We are 3 months old startup, have ipad and tablet apps in developement, zero experience in sales, our developers are freshers except me with 10 years exp in coding. We thought of trying to get some customers and strangers feedback about our product and their interest before launching the apps on app store. When we mail the prospect about our product, they don't even reply, it may be discarded.
We then tried showing up some data about prospects in our app, attached android, ipad images, at least they could say that they are not interested at this time, or they may decide and let us know sooner. Some of them pick our call, clarify their understanding about apps. Some of them are going ahead and asked for price, how to get the apps working on their mobile device.
For each prospect, our sales rep has to spend a lot of time preparing the data that is relevant to our potential prospect, to send the screen shots.
This article is very good to target high potential prospect who can give us good business even if we spend a 2-3 days to prepare the data for them. Since we lack in sales, we don't know the best way to get this done. For each prospect we have to spend a lot of time, if they are not interested, we are losing our time.
I like that exercise and spend time with family part, emotional drain is cause for productivity lost, bad decisions. The basic definition of start up is to get it running, building everything all along, customers, product, technology, architecture, user experience, UI Design, re-iterate the learning and fine tune again and again. Mentor is not needed for technology advise or adding business value or evaluating user interface, instead a mentor helps to drive the startup crazy, throw the founders into kickboxing stage, let them fight and learn than learn and fight.
Go to their site, find the list of startup listed. you see, there is no relevant improvement on the site, no apps as they promised to build. Just plain html pages on few sites.
I do personally analyzed 50+ companies in Indian startup scene who gone through incubators. Not many of them had success. I asked one of the founder of the company who had gone to MS Accelerator, he mentioned as 4 months of office space without rent.
I serious doubt mentor contribution in the startups. Every problem is unique, I exactly don't know what mentors brings to the team and table in such a short meeting (1-2 hrs) on weekly basis.
If you see them as a practice, it vary team to team, project to project, time to time. Agile is NOT dead. It was not there at all.