Igor Gorlatov With Traction5

Intro: [00:00:04] Welcome back to the Start Up Showdown podcast where we discuss pitching, funding and scaling startups. Join us as we interview winners, mentors and judges of the monthly 120,000 pitch competition powered by Panoramic Ventures. We also discuss the latest updates in software Web three, health care, tech, fintech and more. Now sit tight as we interview this week’s guest and their journey through entrepreneurship.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:39] Lee Kantor are here. Another episode of Startup Showdown podcast, and this is going to be a good one, but before we get started, it’s important to recognize our sponsor Panoramic Ventures. Without them, we couldn’t be sharing these important stories. Today on Startup Showdown, we have Igor Gorlatov with Traction5. Welcome.

Igor Gorlatov: [00:00:58] Thank you for having me.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:59] Well, I’m excited to learn what you’re up to. Tell us a little bit about Traction five. How are you serving folks?

Igor Gorlatov: [00:01:05] Sure. So Traction five is a SaaS platform for mentorship programs and our initial target market, the sandbox where we are playing is programs that have adopted an MIT venture mentoring service framework, which is team mentorship. So these are highly managed programs with a program manager in place, and that was software makes their life easier and makes the life of mentors in such programs much easier.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:36] So how did you discover this problem and had the solution come about?

Igor Gorlatov: [00:01:42] I was working as a program manager for Innovate Charlotte. It’s a nonprofit in North Carolina, Charlotte and I was running a mentorship program myself, and the challenge I came across is a lot of manual labor involved in scheduling meetings, coordinating with mentors and founders. All those activities took a lot of time from actual engagement and helping the founders through the journey. So I felt we could do better and that’s how I came up with the ideas. I was surprised that nothing was developed for this specific market, so I decided to give it a try.

Lee Kantor: [00:02:23] Now, had you been involved in mentoring before? Like had you gone through kind of a clunky mentoring process where you’re like, okay, there’s a lot of friction here that probably doesn’t have to be here. And there has to be ways that we can kind of smooth out this journey so that folks can focus on the relationships and the learning rather than the scheduling and the documentation.

Igor Gorlatov: [00:02:44] So I was actually in the middle of it. So as a newcomer to the US at that time, I think I just arrived from Eastern Europe, from Belarus. I tried to plug in into the ecosystem, came across, innovate Charlotte and decided to help that organization to implement the mentorship program. So I was not inside the program as a mentee or as a founder. I was in the role of a program administrator. So my job was to recruit mentors, to recruit founders, and to run the program, essentially to manage everything. And through that process, I saw that running a mentorship program that is structured takes a lot of effort and a lot of this stuff is very technical. You would expect this to be solved by something and there was nothing that could help. So I had to use like Google sheets, doodle poles, like a lot of other program managers still have to do.

Lee Kantor: [00:03:45] So you were just cobbling together kind of solutions that were solving kind of one element of this, but they were kind of clunky and they were weren’t maybe working together as well as one product just dedicated to the mentoring process would be.

Igor Gorlatov: [00:04:01] Correct. So you can use like pen and paper to write a big publication and then you can type it and then you can make copies or send them by fax, or you can use more modern technology to get those things accomplished. So I had to use very old school methodology, probably used 20 years ago, and that was not fun. And I knew that where like hundreds of other people like me in a similar position and I saw an opportunity and that’s how Traction five came about.

Lee Kantor: [00:04:31] And then how did you get kind of the first beta users so they can kind of play with it and and see if it is really solving that problem the way that you envision.

Igor Gorlatov: [00:04:43] So it was not that hard because as a program manager, my first beta users were actually mentors and founders in the program that I was running.

Lee Kantor: [00:04:53] Oh. So you were able to kind of just practice on the folks you were dealing with anyway?

Igor Gorlatov: [00:04:58] Correct.

Lee Kantor: [00:04:59] And then what’d you learn from them going through it? How quickly did you get to a version that you thought, hey, this might be a good minimum viable product that I can get put out there in the wild and see if it works for others?

