Planzai has reached another important stage of its development. Over the last few months we've been turning customer feedback into product refinements ready for the next stage of market testing.

I was struggling to ensure that I had communicated the strategy and goals for the next 3 months and was talking this through with David Kirk, my mentor and now non-executive Director of Planzai. David gave me an excellent suggestion - "why not write a press release for the future? Pick a date that you know represents an important milestone, and write the press release describing the success your plan has created at that point in the future."

I love this idea. I'm a visual thinker, so I could immediately see what I wanted a press release to look like in three months time. From there it was easy to set about writing it, describing our targets, the outcome of our activities and a quote from one of our future, happy customers. I then attributed quotes from team members describing how their input contributed to the outcome. This was important because a lot of our startup pains are derived from understanding how our team works and how our roles and individual goals impact on achieving our vision.

This technique is powerful because it captures the excitement and anticipation that we feel now, and sort of forward-engineers it into how we want to feel when we've delivered our plan. It gives context to our financial and user acquisition targets, and as we continue on our voyage into the unknown, we can refer back to see if we're heading in the right direction.

That leads me to the second part of the title of this blog post: I think that mentoring is one of the most important interventions I've had in the last 12 months.

Mentoring is a strange mix of experience and perspective. It's about shining a light on things you haven't thought of before, words that spark inspiration, and occasionally a good old-fashioned 'wise up!'. Without regular ideas and perspectives from David, as well as several other close friends and advisors, I doubt we'd be where we are today.

One of the many fascinating findings of the Startup Genome Project has measured the impact of mentors in relation to success. "Founders that learn are more successful: Startups that have helpful mentors, track metrics effectively, and learn from startup thought leaders raise 7x more money and have 3.5x better user growth". If you're starting a business, you need mentors.

Experienced mentors are hard to find, but I've found that friends who care about you and recognise your passion are a good start and can also make introductions. (I've had my share of time-wasters. A simple rule: avoid anyone who believes their own hype.) Genuine mentors do it because they can, and because they're putting something back.

Please jump into the comments - I'd love to hear about other folks' experiences of mentoring and those little suggestions that make a big difference.