3 Learnings from our first Advisory Board Meeting

Two weeks ago, we had our first Advisory board meeting (AB meeting).

In this article, I'll share my thoughts on its purpose, how the meeting was structured and three takeaways I got.

LFG! 🚀

Purpose

I wrote a bit about this a few days ago here.

I'm a solo-founder. Start-ups usually have 2-5 co-founders with different skills and knowledge. Although I have two amazing employees, there are still blind spots that they can't help cover.

To cover that gap, I've established an advisory board. Its purpose is to help me with "the things I don't know that I don't know" (those are the dangerous ones!).

Starting in 2025, I've implemented yearly goals, quarterly targets and monthly focuses. The advisory board will meet quarterly to discuss progress and new focuses.

I hope to see two outcomes from the Advisory board meetings:

1. Continuous strategic refinement and clarity
2. Quarterly must-win goals
3. In-depth discussion of concrete complex tasks, decisions

So kind of a "Board of directors"-light, but without the accountability (on both sides) that follows.

Structure

We're going to have quarterly meetings. Each meeting has three elements:

1. Preparation

Before each meeting, I'll set the agenda and topics to discuss. Instead of sending a wall-of-text e-mail, I'll record a video of me talking through whatever the board needs to know before the meeting. Last time, it resulted in a 42-minute video (imagine how long that e-mail would have been).

2. The meeting itself

The agenda (for inspiration):

• Introductions. As this was the first meeting, I dedicated 25 minutes to introductions. In the future, that'll be a follow-up since the last meeting.

• Questions or comments to the materials sent before the meeting (15min)
• Topics for the meeting (3 x 30min)
• My asks for you (10min)

Then, we finish off with some food and networking.

3. Follow-up

I'm taking a lot of notes during these meetings. Golden nuggets are flying through the room throughout the meeting.

Afterwards, I distil it all into a brief summary and must-win tasks for the coming future.

I love these must-win tasks.

In part because they summarise what we must be successful with to push the business forward and in part because they add some accountability on my part to deliver.

Three learnings from the meeting

1. Be clear on your ideal customer profile

Which customers are the best fit for your product? And who is not? I wrote a lot about our ideal customer profile last week, so I won't go into detail about that today.

Before the AB meeting, I had some doubts about our ICP.

After deep discussions and finding clarity on who to prioritise, I've found a new clarity on what to do regarding product/feature prioritisation, marketing and communication.

If you're unclear or have doubts about your ICP, make it your number one priority.

2. Where do we find the customers to drive growth?

We have an outspoken ambition of 5x'ing the business in 2025 and reach €25k MRR. That's great - but how do we find the customers to drive that growth?

The book "Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth" discusses 19 different marketing channels that you can use. But you can't do them all. Not at once, at least.

So in 2025, we're going to focus in:

• Telemarketing. Cold calling potential customers.
• Social selling. Organic posting and outreach on LinkedIn.
• Referrals. We have >100 paying customers - let's get them activated and motivated to tell their friends and colleagues about us.

At the same time, our PTE-CMO and associated agencies will run Paid Ads campaigns on Google Display + Social Media.

We've seen these things work in 2024, so we'll double down on that in 2025.

3. Customer onboarding and activation

None of the customer acquisition channels mentioned above are free.

It's no secret that we're spending a lot of money and resources attracting new customers. And since money isn't free either, we must do our best to ensure that those we attract are properly onboarded and activated.

The tiny churn we've seen so far has been caused by the customs not being properly onboarded and activated. They weren't using our product.

Regarding onboarding, we'll focus on:

• Proactive outreach. If data shows the customer isn't using the product (fx isn't replying to any customers), we'll proactively reach out to help them get started.
• In-product onboarding. Better in-product help and onboarding guide, using articles, videos, product tours, etc.

This ended up being a long post, but I hope it gives an idea about why I've chosen to create an advisory board, how we're working and some examples of the output it's given so far.

I've had advisory boards in previous start-ups and been on a few myself, too, so I know the value it gives from "both sides of the table".

If you have any questions or want to know more, put them in a comment, and I'll be happy to help 👍