CoffeeChat Roadmap: Start-Up Coaching
Tags: Roadmaps, Africa, Founders, Coaching, Startup

CoffeeChat Roadmap: Start-Up Coaching

The difference between success and failure when launching and scaling a start-up can often come down to the talent and advice you are able to identify and leverage at the right time and the right cost along your journey from idea to scale.

At CoffeeChat, we’re all about supporting young professionals, start-ups and enterprises across Africa access affordable and contextualized coaching and guidance to achieve their goals. We’ve mapped out several options below that start-up teams can consider, with the caveat that you should by all means make the most of free resources and pro-bono mentors when available and provide consistent and effective support. And, of course, sometimes its most appropriate for the (co)founder(s) to hustle and just get the job done on their own.

Here it is, along with further description below the roadmap image.

The service suggestions above are illustrative. Coaches and experts on our platform (www.coffeechat.co) list their own service names, descriptions and prices. We bucketed our suggestions along four stages (here in text for your convenience):

Idea: You have a promising idea and are ready to launch a start-up, but have no actual product ready or revenue yet.

Founder Coach: Mentorship to help build and refine your business plan, secure initial funding, and develop your MVP.

Market Research Specialist: Compile industry report about competitors, government policies, technologies, market gaps and customers.

Business Set-Up Specialist: Assess legal considerations such as business registration, data protection and copyrights.

Product Design Specialist: Review MVP specifications including user journeys, wireframes and systems needed.

Minimum Viable Product: Your first prototype is ready, several co-founders may have joined, and you likely have raised some initial funding from friends, family and grants to allow you to focus your time and energy on the start-up.

Founder Coach: Mentorship to grow and manage the founding team, interpret initial market results and determine whether or not to pivot.

Beta User Research Specialist: Conduct beta user interviews and user-product behavior analysis.

Promotion Strategist: Promote the start-up throughout their overall network of business contacts, including high-level introductions.

Products & Pricing Specialist: Build and refine the product roadmap and evaluate market positioning and pricing.

Product-Market Fit: You now have a growing number of happy customers who have provided feedback to improve your main product. You’re adding team members to help serve customers and looking to attract investors to cover the costs.

Founder Coach: Guidance and accountability for founder to help focus on priorities and identify blindspots.

Seed Investment Specialist: Prepare to raise seed investment by building professional investor deck and conducting thorough due diligence internal audit.

Contacts Strategist: Facilitates introductions and meetings with large customers, strategic partners and key industry contacts.

Accelerator Program Specialist: Review accelerator program options, prepare applications and decide whether this is the best next step.

Growth: Your team and customer base is growing rapidly, but so are your needs to attract further investment, become more efficient and enter into new markets.

CEO Coach: Leadership coach to help founder navigate their evolving role as CEO.

Recruitment Strategist: Support in recruitment of high-level team members needed to confidently scale your business.

Digital Marketing Specialist: Develop digital marketing strategy to optimize customer acquisition cost (CAC).

Series A Specialist: Prepare to raise Series A by updating investor deck, conducting due diligence internal audit, and planning investor roadshow.

We view this roadmap as a first version, and welcome feedback from our coaches, start-up founders and the entrepreneurship ecosystem across the continent. Help us build an even more realistic roadmap for aspiring entrepreneurs and better mobilize the pool of experts and coaches to focus their energy on supporting the next generation of African start-ups so they can increasingly compete on the global stage.