Milestone9

The 9Mile Innovation Framework© - A Structured Methodology for Building Technology Companies

When we ventured into the startup accelerator business over three years ago (read our story here), we knew we were headed into brand new territory. The startup accelerator business model was pioneered in 2005 by Paul Graham at YCombinator (YC) and then subsequently adopted by many others after high-profile YC successes such as AirBnB, Dropbox, Heroku and others. We were perfectly happy to replicate a proven model, but we also wanted to ensure we continued to learn, iterate, refine, and innovate.  And the only way we knew how was to constantly talk to our customers - i.e., entrepreneurs and investors - and try to deeply understand their challenges and pain points.

These conversations are the genesis of the 9Mile Innovation Framework, our foundational methodology for helping launch and grow startups. Using Steve Blank’s customer development methodology and Alex Osterwalder’s Business Model Canvas (BMC) tool as a starting point, we began to build our own proprietary framework for company creation and growth. While we found the BMC to be a great tool, we also needed a foundational framework that helped us with the following

  • - A tool to assess a startup’s progress over time, including a self-assessment tool for entrepreneurs to track their own company’s performance.
  • - A high-level model for creating enterprise and B2B startups that are focused on solving real-world problems and on customer traction.
  • - Provide us a common language to discuss startup progress, challenges, and solutions with entrepreneurs, mentors, speakers and investors.
  • - A clear foundational structure for our entrepreneurship and company-building curriculum.

With the 9Mile Innovation Framework, we have a tangible rubric we can use to gauge the current and future success of the companies graduating from the accelerator. Since 9Mile Labs is only successful if its companies are successful, the framework also serves as a measure of how our own business is progressing. Applying the framework to everything we do, there is no hand waving, subjective arguments, or seat-of-the-pants rationalizing. If something isn’t working, we go back to the drawing board and refine our framework.

Just a side note: we don’t claim that every concept in our Innovation Framework is original. We read books, browse startup-oriented publications, follow prominent bloggers, and speak to many people every day. And when some concepts resonate with us, we incorporate them into our thinking – consciously as well as inadvertently. For example, we read a startup-oriented book called Nail It, Then Scale It and really liked that term and started using it; we heard the term “Hacker, Hustler, Visionary” from somewhere else and promptly borrowed it. All innovation builds upon existing ideas; progress comes when you pick “borrowed” ideas and build on them with original thinking (read “Borrowing Brilliance” by David Kord Murray).

The 9Mile Innovation Framework has nine key strategic steps necessary to build any company from idea-to-execution (Figure 1). We call the first five steps in our framework the “Nail It” stage, so termed because investment in scaling activities such as marketing and sales is useless until a startup has achieved these five basic milestones. No business should spend time and money building a product that no one wants. It’s also important to note, that even though there’s a certain sequential nature to this model, startups of course sometimes hit these milestones in different order. Here’s a brief description of the five steps in the “nail it” phase of our framework:

  1. 1. Team: Investors, especially early-stage ones, invest in teams first, then the market and idea. At 9Mile Labs, we look for a complete team comprising three roles - hacker, hustler, and visionary.
  2. 2. Pain Point: The business idea for a startup must be rooted in a well-understood pain point for a specific customer segment in a significantly large market.
  3. 3. Competitive Differentiation:  Every early-stage startup must have an understanding of, and build strategies for creating sustainable differentiation against competitors.
  4. 4. Value Proposition: The value the customer receives from the startup must be significantly higher than the total cost of ownership from using the startup’s solution.
  5. 5. Product: The actual product the company builds, first as an MVP, later beta, and then as a complete product, must be based on an in-depth understanding of the customer’s pain point and the value delivered to the customer.

 

9Mile Innovation Framework graphic

Figure 1: The 9Mile Innovation Framework

Achieving maturity on the “Nail It” steps leads a startup to the “Scale It” part of the framework. The startup has the beginnings of a good business and now needs to take things to the next level. Of course, the “Scale It” part of the framework remains iterative as well, with startup teams learning what works and what doesn’t as they work to build a scalable, repeatable, and profitable business model. Things change, and the entrepreneurs must be ready to go back to square one or pivot if necessary. Here are the four steps in the “Scale It” part of our framework:

  1. 6. Go-To-Market: Create clear messaging and positioning statements that resonate with the target customer segment, as well as demand generation strategies to target those customers.
  2. 7. Customer Traction: Tactics and strategies employed to achieve and track exponential, proven, sustainable customer growth against non-vanity metrics.
  3. 8. Business Model: Bringing together much of the work in prior milestones, the business model must be scalable, repeatable, and profitable.
  4. 9. Funding Strategy: Every startup should clearly think about its funding needs and explore options such as customer revenue, strategic, angel, or venture investment.

Creating the 9Mile Innovation Framework grew out of our conviction that, while raising money is a very important activity for a startup, a much more important success metric is customer traction. However, amid headlines about unicorns and multimillion-dollar funding rounds, startups sometimes start thinking of funding as the ultimate objective, as opposed to a means to building a successful business.

