CBI Insights’ grim sounding 2020 report entitled 339 Startup Failure Post-Mortems found that 70% of upstart tech companies fail. When it comes to consumer hardware startups, 97% eventually die or “become zombies.” And what were the top three reasons for startup failure?

No market need

Ran out of cash

Not the right team (lack of diversity in skills and experience)

Harry had Dumbledore, Luke had Yoda, and Daniel had Mr. Miyagi. While your startup may not be facing an imminent attack by death eaters, stormtroopers, or teenage ninjas, having the right mentor in your corner can seriously help when it comes to developing the right features, battling competitors, winning a crucial funding round, and learning new tricks along the way.

To find out just how to identify and attract the right mentors, we spoke with the manager of a startup accelerator, two startup founders, two networking organizations, and one mentor.

1. Find someone who can help you put the nail before the hammer

Ed Gaze, has been Senior Manager of Lloyd’s Lab, an accelerator for InsurTech startups created by insurance giant Lloyd’s, since its start in 2018. Having seen hundreds of startups go through the program, one mistake he commonly sees is:

“Sometimes startups come with a hammer and want to find a nail. They’ll develop a tool first and then try to find a problem to solve with it, rather than starting with a problem.”

This fundamental disconnect between startups and their customer base can lead to major product-market fit issues down the line.

The beauty of the startup-mentor relationship is that mentors can help you get into the mindset of your target audience. The ability to put your product into the hands of a potential client (and not just any client) and get their direct feedback can be the most valuable info you’ll ever get.

Michael Crawford, CEO of Describe Data, experienced this first hand during his time at Lloyd’s Lab. “We used our mentors as a product-market fit test group. We asked them what they thought about new business ideas, what they liked, how they would like to be sold to, how much they would pay, what licensing models they preferred, even down to UI preferences. They were just incredibly helpful,” he explained.

Start by taking a deep look into your ideal customer base. Develop customer personas and make sure your potential mentor fits within this category or has a deep understanding of what these personas would be looking for, based on their experience.

2. The right connections can bring more than just cash flow

If your startup is in great need of funding, even a killer pitch deck won’t be as effective at convincing investors as a personal recommendation from a well-connected mentor. Having an external stamp of approval can bring you a long way in gaining both funding and larger clients. But you should consider if that’s really what your startup needs right now.

Today access to data is gold for most startups. “The second biggest value startups gain is when mentors either help provide data or introduce the product to various people within their organization to run a proof of concept,” Ed explained.

Well-connected mentors can also be extremely helpful in connecting you to mentors in other fields, whether you’re in need of strategic growth marketing hacks or want to introduce an IoT component to your product. According to Ed:

3. Get you out of your comfort zone

You may find you really hit it off with a mentor that has the same experience, a similar mindset, and technical background. But selecting someone who will think the same way you do may not be what’s best for your startup.

Allyson Kapin, Founder of Women in Tech, a nonprofit which showcases women-led ventures and helps provide capital, mentoring, and direct access to leading investors, explained, “It’s important to look for someone who can be supportive but can also provide constructive feedback. A mentor should challenge assumptions when they feel their mentees are headed down the wrong path and be able to have those tough conversations.” While praise can be highly motivating, finding someone who can and will tell you what you could be doing better is invaluable. “This can be life-changing for mentees,” Kapin said.

Gerard de Vere, COO of Describe Data, explained that, when starting out, “most startups sit somewhere on a Venn diagram between being more tech or industry heavy, depending on the expertise of its founders. The first thing to do is to understand what your balance is between tech and industry. Then try and find the opposite to fit the last piece into the jigsaw puzzle.”

His co-founder Michael agreed: “Push yourself out of your comfort zone. We were kind of adopted by an external marketing mentor and an enterprise sales expert during the Lloyds lab. These were two areas we didn’t have any real experience in. Those relationships months later are still strong and they’ve been incredibly invaluable for us. Look for people outside your area of expertise because they’ll be highly critical and highly useful.”

Attracting your ideal mentor

Once you’ve found the Yoda to your Luke Skywalker, how do you convince them you’re the right mentee to take on? (Aside from carrying them through the jungle on your back of course.)

