Teki 滴

“Dripping water hollows out stone, not through force but through persistence.” ― Ovid

Teki is a one meeting methodology for projects building. Teki means drop (of water) in Japanese. The idea is doing small progress day by day in the process of building your project.

This methodology is ideal for:

• Small teams without full time to dedicate.
• Track the progress so that prevent to lose the north
• Share the past decisions to new members or stakeholders
• Projects that depends on people feedback (video games, social movements, events, etc)
• Projects that need fast learning and progress

Values

Pacing 🥁

Keep the rhythm of the project having small progress every week.

Focus 🧐

Working only in the right things.

Communication/Show? 📢

Telling the team and stakeholders why, how, when and what you are doing. Telling your customers why and what you are doing.

Definitions

Term	Definition
Project	Could be anything from a rock band to a mission to mars
Teki	Small iteration of progress. Minimum duration is 1 week
Iteration	Repetition of a process.
Teki Tracking Document	An historical record of all the Tekis, that can be shared with the team and stakeholders.
Pitch Deck	Small Presentation that contains the most important things of the project and can be shared with the stakeholders. And with your customers (with some modifications).
Stakeholders	People that have a strong interest in your project, but are not part of the team.
Customer	People that are going to use your solution. Hey! this can be you or friends in the begining.
The Solution	What your customers love to use, because solve their problem.
The Problem	What is causing pain to your customers, now or in the future (If you are building a new need).
Target Market	The group of humans arround the world that have the same problem that your customers
Market	All the people that buy and sell similar solutions than yours.
Traction	Evidence that your customers love your solution. Payments, downloads, follows, etc.
Team	People that are working on your project, directly or indirectly.
Progress	Small amount of improvement in the solution, that can be shared with the team, stakeholders or customers.
Infrastructure	The physical or virtual environment that you are building or using. Applications, services, methodologies, etc.

How to use it

Teki iteration start with one single meeting, that happens every week. But you can have it in any moment inside the week if you need.

  graph TB
    teki_meeting((Teki Meeting)) --> start_teki(Working)
    start_teki -.-> |1 week duration| week(Recolect traction data)
    week --> teki_meeting

    teki_meeting-->pd[[Pitch Deck Updated]]
    teki_meeting-->progress_doc[[Teki Tracking Document]]    

    start_teki2(Working) --> question(The team </br> has questions) --> |YES| teki_meeting((Teki Meeting))
    question --> |NO| lost_the_north(The Project </br> lost the north) --> |YES| teki_meeting
    lost_the_north --> |NO| before_start(Before start </br> a new task)--> |YES| teki_meeting

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Stages

One important thing before start every Teki is being aware of what is the stage of your project. So if you already reached the goals of some stage, you could know that you are in the next stage. This is super important to prioritize your work and keep the focus.

Ideation 🥑 🥚

Goals

• Discovering initial Problem.
• Discovering the initial Market.
• Discovering the initial Solution.
• Create your first Pitch Deck

Timing

3 months maximum (This obviously depends on the type of your project)

Starting 🌱 🐣

AKA: Minimum Viable Product/Project (MVP)

Goals

• Create your first Solutions
• Understanding your market
• Understanding the problem you are trying to solve
• Having initial traction
• You know that your team is able to solve the problem

Timing

6 months to 3 years

Tuning 🪴 🐥

AKA: Product Market Fit (PMF)

Goals

• Increase you customer satisfactions
• Your solution shall be the best possible in the market

Growing 🌳 🐓

Goals

• Refine your marketing strategy
• Increase your traction
• Improve your infrastructure

Before start

Every member of the team has to be prepared for the meeting

1. You are not an expert (If you were you don't need Teki and probably you have your project completed or your startup is already successful), so don't assume nothing. Even if you belive that you already know it, stay open and curious.
2. Prepare the traction data for the meeting. What data? any kind of data: interviews, analytics, meetings with customers, experts opinions, research, comments, etc, better if comes from your customer.
3. Create or copy from the last document (save in the in the cloud avoid saving it only in your computer) with this format #(number of meeting) - Date(more text is better) for example:
   • 1 - May 3 2020
   • 2 - Monday, May 15 2020
   • 3 - 2020/March/15

Some questions before start

Question	Answer
Who run the meeting?	The founder of the project shall to run the meeting.
How long is the meeting?	10 to 20 minutes
How many pages should have the Teki Tracking Document?	1 to 2

Document template

Stage:
1. Questions
2. Ideas
3. Tasks
4. Traction
5. Answers
6. Pitch Deck
    1. Problem
    2. Solution
    3. Product
    4. Market Size
    5. Business Model
    6. Underlying Magic
    7. Competition
    9. Marketing Plan
    10. Team Slide
    11. Traction / Milestones

Topics

1. Questions ❓

Write down all the new questions you and your team have about the project.

It doesn't matter how big the questions are or how ridiculous they are, having all the questions would make way more easy to identify what is the most important thing you should be doing in your project.

2. Ideas 🎈

Write all the amazing ideas you have for the next Teki, and for the hole project. Remember you only have 20 minutes maximum so try to keep it simple.

3. Tasks ✅

This is one of the most important parts of the Teki meeting, so be sure you have plenty of time to do it.

3.1 Select the most important question

The first thing that you need to do is detect what is the most important question you have. How could you know that?. Just select the question that separete your solution from the customer the most.

Rock band 🎸:

• How much time am I going to spend on this project?