Following this broad introduction to the 9Mile Innovation Framework, in the next post, we’ll dive into the specifics of each milestone introduced above. First up, the team. Tune into our next post to find out how we evaluate successful teams.

9Mile Labs is a leading Enterprise / B2B high-tech accelerator based in Seattle. 9Mile Labs celebrates the graduation of its fifth cohort on Mar 3, 9:30am; register as our guest with promo code “GOLD” at http://m9.9MileLabs.com

The accelerator is currently accepting applications for the upcoming program (beginning in July, 2016) at http://apply.9MileLabs.com.

Come meet our 9 Exceptional B2B Technology Startups on Nov 20

What is a startup accelerator and how can it help launch a technology idea into a market-ready business? Who is developing some of the best B2B and cloud-services technologies in the Pacific Northwest? Why is our region one of the best in the country for cloud and B2B startups? Our latest Milestone9 event will answer these questions, and introduce the 9 companies graduating from our program. Join us Thursday, November 20, from 2:00-6:00 p.m. at the Washington State Convention Center by registering at http://m9.9MileLabs.com. The Pacific Northwest is home to some of the top enterprise and cloud services companies in the world, and should be a beacon to any enterprise startup. Concur is one such remarkable success story, and we’re excited to have its co-founder, COO and Chairman Rajeev Singh keynote the event. He’ll help welcome hundreds of business leaders, entrepreneurs, investors, mentors, friends and family for great content, discussions, networking and demonstrations of some of the hottest technologies launching today!

This marks the third successful cohort of companies from the 9Mile Labs program and we can’t wait to help launch them into the community. And if you’re entrepreneurs interested in joining a B2B startup accelerator, our next program kicks off in January 2015 – application deadline December 4. Whether launching a startup out of college, from of an established career, or developing an idea on the side, entrepreneurs can apply to our program at any time here.

Register soon and we’ll see you there!

Cohort II Graduation | Cohort III Applications Open!

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Last Friday, May 16th at Milestone9 we had the honor of graduating nine companies from our second cohort. This capstone event is a conclusion to an intensive four month-long program focused on mentorship, advising and coaching startup companies. Descriptions of companies at the close of this post.

We're also announcing that applications are now open for our next round, Cohort III. All information on our application process can be found at apply.9milelabs.com. Here are the key dates:

- Monday, 6/2: Early Bird Application Deadline (midnight) - Monday, 6/16: Final Application Deadline (midnight)

Want to connect with us face-to-face, learn about 9ML and applying to our cohort? Here are a handful of opportunities.

Open Coffee: One-on-one conversation with a 9ML partner

- Every Tuesday (5/20 – 6/10), 1PM – 4PM, Tully’s in Bellevue (10812 Main Street; Bellevue, WA 98004) - Every Thursday (5/22 – 6/12), 1PM – 4PM, Tully’s in Seattle (2nd & Marion; Exchange Building, 821 – 2nd Avenue; Seattle, WA 98104)

Entrepreneur Town Halls: Learn more about 9Mile Labs and the application process

- Thursday, 5/29, 4PM – 6PM, Dice Cabana (Exchange Building, 821, 2nd Avenue, 4th Floor, Seattle) - Tuesday, 6/10, 4PM – 6PM, Eastside venue TBD

Questions about applying to 9Mile Labs? Check out our Q&A page at 9MileLabs.com as well as earlier blog posts:

Are you ready for an accelerator? Is my startup too late / too early for an accelerator? How is a B2B startup different from a B2C startup (Part I)?

 Meet our graduated cohort!

- 3D Product Imaging (3dproductimaging.com):3D Product Imaging allows online brands and retailers to create photo-realistic, high-fidelity 3-dimensional images of products thereby helping to improve sales conversion rates and reduce returns. - Angles Media (anglesmedia.co): Angles Media helps businesses close more sales by delivering the right content to the buyer with the highest likelihood of influencing the sale. Learn exactly how your landing pages, white papers, videos, and emails influence prospects during the sales cycle. - Cloudadmin (cloudadmin.mx): Cloudadmin is a cloud-based inventory management and order management system specially designed for SMBs in Latin America. - Connect Consignment (connectedconsignment.com): Cloud e-commerce software, enabling resale and consignment businesses to; Sell anything, to anyone, anywhere. - Engineroom360 (engineroom360.com): Engineroom360 helps small and mid-size online retailers, utilizing hosted platforms, to create online promotions and improve discoverability of products on their websites. - Ghostruck (ghostruck.com): Ghostruck is a ridesharing solution for moving trucks that connects moving trucks with consumers who need a truck for moving bulky items. - GreenKrate (greenkrate.com): GreenKrate delivers grocery items to consumers and small businesses thereby saving them time. - Pawzii (pawzii.com): Pawzii delivers automated software solutions for animal shelters to free up human capital, generate new types of revenue, and bring focus back to what’s most important: saving animal lives. - Theme Dragon (themedragon.com): Theme Dragon helps marketers in SMB’s make smarter video marketing decisions through actionable recommendations and intelligent data. It supports them from planning and production to measuring results.

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