I spent the first Friday of March by attending a group mentoring with Nyree McKenzie, the founder of Bidhive and a fellow MIT Bootcamp Alumni. She also won the AWS 2019 Founder of the Year.

It was a great session that covered Nyree’s journey and the lessons she learnt along the way. She emphasised the need to have your personal life aligned with your founder dreams. She talked about how her previous business, Thought Bubble, that she spend 16-year building was both a source of inspiration that lead to Bidhive but also something she now has to exit to commit to Bidhive.

She pointed to some tech she found very helpful. Namely Canny, which she is using to gather customer feedback to help her map out a product roadmap that will lead to her releasing exactly what her customers want. It’s a great idea. I will note that tool down for future use.

Speaking of tools, and a slight aside, I don’t think I ever mentioned Kiite.ai, which can be used to create a sales playbooks. It was recommended to me during a sales workshop I attended. But I don’t think I ever blogged about it. But I think it’s worth noting here. Because sales strategies were something Nyree covered at length. She mentioned that from day 1 she only went after enterprise, using language that would cause small businesses to self exclude. Enterprise can be a mixed market to go after but it has its downsizes. Namely, procurement processes for Enterprise are long and complex. So the conversion takes time. Also, per Lewl Jury’s mentoring talk last month, Enterprise customers are very needy when it comes to customer care attention.

Nyree has earmarked Robotic Process Automation (RPA) as a way to help ease some of the pressure currently on her small group of staff. RPA is something I am familiar with through my work with Comprara. I will definitely watch Bidhive to see how Nyree’s strategies workout.

Overall, it was a great talk. I am glad I attended. I asked a bunch of questions. But I left straight after and thus missed the River City Labs, First Friday Bytes. I wish I stuck around but I was “peopled out” as they say. But maybe in April, I’ll get to attend the First Friday Bytes!