Ship it and Sip it

This week we return to the very start with our first guest Igor Krasnik.

"I started writing in my blog, started trying to understand Twitter and Linkedin. The Accelerator launch was the reason why I started building in public and the gains that I got keep me continuing doing that. It's a wonderful way to grow personally and to launch products." – Igor

We caught up on:✍️ Igor's evolution from writing as CTO to finding his voice as a founder🧠 What he's learned from 2 years of build in public mode⚒️ How he sticks to consistent creativity💨 Why Momentum is a core feature of the Startup Bootcamp program

Igor and the team are launching a Build in Public challenge starting May 1st called Nano Grit.

Founders, join this community to kickstart interest in your idea — and win some amazing prizes and the chance to join our 2nd Bootcamp cohort 🚀

With simple tools, consistency building in public and grit — the answer is a lot 📈

"It's given me a chance to really focus on the MVP and where that needs to be niched down to. I had the pleasure of speaking to over 200 PTs — the waiting list grew a lot further than I expected." – Sam Cholera, founder of PT Fitness Coach

"Talking about this idea in public was a big thing for me — when you go to the pub you might tell your mates about an idea. But going on Linkedin and telling your professional network about it is another level. It was always something I was daunted by before. But, having done it, it's been amazing the response I've got — it's just been incredible." – Christopher Elward from Myne”That was the kick of motivation I needed — you get motivated by action. You see that ok, this is possible." – James Hutchinson at Lingoers

I caught the founders James, Chris, Joe and Sam just after they pitched their startups to our selection panel at the end of Bootcamp Batch 1.

Enjoy the show to find out what they accomplished and the traction they built for their idea in public.

Join the next round at www.nanohq.co 🚀

That's what Ethan Summers and the team at Extelli do — and the solution sits right in Chrome ready to use in a flash.

This interview uncovers: 🪜 Ethan's path to entrepreneurship from hardware to software + joining Harmony Venture Labs 🧠 How teams of all sizes use Extelli — from small startups to established orgs 💡 Why it's key to retain workflows, info and know-how in any team — hint: it saves time and $$

"It is magical to sit down with a developer, come up with a feature, identify an issue, fix it — and then they push it and it just works. If you've lived in software your entire life, maybe it can be easy to forget just how magical that is." – Ethan Summers Tune in and enjoy the show! Check out extelli.com to try it out with your team. Learn more about Harmony Venture Labs. Subscribe to Shegun's Let's Build newsletter.

Pitch day is on Monday, who will win the prize of a free MVP build with Paralect?

In order of appearance:

* Sam Cholera from PT Fitness Coach 💪

* James Hutchinson at Lingoers 🎙️

* Chris and Joe from Myne 🏡

* Andrew Manchenko at City Scout 📍

* Brooke LeBlanc from Point Five 🍹

Stay tuned for the results, and bravo to all the founders for working hard to gain traction these last 4 weeks 👏

Every time we kick off a fresh product build with a founder, a creative designer is one of the first on the scene. Most times, a quick design prototype is step 1 to a successful launch.

So how does it happen? And what does the environment that supports each product designer look like?

Let's pull back the curtain on our design process this week with Head of Design Lena Grechits 🥂

Highlights from the show 👇

Can you just describe from a high level what the design team looks like now?

So we have a team of 15 really, really good professionals and not just professionals. They're great people and we are friends with all of them.

For me, the design role is really important in startups for sure, because the designer is the person who starts in the very beginning with a business analyst or product manager. They understand the application from a really basic level in the very beginning.

Not just understand, but create something that will fit not only for founders who want to create this product, but also for users and people. I don't really like word users, you know, let's just talk about people.

How do you sort of cross-collaborate, cross-pollinate ideas and share feedback with each other?

I really like the atmosphere in our team because we not only work on projects and sometimes see other designers, but we have special meetings twice a week.

We share our latest updates, our new projects, maybe some tools that we found, some new techniques. We also share experience and have one moderator every week who is responsible to find a newer topic, a new tool, or something to share.

The second meeting is our design review. We share our work like really sharing our screen in Figma and show interesting solutions. Or we can ask questions like, can you review please this? Like the colors? Are they good or not? Or I mean it's not only about colors for sure…

So each designer has broad support from the whole team?

Every designer has their own experience. Some of them create cool logos. Some of them can work with typography or with animation or with 3d. And when you work on a project and you don't have some skill, you can ask anyone. You can ask another person as a designer to help with conducting in usability interviews.

You can ask the help to create some 3d, some logo, etc. It's really cool that we are collaborating in this way with our team and we are really close for sure.

Tell us about the latest design collaboration — Brick?

It's a new initiative and I'm really proud of publishing — now it can help anyone in the world and we can receive feedback from everyone and improve it fo many teams and products.

So it's a design library where we collect tips, knowledge and processes. My favorite part is the template for usability testing. So you can basically take all the scripts and just prepare usability testing in just one hour.

We just realized that it would be good to have one source of truth — collect all this knowledge and it's always there.

