The power of Peer to Peer mentoring for Founders
How to move faster and more successfully on your Startup journey
When you start your startup it is easy to quickly become overrun with things to do of which you have no experience or training. For first time Founders these roadblocks come thick and fast.
Design thinking, building an MVP, interviewing customers, raising funding, writing contracts, negotiating potential customers, there are so many different things to get across and even an experienced Founder will feel lost at times.
At Canopy we believe in the power of peer to peer mentoring, sometimes referred to as “close mentoring”, between Founders as a way of speeding up the journey and helping you to be more successful.
What we mean by this is that the best person to mentor a Founder on, for example, how to raise seed funds is another Founder who has just recently raised seed funds. Ideally from similar investors related to a similar product / proposition.
The closer the fit of experience the better. This is perhaps the ultimate in “not reinventing the wheel”. We build efficiency and effectiveness through adopting practices that are right fit for now, in this moment. In this market. Today.
In our role for the ecosystem, Canopy regularly connects Founders together and help them to share experiences for the betterment of all. We recognise that everyone has something to share and everyone will at times have something to learn. There is no expectation that the sage like members of the community are always the ones to share and the first time founders always the ones to learn, in fact it is remarkable the diverse range of people that have been helped in so many ways by this approach.
Over the next few weeks we will be trying something out to see if we can scale up the way we match and introduce people into more of a platform. It’s not something we’ve ever tried before at Canopy so it is definitely a test and learn moment.
We’ve leveraged Sharetribe to create a marketplace for Peer to Peer sharing in the community. We’ve adopted the most basic version and are gradually rolling it out to different groups to prove the use cases and debug the set up. First to see and try the platform have been the In Residence CxOs. Then the #tribe members. Then people doing demo night in December and then out to the wider community and finally into social media for anyone to get involved.
Within the MVP, we have two primary use cases, and when you are invited to the platform we encourage you to set up a listing for both
Sharing of experience related to Canopy e.g. Having given a demo at demo night, been a guest on Founder Friday, contributed to a HOWTO episode etc. These shares are free of charge and are booked using a calendly (or similar) link which the user puts into the listing. When making the listing we ask each user to add a Canopy related image and this will make it stand out on the page. It will also have a FREE price tag displayed on the top right hand corner. What we hope to see from this kind of sharing is that the community help each other to keep building on good practice, and getting the most out of these opportunities, through a handshake of knowledge and experience. If this works it will really raise the game on everything we do, and continually challenge us to keep evolving, innovating and raising the game further.
Sharing of startup experience - at early stage and scaleup. Things like raising seed funding, raising series a funding, securing R&D tax credits, hiring your first dev team, forming a board. These shares are positioned to be for up to 1 hour, are booked through the platform and payments taken using Stripe. With each listing we ask the Founder to include images of logos for the startups they are involved with. This is very eye catching on the main listing page. The value per hour for these sessions is set by the person listing within the range of £0 to £35. For Canopy there is a flat 10% platform fee. This pays for the hosting and keeps things sustainable. This price point may change as the MVP evolves. We will be led by the community on this.
Within each listing there are a selection of tick boxes so you can make clear the kind of recent (within 2 years) experience you have and are prepared to share. Sharetribe then makes it easy to search for different experience within all listings and then making bookings accordingly. You dont have to import any info via linkedin etc and the setup takes about 1minute if you have all the images to hand in advance.
Right now the platform is invite only as we gradually iterate on the experience and see the first experience shares happening. It’s an exciting moment to see if we can facilitate at scale what we do already at every demo night, that is to put together people who can help each other through this close mentoring approach.
Will it work? Help us find out and let’s build this together.