How Pablo Palafox Used Mentorship to Build Sales Skills as a Coder

What have you worked on with your mentors so far? 

We've talked a lot about how to do sales and how to think about the customer. Things that, having a technical background, I don’t know as much about. They've helped me deep dive into the mind of the customer and really think from the customer's perspective.

Recently, we've had a lot of issues thinking about how to price our product. How do we sell it and what's the business model? We’ve made a lot of progress on building the hard skills that get you sales. My mentors also helped with fixing slides and a little bit of sales tech.

Tell us about the mentors you’ve worked with. How have they each helped you?

I’ve worked mostly with T Zhu and Sascha Eder. Learning from their B2B mindsets to get perspective on how to tackle things has been awesome.

T is really insightful, intelligent and knowledgeable. In our first meeting with him, we actually got a lot of motivation in terms of how to not be scared about failing. He told us his story about how he spent a year with some friends iterating over ideas. Every two weeks they would try a different MVP. Over the course of that year, they went from inventing simple little projects to creating very serious products.

So that was inspirational, seeing how he spent a whole year exploring. Especially because we're in a similar situation where we can survive off our grant and not die tomorrow.

Meanwhile, Sascha has been more hands-on. He went into the slides and modified them a little bit here and there. Sasha also shared some unique techniques and concrete steps for building new business skills.

How do you plan to leverage your mentors to sustain your startup’s growth?

We're bootstrapping a little bit and with some grants here and there, so we’ll have to raise money at some point.

Really, technically speaking, we need to develop a bit more. We're a deep tech, if you will. It's a lot of deep learning, computer vision, things that really need time to program and code. But at the same time, being in touch with T and Sascha, we get this perspective of, hey, don't forget about your users, your potential customers. Keep talking to them. Think about the value that they will get from you if they'll get any. Don't just forget about that aspect and just code. That's easy for us engineers.