Have you always wanted to grow into a leadership role?

Actually, half an year ago I thought about this journey and I thought that I want to improve my skills as a designer — I want to do more research, I want to be a really good specialist.

But then I just got this opportunity, and I took it. But now I see the background, my background — for example, my parents — they've been managers for almost the whole their life. My grandfather was a principal in a school.

So it seems like something is inside me about management. It's just really a new role for me and it's really challenging. But this is just an opportunity that I caught and I'm really happy about this.

What products bring you joy from a design perspective?

For sure one is Notion — it really fits my needs and I follow the journey of the designer who created Notion — it's interesting to see how they work.

Huge brands like Figma and Spotify and Netflix. They create great things. These are products I use every day and they're inspiring me to create this really cool experience.

Why did you start in marketing and then pivot to design?

Marketing was not really my solution — it was advice from my parents because I didn't know what to do in my life after school. My dad told me probably marketing will fit you. And I'm like, yeah, probably.

So I just studied marketing and started to work in a sport company. And I would say that I was really bad marketer. It's funny, but I didn't have some huge figure that could inspire me — for some reason I don't really like marketing.

When I was in university, I didn't realize this product that I see in my laptop and my phone was created by someone, someone just drew this circle and things — it just didn't work in my head.

Then I started to work in a company whose product was diaries for schools and step by step I realized how the product works and who created them.

I decided to try. I just went to the courses and started to work as a freelancer and then started my journey as a product designer.

What would you say is your favorite part of early stage product or startup design?

I have two favorite parts in the beginning — the first one is wire frames. I'm the kind of person who likes to create really, really ugly wire frames — just to draw some circles and some squares.

But I'm really proud of them because it's really fast. Then I just move it to to Figma to show to the customers. And I can even take a photo of my drawings and show it.

I think it's the correct approach because wire frames are just about sharing ideas.

And the second thing that I really like is usability testing, because it is time when you speak with real people and you can understand their pains, their values. I think it's a necessary step in any product, especially for startups.

I'm really a massive fan of usability testing. This is the way you find feedback from real users really fast.

You can really understand what is necessary to improve, what is problematic in this application, on what step it's difficult to go further. This kind of research is really necessary and I always try to push this idea.

What do you think of Momentum page builder?

It's interesting because exactly yesterday we improved our page on Momentum and we added our design team there.

We added some feedback and information about for who this library is for.

It's like everything that you need to launch fast. And a huge plus is that you can add posts from social networks. You just show that it's something real, something working and live.

It's a new thing on the Paralect website where we are not showing like — oh, we are a really cool company. We can invest, we can build, we can design — but we also show real people, real faces who are sharing their real work and real projects.

An open approach where you are not hiding some secret templates, some unique approach to design. Everyone understand how to work, how companies work nowadays. It's not a secret and if you share this more and more is just a key, I think.

Are there any changes or new ideas that you'd like to bring out in the next 3-6 months?

Yeah, I really want to develop and to bring to life a design event, a public event where we can he help founders to improve their product or to review their product.

I think would be really useful for designers and for founders. We really want our team to improve, to grow expertise, to create interesting solutions, to create great products, and this is our goal.

Until next time, everybody, ship it and sip it.

How do you take an idea from a napkin note to a product with validated potential in just one month?  

That's one of the main topics on this week's Ship it and Sip it with Bodii founder Chris Fernandes.

Beyond Bodii, Chris has teamed up with Victoria to launch our Startup Bootcamp — already wrapping up week 1 of 4 🚀

John and Chris broke down the inspiration and strategy behind both the Bootcamp and Bodii: - How are validation and traction different yet equally important? - Why is the Bootcamp a supportive and valuable step for very early-stage founders?- What is the main goal for the month and what'll happen at the end? Plus find out how his own founder experience at Bodii has helped Chris focus on the best strategies to help founders gain traction 🚀

Enjoy the show and we'll be back soon with stories straight from the founders of Bootcamp cohort 1!

How? One way is now super-clear thanks to Victoria Barouskaya's new partnership package code-named Kickstart 🥾

"We pulled together all the tools and startup services we use and trust to build better products. With Kickstart we launch faster and cheaper thanks to consolidated discounts on everything from databases, hosting, analytics, and more." – Victoria

On today's Ship it and Sip it, John and Victoria dive into Kickstart and also:🤝 Her experience at Web Summit and Hub Berlin🥳 What it's like to return to in-person events🐾 And her path from project management to partnerships

🎙️ Find the podcast on your favorite player here 🎙️

But wait, there's more: Kickstart's for any founder — so in the show we'll reveal the discount code you can use to join for free 🤑Share it with a founder who's building now 🎁

“It's not like I've been a successful entrepreneur. I think I've failed almost all the other startups I tried doing when I was in university, before university and after university. But I think now the greatest thing I have is the experiences I've gained from failing — and also the exposure and the education.” – George Nimfour, co-founder of PremedGo.

