Goals results
Lessons learned
income results
These past 2 months have been very busy. Although I did prepare a June retrospective, we were in the middle of our funding process and I was still learning so much, that I decided to pair up June and July instead, and share with you everything I learned with the benefit of hindsight.
Our main areas of focus were: Preparing the fundraising – where the right gears are already set into motion-, and reviewing our content Production strategy – which split into 2 target audiences: onboarding and clients. When analyzing the later, we realized there was an immense opportunity in revamping MyCTOfriend’s Offer with a new modularized approach. If you would like to be the first to know about this new product offer and get an extra special pre-launch deal, you can subscribe to our waitlist here.
In a nutshell
It has been a busy summer working backstage. We removed focus from immediate income to set everything up and perform our best in both mid- and long-term.
In regard to my personal life, I also moved to another region: Ardèche. I’m proud of my new Studio & Office pictured above.
As usual, for more details you have everything below.
Project |
This month’s results vs goals |
Next month’s goals |
| Content production (Video, blog & podcast) | We decided a couple months ago to pause content production altogether to better align our strategy. Indeed, after just a few workshops we’ve re-discovered a lot about what startups want, need, and benefit the most from and in which situation.
In the past 5 years, we’ve produced content according to our clients’ questions and the challenges they face. But we found that those change tremendously when looking at founders that still lack CTO guidance. That separated our content production into 2 audiences, and therefore 2 categories with different purposes. |
We aim to restart content production in September with this new approach. The new format is still being shaped but Mitchie is well underway with a brand new intro and design.
We will definitely continue our regular podcast and by the end of august, we will have decided on the first topics to tackle in September. |
| MyCTOfriend product offer revamp (unexpected) | As we were brainstorming with some of our clients on their needs and the support required, the particular way in which startups accelerate and its inconsistent speed kept popping up.
We decided to take a longer, harder look at the situation. Depending on the startup, the stage they are in and their specific challenges, they might be running at sprint speed, marathon speed, or power-walking speed. So having a strictly time-related offer losses its relevance, and that’s where we recognized 2 main factors: Continuity and intensity.On the one hand there must be some sort of constant support, so that the startup is kept on track an its history and context are being considered with every advise; for that we designed a very affordable monthly coaching program. On the other hand the intensity of the support needs to adapt to the startup’s particular needs at a particular stage, for that we’ll provide goal-oriented modules that will get founders from A to B, regardless of how long they need. We tie it all up with an initial assessment to evaluate the situation and voilà! A brand new product offer designed by and for startup founders! |
We will launch this new format in early September, but there will be a pre-launch offer very soon. Since it will have so much value and be so affordable we will need to limit our first batch of new clients to only 6 or 7.
During this beta period these use cases will get a bit extra attention while we validate the new structure and the necessary content to complement it. If we get too many truly deserving requests, we might consider extending it to 10. If you would like to be the first to know and get an extra special pre-launch deal, you can subscribe to our waitlist here. |
| ‘Startup Without CTO’ book | For the third time in my life, I had to stop my book writing process to realign what needs to be written and in which order. Exactly the same conclusion as other communication media. | No goals set, I’ll just let my mind roam during the holidays on the book plan and what I could readjust. “Creativity mode” |
| Online courses | As I shared above, we’ve worked hard on our customers’ journey. Dissecting thoughts, needs, challenges at every stage. This led us to analyse and restructure our offer, as well as tweak our own sales funnel.
We are now putting together the onboarding meetings structures in our internal online course to be prepared to hire new CTOs and sales people. Just like this quote I love: “If you want to master something, teach it!“ Mitchie is great at learning new things and structuring them in a way that is easy to understand, so we are just preparing for the upcoming months. |
To finish the internal online course on our onboarding process. |
| Fundraising | This was one of my main areas of focus in June and at the beginning of July. I put together a long-term strategy with CTOs worldwide and AI-assisted coaching to improve our practices and provide more value at a lower cost.
The deep analysis we’ve been conducting on startup needs fits very well with what we can do with AI, which makes the future of MyCTOFriend very promising. I went to London to an investment accelerator were I finished as first runner up in the pitch contest. I also performed very well at the investor summit that took place right after the accelerator event. |
With several already interested in investing in our company, we are dedicating August to exercise due diligence and be fully investor-ready for September. |
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