In his book, ‘The Lean Startup,’ Eric Ries states, “I’ve come to believe that learning is the essential unit of progress for startups.” The concepts of learning in general as well as validated learning as a core metric for startups in particular, was the common thread in the conversation I had last week with Sacramento startup founder Mike Mendelson of Splor at Hacker Lab after a 1 Million Cups event.
Splor connects people to learn from each other. Their main product is Scale, which helps retail sales grow by connecting employees and sales reps to practice sales skills. As an example of retails sales growing, Mike cites a manual demo with a wireless retailer. They connected the eight lowest performing employees with the eight highest performing employees for weekly training and saw an 80% increase in revenue. Splor is looking to take that concept and scale it throughout the whole organization using a mobile app. You can hear about this in more detail along with why they pivoted from K-12 classroom learning to focusing on adult learning and corporate training in the wireless retail market, Mike’s thoughts on the Build – Measure – Learn component of Lean Startup, as well as thoughts on entrepreneurship in the video below.
If you don’t have time to watch the entire video, here’s a few excerpts and takeaways from the interview.
“The entrepreneurial journey is always exciting because you never know where it’s going to go when you launch it.”
“In the classroom, I had this immediate need and I wasn’t scared of building a solution for it.”
“What it took for me to dive into it full time was enough people saying, ‘I want to help!’ ‘Yes, good idea!’ ‘What can I do?'”
“A learning concept can be wonderful in theory, but if it’s not engaging and people don’t use it, first of all they won’t learn and second, we won’t learn.”
On key lessons-learned:
In the interview, I asked Mike about some key lessons-learned that he could share with other early stage entrepreneurs. He cited the need to be patient and persevere and that exponential growth starts out really slow so when exponential growth isn’t taking off yet, founders need to focus on the concrete wins they’ve had. Every single piece of growth is worth celebrating.
On what’s needed to get from just an idea to pursuing it:
“Talk about it a lot. Find that first person to give you a ‘Yes,’ a first follower/fan.’
Talking about it with others helped to validate the idea and motivate him to keep going and talk about it on a larger stage.
How to Build a Movement TED talk that Mike references.
On the Sacramento startup community:
“I feel really lucky to a member of it… It’s been really welcoming… 1 Million Cups has been really big for me.”
“It’s proximity to the Bay Area is a HUGE value add. To be down there, grab that energy, grab that wealth of knowledge, come [back] here and focus.”
Splor’s Video from 1 Million Cups
Check out Mike’s presentation at 1 Million Cups Sacramento on November 30.
See more profiles and interviews of Sacramento startup founders.