Where did the inspiration for PremedGo come from?

So back in 2020 I started my postgrad in international strategy at Oxford University. I was sort of struggling to get a topic for my dissertation but coincidentally, I visited my mom in London and as we were having a conversation she sort of started going dizzy.

We called an ambulance and did a lot of stuff and couldn't really get to the bottom of it. We did some tests and those tests actually showed that she had Diabetes, which she thought she didn't have. So although it was bad, it was quite good because we were able to know about these issues she is dealing with.

I started thinking, okay, how, what is the problem here? And how many people are like my mom thinking they're all good and one day. something like that will happen to them. So I looked at the problem and at a possible solution and decided to write it with a business plan.

Fast forward — I applied into Cambridge from Oxford. Then met Robert and discussed the business plan idea with Robert. He also came from a healthcare background, and that was where we collaborated and the magic started happening.

Why is now the right time to launch?

If I look at the world, I think — looking at the cost of living crisis and everything — now is the right time for us to start living a healthy life and having more control of our life, our health, which is very important. If I look at the United Kingdom, preventative health is very key to solving pressures on the NHS because what happens is people know about their health. 

They know what they need to take in, what they don't need to take in, what kind of exercises they need to do, and the kind of exercise they don't need.

But what happens is, at the beginning of the year, we all come up with a New Year resolution. We are going to live a healthy life. I'm gonna join the gym, sign up. But before we do that, we don't even know what's going on in our bodies — we just decide ‘I want to be slim, I want to do this, I wanna have a toned body.’

We think now is the time we can create our aim and vision — to create a healthy economy. Where everyone has control of their health — they know what's going on in their health and that is why we think now is the right time to launch PremedGo.

So what is PremedGo?

Simply put, PremedGo is an online marketplace using a mobile app to connect people and health checks.

The aim is to make sure that we address cost, which is a problem for loads of people. And access, which is also a problem for a lot of people. We are the first online health check-up marketplace. So all we focus on is preventative health and health checkups.

Why preventative health checks specifically?

What we notice is a lot of attention goes to treatment but not diagnostics. And the main thing is that even for treatment to be done accurately, someone needs to find out what is wrong with you.

So we decided why don't we concentrate on helping people know what's wrong with them instead of getting to a clinic to find out this is wrong with me instead of detecting it late.

How do you balance the two business models — SaaS and marketplace?

The SaaS platform is to create something that will help providers. In terms of managing their workload as well as managing patient flow coming through.

For example, in the NHS now, if you have to book a health check — you have to:

* Ring into a GP surgery. 

* A receptionist will pick it up and look at appointment slots and give you an appointment slot. 

* If somebody doesn't turn up — the appointment slot is lost, the GP might be there or they might be waiting.

We are creating an infrastructure whereby the patient is able to book, the GP is able to see, so in real time when you book, you are able to see the slots available. The GP is also able to plan their schedule ahead. And to be honest, our platform is going to be free for both the user and the clinician.

In terms of the marketplace, what we are trying to do is to make it very competitive because — from the research we've done — the average price is around 500 pounds to have a proper health check. What we want to do is to bring a lot of providers on so that we can create a system where the price comes from 500 to as low as 150, which makes it very cost efficient and also makes it cost attractive in a cost of living crisis.

Who is your target market?

Our target audience are normally, small businesses that cannot really afford a full-fledged medical package. But they still want to offer something to staff. 

As an employer, it is good to be part of the health journey — not only providing their development, but also their mental health and preventative health is one of the most important thing an employer can do for an employee. 

How do you define success in the next 6 months for PremedGo?

Our biggest vision is in the next five years, we want to affect over a billion people on a cumulative basis. So, in the next six months, we want to affect over 5,000 lives within our target area. So we're doing a soft launch in London, and we are looking to affect over 5,000 lives.

And at the same time we’re looking to also explore different markets. If the London market is going well, probably we'll step into another market to bring the concept and grow gradually at the same time. So we are currently in LA and actively researching how we position in the US market.

‘Cause the US market's quite different, with different mechanisms of payments and how insurance works and things like that. So success will be having a soft launch in LA within the next six months.

And finally, why are you so passionate about launching this product?

Thanks George and Robert for the great interview!

Check out PremedGo.com to learn more about the product and follow their story — I'm sure it's only just beginning 🚀

Our guest Max Flietmann shares his experience from a decade of entrepreneurship and helping other founders reach their funding goals.

We discuss:

* The current state of fundraising in Europe and worldwide

* What industries and areas are most affected by the slowdown in VC funding

* Which ones are still holding steady and could come out of stronger

* What investors want to see now from founders in terms of ideas, teams and metrics

* How founders can raise in this environment and what to do to thrive as the winter ends.

Max has a ton of resources for founders and we chat about his love for Notion and what info products he’s got in the pipeline for 2023.

So make a warm cup of your favorite winter brew and enjoy!

Want to watch — check out the livestream recording 🎥Check out Max’s work at: Wizard VenturesBase Templates