Igor Gorlatov: [00:05:11] So we started first of all, I had to get the partner because I’m more of a marketing person, not the software development person. Like I don’t code by myself. So I found a business partner then is Dimitrov, who is a very strong software architect, and I sold him on this idea that we could start with this niche segment and then expand and we start working in November of 2020. One of the smartest decisions we made was hiring a professional UX designer. So our platform looked good from the MVP stage, and that really helped with adoption because like people, especially mentors, they’re not ready to work with tools that look ugly. So when we started testing it with Innovate Charlotte, the tool was ready for prime time. So it was, I think, six or eight months after we started working on it. So it was in pretty functioning state. And to get to the first client, that was a bit of a challenge, but not from a technology perspective, but just getting people. And most of those are like universities, economic development groups to buy from a startup. That was, I think, the biggest challenge to overcome for us how to get people to trust us with their data.

Lee Kantor: [00:06:34] Now, were you bootstrapping this or were you able to get some funding early on?

Igor Gorlatov: [00:06:39] So most of it was bootstrapped. There is a foundation in North Carolina called NC Idea, and they gave us $5,000 to help with initial implementations in a couple of programs that are using the same team mentorship approach as in Charlotte. One was in Raleigh, North Carolina, in other words, in Asheville. So I got funding in hand to do those implementations. But to my disappointment, both programs said no.

Lee Kantor: [00:07:10] Well, that’s just part of the journey, right? You’ve got to overcome obstacles.

Igor Gorlatov: [00:07:14] Yes. Luckily, I was able to find other programs. The first client was not far in South Carolina. There was a group called Gravity Center, partly private, partly financed by the local municipality, that even though they bought a different software product before and paid a year in advance for it, they agreed to give us a try and became our first client and they’re still a client, so I’m very grateful for their support.

Lee Kantor: [00:07:42] Now what advice can you give other kind of non-technical founders to first identifying that right partner? Because that’s such a critical element. You know, you have to get that right.

Igor Gorlatov: [00:07:57] I’m not sure if there is like a recipe in place. I knew Dennis for a long time and we met when I came to the States in 2016, but we actually went to the same school back in Belarus. We studied at the same MBA program at Belarusian State University. So there was like this long connection and a lot of common background and common heritage that helped us. I’m not sure if this can be like repeatable process for someone looking for a technical founder.

Lee Kantor: [00:08:31] So that was just serendipity that you both landed where you landed?

Igor Gorlatov: [00:08:37] I think so.

Lee Kantor: [00:08:38] Wow. Good for you. I mean, that’s the stars are aligning pretty good.

Igor Gorlatov: [00:08:43] Yes. So I think we got lucky, but we were both at the phase when we wanted to experiment and to try something that kind of could scratch our startup itch. And I was working a lot with startups as a program manager, so I wanted to do something. And Dennis was working in the software development shop and he wanted to have a product of his own, not just to work on other people’s products.

Lee Kantor: [00:09:10] And that’s really the key, right? The people who want to kind of attack this bigger vision and and have a bigger Y associated with their work and you’re building Traction five to help you and him kind of achieve those goals.

Igor Gorlatov: [00:09:27] Yes, for sure. But we are also very passionate about the startup community. I saw how powerful and effective mentorship program can be as a tool to activate successful people in the community, to give them an easier way to engage with startups. Because one on one mentorship and organic mentorship is hard. A lot of work is placed on the shoulders of mentors to do this. And it’s like for people, it’s not easy to figure out all the pieces and how to do this well. Whereas for startups to get access to expertise is essential because mentorship helps. I’ve read that it triples the chances of success for a startup company, and it just creates additional support for a founder because being founder usually is a very lonely job. So through Traction five, we support not only founders at in Charlotte, but in other communities, other communities who are engaging their local mentors, their local founders, and building this support network to grow into partnership across the nation.

Lee Kantor: [00:10:39] Now, are you finding because because you are building this platform for mentoring, that you’re learning some best practices from a mentors standpoint and a mentees standpoint?

