academy and the Africa Leadership Development Institute please join us for our next Tech Connect live chat on May 10th 2016 and before we go I would like to add that just as more than just Tech Connects just also run startup boot camps which empower young science and technology innovators and entrepreneurs and advancing their skill sets through on the ground training delivered by many top US mentors and in-country partners our next startup boot camps are scheduled for Johannesburg South Africa from April 12th through 15th and Dakar Senegal from April 20th through 22nd I also want to remind everyone that our second just guru web chat part of our new online programming will be held on March 8th you can learn more about applying for the boot camps watching the guru series and discovering more just programs at www.justnetwork.org we will now end our session with some closing remarks by Connie Jumas director in the secretary's office of global partnerships I hope you found our insights today useful and wish you all the best of luck my name is Connie Jumas and I'm a director of partnerships in the secretary's office of global partnerships here at the department of state I hope that you've enjoyed this just to connect on the most important steps in starting your venture the secretary's office of global partnerships focuses on creative collaboration between the US department of state and the private sector including civil society not-for-profit institutions and universities through partnerships with the private sector formed around shared goals and values we aim to strengthen and deepen diplomacy and development globally as well as support entrepreneurship initiatives that bolster you the next generation of innovators and entrepreneurs we also work closely with our just colleagues to build programs that can help to foster creative and innovative entrepreneurial ecosystems in this vein let me highlight two of our key initiatives the Lions Africa partnership and the Tigers at Mekong partnership first the office of global partnerships co-founded Lions Africa a public-private partnership started to support Africa's economic emergence Lions Africa seeks to enhance and deepen the startup innovation ecosystems of targeted fast-growing African economies promote and facilitate new investments and foster innovative business models demo Africa is one of our signature programs under Lions Africa each year for the past four years demo Africa is an event and platform where the most innovative companies from across Africa launch their products and announce to Africa and the world what they've developed most importantly these are creative homegrown solutions to local regional and sometimes global problems to date demo Africa has launched over 150 amazing startups perhaps we'll see some of you launched at demo in the future the second initiative I'd like to highlight is our Tigers at Mekong partnership this platform is designed to enhance and deepen the startup and innovation ecosystems of Mekong economies by supporting young innovators and entrepreneurs in the high tech sector last summer Tigers at Mekong hosted a Mekong ecosystem summit in Vietnam that brought together entrepreneurs policymakers investors educators and private sector supporters from across five Southeast Asian countries together these ecosystem actors explored their shared ambitions and proposed over 30 cross-border activities to build linkages and spur collaboration three top teams were awarded $20,000 in seed funding to make these programs a reality these are just a couple examples of some of the partnerships that the secretary's office of global partnership supports we recognize that you are the catalysts for addressing some of our biggest challenges local and global whether it's climate change infectious diseases transportation or food security we all benefit from the growth and empowerment of young innovators and entrepreneurs worldwide we know that your passion dedication and creativity can be our greatest assets in finding solutions so we support you the innovator and entrepreneur in moving your startups from ideas to reality if you haven't done so already I encourage you to learn more about and join the GIST community by going to the GIST network website at gistnetwork.org good luck as you continue your entrepreneurial journey and we look forward to seeing you at the next GIST Tech Connect