Tip one: Show your enthusiasm

“To attract interesting mentors, it’s about passion. Michael does a lot of presenting for us and he’s very passionate and very charismatic. That’s very honest and authentic and really attracts people. We’ve seen a really great technical startup that had the talent and the skills, and, if they had gotten funding, they would have gone really far. But the guy just didn’t have any charisma. At the end of the day, it’s not just the idea, the team, or the need that mentors will consider,” Gerard explained. Just like anyone else, they want to spend time on something they’re excited about.

Tip two: Drop the technical jargon

Even if your solution and what it does may seem obvious to you, it might not be to other people. Ed once saw a startup use very technical language during a midpoint review. After the founders left the room, he asked the mentors if they had any further feedback. That’s when a few admitted they honestly didn’t understand what the solution was. Always remember to translate your technical language into words your mentors will understand.

Rob McLendon, a mentor for Lloyd’s Lab, works as a Principal for Beat Capital. With a background in the insurance world, his interest in mentoring comes from a drive to learn about advancements in tech and how they can help him and his company in their day-to-day.

“The first thing I’ll consider is the practicality and the tangibility of the service or product. In the InsurTech space, there are a lot of things that are difficult to comprehend. When that happens, the practicality aspect disappears. For me, that skips over one of the problems that the insurance industry has: just doing the simple things really well,” Rob told TNW.

Tip three: Set realistic goals upfront with your mentor

Having worked with numerous female-led startups, for Allyson Kapin, the best way to get the most out of your relationship with your mentor is to set clear expectations and deliverables from the start:

Tip four: Build long term relationships

Leslie Feinzaig, CEO of Female Founders Alliance, knows all too well about the difficulty of attracting mentors and investors when you’re just starting out. Having started her own EdTech startup, she soon realized she didn’t have the same founding experience and support that male CEOs in her industry had. In 2017, she founded the Alliance to enable female entrepreneurs to connect, share tips, and help each other develop the skills they needed to create and scale a successful startup. She suggests:

Look at it as a two-way street

Don’t be afraid to approach a potential mentor. Keep in mind that, for mentors, especially when coming from a corporate background, the speed at which decisions can be made, and the ability to directly influence the development of a new product can bring the rush that makes mentoring worth it.

You could see this sense of excitement when Rob talked about one of the startups he mentored, Inari: “They helped us build a cutting edge data lake that brings together tons of data points to give us this enterprise-wide view of our business. I’ve just never been part of something like that. I learned a lot and we did it on time specification and on budget, which, to build a data lake, is almost unheard of.”

Entrepreneurs! Your social networks should be small and curated

Bigger is always better . Many of us think this is true when it comes to building our online networks of social media friends, connections and followers. But new research suggests the opposite may be closer to the truth: curating small networks of trusted connections may be smarter in the long run. While this may seem counterintuitive, it also comes with a caveat.

We often feel compelled and are even encouraged by social media platforms, to grow our networks. Consider all the prompts about “someone else you might know” and “who to follow.” We all want the sociometrics (that number of friends or followers posted in the corner of your profile) to look good.

Offline and online social networks

Both offline and online, our social networks can function as either prisms or pipes .

As prisms , they broadcast to others our likes, dislikes, opinions, interests, activities, and more. They signal who we are, or want to be, to our network of social connections.

As pipes , they act as conduits through which help and resources can flow. Using our networks as pipes is an important part of how we build relationships. We give and receive advice, advocacy, endorsement, emotional support, and tangible things ( like entrepreneurs do, for example ).

Studies of face-to-face networks have generally shown that, whether we use our networks as prisms or pipes, bigger is better.

But what about online?

We flock to social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram because it’s easy to view, share and store our connections, allowing us to communicate with them whenever we want. That’s what makes connecting online and offline so different. We can’t search and find a comment we made six days ago to a friend over coffee. We can, however, find and reshare a conversation we had with our Facebook “friends” three years ago. It turns out that’s a really important distinction.