Igor Gorlatov: [00:10:51] For sure. I think my biggest learnings came initially from the program that I was running and the mentors that we had in the program, they were learning together. So it’s like a joint learning process and the program has been designed by MIT to be truly a self learning experience. There are a lot of insights that you get from working with founders, working with mentors. Now, as we’re building the tool, we’re learning different flavors that other communities are adopting. And one of the ideas we have in mind is not just to build a software tool, but to create a tool that incorporates the best practice of mentorship so that when you want to launch mentorship program, you’re not just automating certain processes, that you don’t know whether they will lead to better outcomes or not. But you have something that has been validated in different communities already, and it’s currently thought as the best practice. And if you come up with an improvement and it really seems like a the best practice, not just for your community but for the broader groups, for broader users of traction. Five We can then incorporate it into the platform and make it available. And the last thing I’ll say on this is that to help. People building mentorship programs and to help mentors. We’re working on a number of courses that are available on Udemy. One course that is currently available there is called Becoming a Better Mentor for Startup Founders, which is specifically targeting mentors who work in such programs. Who are our clients now?

Lee Kantor: [00:12:34] Are are you finding regarding this content like when a person or a startup founder is dealing with a mentor, you know, they’re trying to solve their specific problem and they need mentoring around their unique situation. But like you said, some of these truths that the mentor is sharing are kind of universal. So you’re creating kind of this content library that has these this information so that, you know, people in general can get this same type of information like asynchronously, asynchronously, as opposed to just on that one on one mentoring.

Igor Gorlatov: [00:13:09] I find that mentorship is not about sharing information. I find that mentorship is about human connection, empathy, support, and opening doors. I think these are the main and information is available. There is a lot of information already. So what we are trying to do with the content is to help mentors figure out how to be better mentors, how to tame the advice monster, to stop giving advice and to ask good questions, to offer encouragement to founders. To have a plan where they’re going with this mentorship and in the format of mentorship that those programs adopt. It’s a team of mentors, so each startup founder gets not one mentor, but the group of mentors. Four or three mentors work with the founders, so we bring diversity of perspectives. But it is also a support group. But figuring out how to make the support group work, how mentors can effectively work with each other, with the founder, and with the program. As volunteers is a lot. So this is what this course is about, helping a new mentor who joins a program like that to be up to speed in no time.

Lee Kantor: [00:14:22] Now, how are you kind of differentiating a mentor from a coach? Because a coach asks a lot of questions, more so than than supplies answers. And it sounds like you believe mentors should kind of follow the same tact.

Igor Gorlatov: [00:14:39] There is a cool group that actually. I think help me define certain aspects of the course that says the cultural group out of Canada. They focus on mentorship as a discipline and they do a lot of research and they have a very strong conviction that I agree with that. Mentoring is not a verb, like a mentor is a noun. And like, you know, a poet is not someone who writes poetry. A poet like you read the poetry by someone. And if you like it, you can say, this person is a poet. It was written by a poet. So a mentor is more of a gift word. Someone needs to call you a mentor, then you become a mentor. And this is how I understand mentors. But a mentor can do several things. They can act as a coach, and then they are asking questions like a coach would. They can act as an advisor and they can provide guidance as an advisor would, they can act as an instructor and they can do very tactical like walk through through things that the founder is figuring out, or they can serve as an example or exemplify certain things like share the experience. So these are different things that the mentor can do. And the difference, I think, at the end of the day is usually mentor. Relationships are like friendship. You’re not paying for mentorship because it’s a relationship, whereas a coaching or consulting engagement, it’s a more professional thing. So you get someone who is a professional to offer a specific service. So a coach helps you build a certain set of very specific skills, or a consultant helps you figure out the very tactical problem that they have expertise in. Whereas the mentor is the person who has this relationship with you, helping you get to the next level with our founders as a better leader, as a founder.

Lee Kantor: [00:16:36] Now, is there a way to quantify a good mentor?

