Guest Post: 3 Top Tips from Unrival

Each startup will be writing a guest blog to share the highs and lows that come with being an early stage startup. This is your chance to get a sneaky peek into what it is like to be part of Collider and even grab a chunk of wisdom on the way. This week's is written by Hue Painter, the COO from unrival.

Riding the wave

As first-time startup founders, it’s the emotional journey that makes it memorable for us at unrival - Super highs, and of course those painful lows, that we often experience in the space of a week, sometimes even within one day (or hour!).

But it’s riding this wave that keeps us going. The biggest challenge we’ve found, is staying focused, when everything around us can seem to be in a constant state of chaos.

We’ve found that as a tech startup, you are a beacon for everyone wanting to give you advice on what you “should do” which can become overwhelming (advice overload).

So we’ve found surrounding ourselves with a small, trusted group of coaches and mentors, helps to keep us somewhat sane and on track. This guidance has hugely helped us to filter the noise. You could almost call it personal counselling.

But and there always is - with serious reflection over the journey so far, 3 key lessons/pieces of wisdom that we have learnt so far - LISTEN NOT PITCH, THINK BIG and FEAR.

LISTENING NOT PITCHING

The Collider process so far has provided an intense number of opportunities for us to meet, and engage very senior people from brands that we never would have had the chance of meeting – if not for the programme.

The immediate thought on meeting these people is “OMG, I have to tell them everything about what we do, and show them how great it is”. The lesson learnt here is, that we have two ears for a reason, as doing 2x more listening than talking - leads to a better result for all these meetings. Internally we now call this “don’t show up and throw up” – sorry if this isn’t a lovely visual.

THINK BIG

Definitely has been hard for us to digest, as you can have such tunnel vision and be so purely focused on solving the problem for one area that you miss the opportunity of widening the scope of your proposition. This is where talking to lots of people and listening can really broaden your horizon and actually uncover new concepts that you may not have thought of.

FEAR

It’s good, but make sure it doesn't stop you from taking risks. In the business we’re all in, we have to make tough decisions. The best piece of advice we’ve received on this is:

“Whatever you decide, as long as you can look back and for whatever reasons for that chosen path, you can be happy and confident in your choice at that time.”

The worst thing you can do is not make a decision because of the fear of failure.

So here we are in the middle of the Collider programme, and we can honestly say, we are excited by the next challenges that are most definitely going to be thrown our way. Bring it on!!!

Guest Post from Moment.Us

Last week one of our startups, Moment.Us, held a private testing session at  TechHub Manchester. Fueled by pizza, music, and the chance to play with new technology, the testers scrutinised every aspect of the app and wrote all their thoughts down. These types of events are crucial to a startups growth, and so it's always worthwhile to reflect back on how it went, what was learnt, and what to do next time. Over to Ioana Craescu, the Marketing & Comms Lead, to tell us how it went. 

"Recently we had our second Private Beta testing session for the Moment.Us music app at our lovely office at TechHub Manchester. We’d like to thank again everyone for attending the session! The things that we loved the most were not only your enthusiasm and curiosity to play with the app, but also that this lead to great questions and great conversations.

The highlights of the afternoon:

• We had some time before we started the testing session to chat a bit with Bernardo, Niyati, Karen, Katie, Haider, Carys and Adam. Hope you guys will also keep us updated with your projects!
• We made a bit of noise in the office, but this is one thing that we love about TechHub – creative environment all the way!
• The Moment.Us team all wore for the first time the white t-shirts Fiafo made for us (thanks guys!)
• It was lovely to see Max, Vlad and Toni so relaxed, confident and communicative!!
• On the same note, the members of the Moment.Us team who talk a lot (who could that be?) welcome Max into the gang! Don’t ever interrupt your flow.
• We were happy to have David online from Toronto, even if he was conditioned by where we would take the flat screen to
• Thanks everyone for trying to be as critique as possible – we need  the things that you don’t like the same way we need the ones that you love!
• Thanks for being patient to go through some steps more than once
• Thanks for putting down on paper every detail that you found relevant (yes, Katie, even wondering if it’s your finger or our app). You’d be surprised to know how helpful that can prove to be!
• We appreciate that everyone asked us questions whenever they felt we could help with more information
• Thanks for feeling confident to share any idea about what features you’d like to see build in future versions (like radio stations from World War II – crazy, but neat!)

If you’ve enjoyed it, come again! You’re always welcome to stop by TechHub or drop us on email for a coffee downtown. And don’t forget to tell us that on Twitter or on our Moment.Us Facebook page with a Like, comment, share or however you feel more comfortable expressing it.

Soon enough we won’t be talking about testing sessions, guys! You’ll be able to download the app yourselves and your friends and, wow.. isn’t that exciting!? Don’t forget to Subscribe to our mailing list (you’ll find the form at the bottom of our website) to be the first who finds out when we release more exciting stuff.

Keep in touch

Ioana

You can see the original Moment.Us post and lots more on their blog, here.