It’s when we use our online networks as pipes, not prisms, that small matters and seems to be valuable. In a recent study of Canadian entrepreneurs , our team of researchers uncovered this counterintuitive point and shed light on the reasons why.

We think it suggests some broader insights.

Using our online networks

For people to actually use their online networks as pipes for resources and support, three things need to come together. First, we need to believe we have the ability to ask for or give a resource or support (termed exchange ). Second, we need to have a way to actually make the exchange happen. And finally, we need to want to conduct the exchange.

All those digital viewing, scanning, sharing, searching and storing capabilities of our social media networks make it really easy for us to believe we have the ability and arrangements to use our networks as pipes. I can quickly and easily ask my online network for something I need and get a quick response. But our research suggests that we don’t always have the willingness to ask.

Through interviews with entrepreneurs, we uncovered that the reason is likely that people are really worried about what others will think. This perceived social judgment risk can get in the way of entrepreneurs getting helpful resources from their online networks. We suspect it’s not just entrepreneurs who are worried about this. That’s because perceived social judgment risk is a product of audience collapse, which reduces our willingness to reach out online.

Audience collapse happens when we add people to our online networks from all aspects of our lives. These might be people we know well and people we barely know; personal connections, work acquaintances, volunteer connections, hometown connections and those with shared interests and hobbies.

By building these varied and oversized networks, and inviting so many different people to join, our willingness to ask for help goes down. With all that searching, viewing and sharing, who knows where our request might land?

Our research reveals that many of us likely perceive a lot of social judgment risk in asking for anything but information from our online networks. We are worried that others will judge our asks as weak, needy, unsure, confused, too personal or otherwise inappropriate, making us less willing to seek help. This dark side implication of bigger is better social media networking is rarely discussed.

If this resonates, what can you do?

To make our social media networks useful as pipes, we suggest creating trust networks . These are purpose-built to stay small — yes, small. Only add people who will support, not negatively judge, and help you  — these are the people you trust.

A trust network is likely to be very high in reciprocity , or the giving and getting of help, because all members feel it is a safe place to ask for and give help. It becomes a really useful pipe network where small, not big, is valuable.

So, if you want to use your online networks as a prism to signal things to the world — stay big. But if you want to give and get help, then create a purpose-built, small trust network on social media. We think you’ll be glad you did.

This article by Claudia Smith , Assistant Professor, Gustavson School of Business, University of Victoria, is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article .

Podcast: How mobility startups need to adapt and grow in 2020

Sustainability is one of the most important areas of growth across industries, and some will need to adapt more than. The mobility industry, for example, has been historically pretty bad for the environment — cars, planes, need we say more? — but it’s now one of the areas undergoing the most exciting and disruptive evolution.

Introducing the second episode of Data Market Services Inspiration Series , a new podcast produced and hosted by Tecu to support startups in the current crisis with advice and experienced insight . This episode will look into how the mobility industry is adapting and changing in the current landscape, and the new challenges that lie ahead, in Europe and beyond.

This podcast is produced in collaboration with Data Market Services Accelerator, a European Commission-backed initiative involving TNW and nine other partners from across Europe. For six months, the DMS Accelerator offers training in business growth, legal and IP matters, GDPR,  and data science, as well as investor matchmaking to 50 European data-driven startups. If you’d like to join the program, find out more here. The deadline is May 31!

Over the course of three episodes, we’ll hear from panels of experts and startups on how to grow their business and what key lessons they should take away from investors, government agencies, and fellow startups.

In this latest episode, Tecu’s Andrii Degeler interviews Karolina Korth, Head of Strategy for South-West Europe at Siemens Mobility, Antonio Jara, CEO of HOPU, Joris Jeelof, CCO of RoadEO, and Linus Frank, the co-founder of Vesputi.

How important is startup-corporate collaboration in smart mobility? How open are European cities to innovation? What are the effects of the coronavirus on the transportation and mobility industry? Listen to episode three of Data Market Services Inspiration Series to find out:

To find the episode on Spotify, Google Podcasts, and Apple podcasts, click here .

And i f you’re a startup looking for equity-free advice and support, join the Data Market Services Accelerator today .