This question for example is probably the most important because if you don't know how much time you are going to spend on this project, you will not be able to know if you are going to be able to finish it in time. The lack of this answer is separating you from showing your solution to your customer.

Kowing the other anser otherwize is not super important right now, because you don't even know the time you will use in your project.

Mission to mars 🚀:

Here is more difficult, because some of you could think that knowing the materials is the most important question. Because if you don't know that you never are going to acomplish your mission to mars. But that is not necessarily true.

Do you really need to build your own rocket to travel to mars? Have you researched if there is some other company that is actually selling rockets that are able to go mars?

In this part of the meeting is so important that the team reconcidered their questions. Remember that you are traveling blind through a forest full of challenges. Your real goal as project founder is to make something that other people will want to use. You can build tons of rockets if you want but that is what you want or need, not what your customers want.

If you are building something only because you want to use your free time and have some fun, if your are not planning to show your solution to customers, probably Teki can't be so helpful.

• Is there customers that need to go to mars?

That been said, I would select this question as the most important. If there is no one that wants to go to mars, you will be trying to build something that will not be used by anyone.

3.2 Define the task you are going to do this week

Rock band 🎸:

• How much time am I going to spend on this project?

How could you answer that question? You probably need to just try to make some music in the week and track the time you spended on it. Or you could need ask your boss or your parents if you can dedicate some time of your duties to this project.

So the task you are going to do is something like

• This week I will track the hours I would spend on this project. Because is the easiest way to know how much time you are going to spend on this project. So that I could countinue with the rock band project and show my music to my fans.
  • I need a notebook to trak the time.
• Today I will ask to my parents how much time I can spend on this project. Because I have weekly duties and I would like to have my parents support and permission. So that I will be able to shoy my music.

Be sure your tasks include:

1. When you expect to finish.
2. What you are going to do. Including sub tasks.
3. A way to know you are done.
4. Why this task is the best option to answer the question.
5. The results you expect of the task.
6. Part of the task is recopilate the traction data.

Mission to mars 🚀:

Ok so we selected

• Is there customers that need to go to mars?

I'm not going to go with the tipical make a poll. Or the other one create a landing page. Let's go more creative.

• This night I will send a fun payed message in four twitch channels asking if anyone would like to go to mars. Bacause I will get the chat and streamer feedback. So that I can have a better idea if there is potential customers.

  • We need to create 4 very specific messages to be sent.
  • We need to select 4 streamears that tipically stream tonight.

• This Wednesday I will go to the college and ask in five science classes if anyone would like to go to mars. Because I will get the feedback from the science students and professors. So that I can show to this potential market my ideas.

  • We need to contact 5 teachers in the college.
  • We need to ask for permission in the college.
  • We need to create at least 6 big pictures of mars to show to the students.

You can be super creative or go for the tipical ideas. Any option is fine. The real goal here is to do something that can help you to answer your questions, and fill the lack of information that you need to build your solution.

4. Traction 📊

Make a list of all the traction data you have collected in the project, keep the recent data first. This could be excel files, images, stats, or audio files. Any kind of evidence is valid.

It's super important have the full list in all the documents, you can remove the evidence that could be repeated or is not relevant any more (Remember you only should have 2 pages in the document).

5. Answers 💧

So now you can start to answer some questions. Writing the answers help you to understand your mistakes and hits in your project story. Write in a form of question and answer all your learnings so far.

6. Pitch Deck 🎪

There is no better instruction on what to put in your pitch deck than this https://slidebean.com/blog/startups-pitch-deck-examples/

These is the tipical content you could have:

1. Problem
2. Solution
3. Product
4. Market Size
5. Business Model
6. Underlying Magic
7. Competition
8. Marketing Plan
9. Team Slide
10. Traction / Milestones

So keep the basic content (only text) in this document. Remember that part of the goal of this meeting is fill this presentation so it is a good guide to create your next questions.

Examples

---

Rock band 🎸

• 1 - June 24 2020
• 2 - July 2 2020
• ...
• 21 - April 13 2021

Let's imagine that after 21 weeks the rock band project has already one song produced including the video. They have a youtube channel and some social networks as well. There they have an initial amount of followers and subscribers.

Notice these important things in the last document:

• They know that they are in Starting Stage, so they are not trying to tune their solution yet, and they are not trying to grow neither. The only missing task they have to swithc to Tuning Stage is beign sure they really have a good solution (The first video they made could have been just good luck). They want proof that they have a good solution.
• They switched to Latin Music, because they noticed that making rock music is ok, but they are better at Latin Music. Keep trying to make something that you are not good at is not always a good idea.
• The pitch deck slides order could be different.

So:

1. Embrace your stage
2. You can change the original idea
3. Be sure you are good at what you are doing

---

Mission to mars 🚀

• 1 - June 3 2020
• 2 - June 10 2020
• ...
• 93 - July 5 2021

Here the mission to mars team were able to create a company with a lot of technology, because no other company could offered the needed rockets. They also have a considered amount of customers that has their pre saled tickets. With a more big amount of fans in their social networks.

---

Frenquently Asked Questions

¿How to select what question to answer? https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMFwh4kQe/

To do list

• Update the strategy to selct what question to answer
• Update the way the answers are answered (date record)
• Remove the pitch deck from the teki doc
• Add some posts from linkedin of founders
• You can use sections to organize the answers and questions
• Adding Demo? (Show?)
• Ideas or progress? (Same as show?)
• Cambiar la palabra Traction to Data