I had the pleasure to meet 4 entrepreneurs between 8 march 2020 and 12 march 2020. Overall, I am pretty satisfied with the progress made. here are the details :
Meeting 1 : @salaheddine Ogontayo, Tunisia, Identity Co.
Overall Salahedine has made a very good progress with regard to his initial action plan.
Here is a description of the progress made so far:
The landing page for user is ready. Slaheddine showed it to me and I gave him some advice to improve it further. We have also discussed the design of the partners landing page.
The app development is ongoing. Slaheddine showed me some screenshot of the prototype, i.e. the partner interface and the app has been developed used the last technology in the field.
We discussed the marking strategy. Salaheddine is aware that the current company’s name doesn’t reflect well the app’s characteristics and usage. They started thinking about a new brand name and part of the money will be used to register the new domain name and to host the app in a high capacity server/cloud. We also discussed the go to market strategy and the important events and deadlines to lunch the app as well as the strategy that will be used online and offline to attract the first customers and the pricing strategy as well.
We discussed the next actions that will be undertaken and we agreed that Slaheddine will update the action plan taking into account the progress made so far.
Meeting 2: @MohsenMahdaoui , Tunisia,PaillEco
We started the meeting by discussing the outcomes of the customer discovery.
Mohsen told me that the interviews conducted helped him to test some assumptions and to identify the right customer segments, i.e. ecological guest houses.
We reviewed the action plan and we discussed the degree of progress made with regard to what was planned and scheduled.
Overall Mohasen has done a satisfactory progress however the action plan should be updated to include some key actions as customer discovery, patent filing and marketing strategy. The deadlines should also be reviewed and update accordingly.
Mohsen has already got the raw material needed to build the prototype and contacted some laboratories and companies to help him developing the first version of the prototype.
*We discussed some challenges that Mohsen is facing as the money needed to rent a laboratory 15 days to work on the prototype and to hire an expert to help him with it. *
We agreed that the prototype should be ready by the end of April and we discussed the go to market strategy. The team needs to be widened to include a REP since all current team members have tech oriented profiles.
Meeting 3: @HIBA Diyafa - Morocco
We started the meeting discussing the progress made so far. The good thing is that Hiba has already started delivering her service (using a concierge MVP) even though the online app/ website is not developed yet. She organized 9 trips with groups between 25 and 7 people.
We reviewed the action plan and we discussed the degree of progress made with regard to what was planned and scheduled. Since all the actions are scheduled to start at earliest in second half of March, we discussed the progress made so far with the customer discovery and customer interviews. I gave Hiba some feedback and advice about the way she should interview the customers and we agreed that she will review the questions following my recommendations and that she will prepare interview questions for the B2B segment.
We have also discussed the financial side of the action plan. I discussed with Hiba my concerns about the fact that some actions are over estimated (such as the logo creation and the mission statement preparation) while other aspect such as the digital marketing campaigns and customer acquisition are under estimated. I advised her to review the estimates and to look for contributors that would propose fair quotes.
We agree that Hiba will update her action plan accordingly and that we will meet the next week by Thursday 19 March 2020.
Meeting 4: @ayari.taha , Tunisia, Artificial intelligence for alzheimer’s and dementia predicition
We started the meeting discussing the challenges faced currently by Taha with regard to access to data and the target market. Since it’s a new product in a very specific market, it’s normal to face resistance to change and reluctant stakeholders. Based on my experience, I gave Taha some advice to overcome those challenges.
We reviewed the progress made with regard to the action plan and the prototype development and overall Taha made a good progress. We discussed the outcomes of the customer discovery and how they can be used to develop a prototype.
We reviewed the actions and many development actions have been done. Some other actions are delayed due to some constraints that Taha faced. In this respect, we agreed that Taha will review the dates and update them accordingly. Also, I advised him to start thinking about his Go to market strategy and the marketing side in order to include them in the action plan.