xPollinator

Q&A Session with Mentors

Tony Gauda

CTO, Modern Products
Bachelors in Comp. Sci., University of Missouri-Saint Louis

A serial entrepreneur, founder of 5 startups and YCombinator Alumni. He founded ThinAir, Bitcasa, Grail Networks, PrivSystems and Nexxware LLC.
Modern Products designs and builds next generation hardware and software products for brands, startups, enterprises, and government agencies. They specialize in cybersecurity, AI/ML, big data applications, appliances, consumer robotics, AR/mixed reality, and blockchain powered products.

Date: Friday, October 22, 2021

Eric Migicovsky

Group Partner, YC
Co-Founder, Beeper
Bachelors in Systems Design Engineering, University of Waterloo

He founded Pebble Technology (YC W11), which was acquired by Fitbit in 2016.
While studying engineering at the University of Waterloo in 2008, Eric began building smartwatches with a group of friends.
In April 2012, Eric and his team launched Pebble on Kickstarter, where it became the most successful crowdfunded project in Kickstarter’s history.
Pebble sold over 2,000,000 watches.

Q & A with Eric Migicovsky

1. How to find users?
Below is the summary of our issue:
Common points amongst our users:
They are 1-2% of college-going students.
The need for our product already existed in them.
There wasn’t any such product existing in the market to fulfill this need.
How did we find our existing users?
We sent messages to every student in the college.
Students who were interested followed up with us.
We took our product to another college. We got the same result but we weren't able to target the whole college.

also check subreddits for area, whatsapp/telegram groups, try in person posters!

There are more users out there but we have no way to reach them short of sending the message to the entire college.

why not send a message to whole college? or maybe there are some clubs/teams/campus groups

This is our predicament. Are there ways to reach our users without targeting the entire college? If so, can you suggest some of them?

2. How to choose the right mentor for our startup?

For a mentor I would pick someone who was the CEO and founder of a startup, started company <2-3 years ago so they have very recent experienece

3. Is requesting mentorship different from pitching to an investor or YC?

yes

4. How does one know if they made a bad MVP or a mistake in finding the right users for their MVP?

trust your gut instincts

5. Should students be encouraged to do hardware startups despite the huge amount of resources required to do it?

yes! hardware is awesome.

6. How would you go about finding the enormous resources required for a hardware startup (for a student)?

https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/19/what-working-on-pebble-taught-me-about-building-hardware/

Debo Olaosebikan

Founder & CTO, Gigster (a YC company)
Master of Science, Cornell University

He took a leave from his Ph. D. in Physics at Cornell University to start Gigster. Gigster helps companies develop software applications with the speed of a startup, coupled with the quality and expertise of the most innovative global talent. Gigster reached a valuation of $1 billion in 2017. Gigster was acquired by Ionic Partners in 2021.