Igor Gorlatov: [00:16:44] This is something that we’ve tried to do over three years in the program and in the software. We are also asking founders and mentors because it’s a team of mentors to evaluate like who was the most impactful mentor. And we’re trying to figure out, I’m personally trying to figure out what are those skills or what are those behaviors that result in effective mentorship. So far, we’ve identified six tactics that effective mentors use, and those are they’re willing to spend time with the founder. So they attend team meetings, they don’t skip meetings, and they also meet with founder one on one. They might attend the workplace of the founder, meet the team, get to know the founder on a more deeper level. They also have a plan which means they help the founder articulate specific goals. It’s not just, Oh, let’s meet. Let’s talk about what’s going on in your life. It’s also figuring out where are we going, where this mentorship relationship is going and where the founder is going. Then creating an accountability relationship. And this is number three, getting buy in from the founder on what we call whole work. So founder needs to commit to do something before the next meeting that helps them get to the next step of their journey.

Igor Gorlatov: [00:18:02] I already mentioned this, which is taming the advice monster or not telling the founder what to do, instead asking questions and helping the founder figure out their journey. And it’s not that mentors cannot give advice. They can it just limiting the amount of advice that they give the last two are not being overcommitted to the founder, like not being not feeling too responsible for mentee success because we had a few mentors who burned out. They like overinvested in a specific founder and that just doesn’t make sense. It’s the founder’s job to grow the business. It’s the mentors job to help the founder learn, even if it’s learning through failure and then throwing price, praising behaviors not in choices and not natural talent of the founder. This is what especially early founders need when they don’t need to be shown the next roadblock. They need to be encouraged to take the next step to make that phone call, to reach out to that customer. So these are the behaviors we found that the most effective mentors use consistently.

Lee Kantor: [00:19:09] So how did you hear about Startup Showdown and Panoramic Ventures? How did that get on your radar?

Igor Gorlatov: [00:19:17] I think there was a like showdown by Panoramic Ventures in Charlotte, North Carolina, and they had the local segment in addition to those big segments. And it sounded like a fun opportunity to talk about Traction five to find you now pay pitch and to get feedback and also to see to get to know other startups in the community who are doing similar things. So that’s how I think we heard it probably from Reef Tech Labs, which is our local accelerator.

Lee Kantor: [00:19:47] Now, was there any aspect of the process that was most beneficial for you?

Igor Gorlatov: [00:19:53] I think every aspect of that process was extremely beneficial, starting from putting together your thoughts on the business in a way that is clear and understandable because as you can see, we like it’s hard to explain in a few words what exactly Section five is. Getting the down to a pitch has been a great experience and the mentors that Panoramic Ventures provided were great. The fact that we were able to get to the final and present from the stage with another great experience as well. So and connecting with other founders who were in the final part of the showdown and semifinal, it was great to so like a number of factors, great people, great experience and great support.

Lee Kantor: [00:20:38] So what do you need more of? How can we help you?

Igor Gorlatov: [00:20:41] I think this podcast is a great opportunity, but just right now we are in the process of customer discovery beyond our immediate niche. So we’re looking for connections to accelerate the programs to people at Panoramic Ventures and other accelerators who are working with startup founders to see how Traction five can evolve to offer additional use cases beyond just the structured mentorship program. If there is a person who is involved in that space, I’d like to have a conversation with them.

Lee Kantor: [00:21:15] And if somebody wants to connect with you or somebody on your team, what is the website and best way to get a hold of you?

Igor Gorlatov: [00:21:22] Yeah. So the best way, the easiest might be just to go to the website traction five and we have like contact form there. Or you can reach out to me at Igor, I go r galati, g0r la t0v at hey h e y dot com. This is my email.

Lee Kantor: [00:21:46] Address and that’s traction. The number five.

Igor Gorlatov: [00:21:50] Yes, it can be number five or it can be words five as letters both lead to the same website.

Lee Kantor: [00:21:57] All right. Well, Igor, thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing important work and we appreciate you.

Igor Gorlatov: [00:22:02] Thank you so much. It was great talking to you and being on this podcast today.

Lee Kantor: [00:22:06] All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you next time on Startup Showdown.

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