Hi and welcome to my weekly blog, where I write about my progress in building a company! I spent the last week mostly talking to people - I’m starting to get to know the awesome people in my Antler cohort (co-cohorters?), while also doing more discovery interviews.
🅰️Preparing for the start of the program
The first few weeks of the program are about testing the compatibility waters by getting to know and trying to work with potential cofounders. It’s like a combination of The Bachelor and Shark Tank. Since a few weeks is not enough to give it a try with every single person, some pre-program speed dating can help surface both good/bad chemistry and common interests/goals.
Speed dating
As far as I can tell, there are currently 40 people starting the Antler program with me on April 17. My goal is to meet most of them before the program starts.
So far, the more people I meet, the more excited I get. Everyone has an impressive track record and seems has the hunger to build something awesome.
As you would expect from someone keen on (obsessed with?) keeping things organized I’m using a personal CRM, Clay, to keep track of the people I meet, and take notes. It makes it super convenient that Clay is synced to my calendar and LinkedIn, and can also suggest people to re-connect with.
Self reflection
To make this courtship game easier, Antler suggests engaging in some self-reflection, and provides some tools that help out with that. I’m a big fan of both self-reflection, and meeting new people, so this is exciting!
One of the tools is a slide where people fill in their:
- Operational strengths
- Personality profile (e.g. MBTI)
- Personal values
- Working style
While filling this in, I was surprised to learn that my MBTI profile (ENTJ) has changed since I last took it around 5 years ago. In particular, I’ve become a lot more extroverted (E), and slightly more intuitive (N) than sensing (S) (concentrating more on big picture & patterns rather than details).
🙋Customer discovery progress
After a few more customer discovery interviews, I’m starting to get a more well rounded idea of my ideal customer profile and how SquidGPT could help them.
While my initial assumption was that Strategy and Business Operations folks could make best use of a tool like SquidGPT, it looks that Product people could be an even better fit.
Another takeaway from the last few interviews is a more defined set of frameworks that could be useful to Product Managers. I’m hesitating of sharing the specific frameworks here, before I actually build them into the product, but I’ll be happy to share in private.
Super excited to research the frameworks suggested by the people I talk to, and find ways to make AI speak those frameworks well. Meanwhile, I have a few more discovery interviews lined up.
🗿Personal update: How’s it going, Stefan?
🔨I spent the weekend in Lille helping my sister- and brother-in-law to build an exhibition stand at a rail industry fair. It felt great to build things with my hands. The cool thing with manual work is that your effort becomes reality instantly, and progress is very visible.
🏃Started working on my marathon training plan. I’m using a pre-structured program available for my Garmin watch, and ChatGPT to adjust the ramp up in performance targets to match my goals (under 4h).
🚅Going to Strasbourg this weekend - always shocked by the contrast in noise levels and when going there from Paris.
➡️Next steps
- Wrap up this round of customer discovery interviews
- Research the frameworks suggested by interviewees and add them to the bot
- Meeting more Antler people