Ablorde Ashigbi is the Co-Founder and CEO of 4Degrees, a Chicago-based technology company applying machine intelligence to help teams in relationship-driven industries manage their most important source of opportunity – their professional networks. Prior to 4Degrees, Ablorde has held various investor and consultancy positions at companies including Pritzker Group Venture Capital, Bain & Company, and G2 Crowd. When he’s not doing that, you can usually find him lifting weights, reading books, or eating BBQ.
What is 4Degrees all about?
At 4Degrees, we focus on understanding the strength of relationships and helping our customers turn them into something valuable – whether that is acquiring new customers, attracting funding, or seeking new job opportunities. In short, our platform helps track the connections our customers are making in a dynamic fashion. It provides insights and recommends actions to build new relationships over time and strengthen existing ones.
Tell us a little bit about your background and how you started your company?
The inspiration for 4Degrees comes from the backgrounds of myself and my co-founder. Prior to founding the company, we worked in a few different industries that are heavily relationship-driven (think venture capital, private equity, consulting firms). We had come to realize the role relationship networks play in helping companies grow and succeed, and how ineffective manual and transactional focused systems are in facilitating that. Based on our experience and feedback from our prospective customers, my co-founder and I took the leap and started 4Degrees. We’ve spent a lot of time trying to understand the challenges that our customers face in managing and driving value from their relationship network and how to best answer our customers’ needs.
What was the biggest problem you encountered with your business and how did you overcome it?
The biggest problem we had was finding the right skill sets to round out the founding team. As an example, we knew that great design was going to be a driver of how well adopted our product was by our users. My co-founder David and I bring solid product, engineering and business skills to bear, but neither of us are designers.
Finding an exceptional designer willing to join our company in the earliest stages, with all the risk that entailed, was a huge challenge. Given the nature of our business, we relied heavily on our relationships to find the right fit. Ultimately, the vast majority of hires we made in that domain came through referrals from our advisors and professional connections.
What were the top mistakes you made starting your business and what did you learn from it?
The biggest mistake that we made early on was believing in our initial MVP so strongly that we waited too long to listen to the market and adapt the product. For instance, there were early versions of our products that did not pay as much attention to the importance of tying relationships into the business development process, which is now core to our solution. Our main takeaway from that experience is the deceptiveness of ‘happy ears’ – which changed how we pursued customer discovery efforts for future product development.
How do you separate yourself from competitors?
What sets us apart is the technology we leverage on the back-end to make our platform highly effective. By utilizing machine learning and artificial intelligence, we analyze the history of communications data, for example, email and calendar exchanges, to score relationship strength and suggest how someone can leverage these relationships for different purposes. We also apply machine learning to the categorization of a team’s relationship network. By doing so, we can foster a better understanding and ensure that we share relevant information, such as news and events, with the most relevant contact.
What is something that you do daily to grow as an entrepreneur?
I’m a believer that your calendar displays your priorities – so I try to make sure I’m spending my time in a way that reflects what’s most important. At the beginning of each day, I take my 2-3 top priorities and schedule time on my calendar to reflect those goals – with the belief that if I can execute on those 200+ times a year, the company will move forward materially.
What has been your most effective marketing strategy to grow your business?
Referrals from existing customers. One of the benefits of operating in a heavily relationship oriented industry is that when you do your job well your customers talk to each other about your product, its value and how they use it in their daily lives. Outside of that, we complement those efforts with content marketing and performance advertising, but it begins and ends with building upon central relationships.
If you only had $1000 dollars to start a new startup, knowing everything you know now, how would you spend it?
First, I would spend a portion incentivizing unaffiliated customers or potential customers to have conversations with me to make sure I understood the problem my product addressed and the specific way that problem manifested in their lives.
Next, I would build an early version of the product (likely using no-code or prototyping tools) to quickly test how well our proposed solution solved a real problem for the user we’re trying to work with.
Last, I would spend a part of it driving demand to a landing page, or some other mechanism through which I could gauge interest in our solution – and hopefully identify what channels might work best in the process.
What’s your best piece of advice for aspiring and new entrepreneurs?
Control the controllable. In building a company, there are a lot of elements and variables that you cannot control. You cannot fully control how the markets are going to react to your solutions, but what you can control is the amount of effort and energy you put into what matters. For example, you have control over how you prioritize your time and how you treat the teams that you construct and build.
What is your favorite quote?
I think one quote that resonates with me is not majoring in the minors. This means focusing on the things that truly matter. It is easy to get caught up in the little things that end up consuming a lot of your time. They can also distract you from seeing the bigger picture, whether that is the mission of your business or your personal entrepreneurial goals.
How is running a tech company different than what you thought it would be?
Nothing was a major shock, but there certainly were some surprises. For instance, everyone says building a company is a rollercoaster, but it is hard to understand the magnitude until you are living it. Hiring in a startup is another piece of that cadence; it is a unique challenge to convince someone to come on board in the middle of a journey, with limited resource allocation, be that financial or otherwise.
How can readers get in touch with you?
To learn more about 4Degrees, you can visit www.4degrees.ai. As for me, you can connect with me on LinkedIn or on Twitter, where my handle is @AblordeSays. To anyone who reaches out, I look forward to engaging in conversation with you!
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