There is a tendency in the start-up community to be skeptical towards MBAs. In an industry that lauds performance metrics to constantly track progress, there’s something fluffy about a professional degree that is not a prerequisite for anything.

Unlike medical school or law school, you don’t need an MBA to go into business. Since much of the startup playbook is about learning as much as you can as quickly and cheaply as possible in order to reach some important milestone, many founders, investors, and engineers look at a $200k, two-year program as an inefficient means to an uncertain end.

My experience as a full time MBA does not necessarily contradict this outlook, but I do think there is a more nuanced conversation to be had. In a recent New York Times blog post, entrepreneur Cliff Oxford asserted that although MBA institutions are pouring resources into entrepreneurial programs, these programs still lead to classroom-centered teaching models that simply move too slowly to be relevant for start-ups, which often need to be up and running in months or even weeks. While Cliff also says that top MBA programs like those at Harvard and Stanford are worthwhile for networking, he generally argues that there is little value in the academic approach to entrepreneurship.

I agree with Cliff that some of the courses I took during my time as an MBA student haven’t yet been relevant for my career path. However, I did learn a few critical things in the classroom, and beyond that received the support and mentorship I needed to incubate not only one but two business ideas.

Would I say that all of this has been worth the sticker price of ~$200k, plus the opportunity cost? The cop-out answer is that whether or not it was worth it for me will not really help other people figure out if it will be worthwhile for them. That calculation needs to take into account personal financials, opportunity cost, and expected future salary. I’d recommend reading this article by Tim Berry for further discussion regarding whether or not an MBA is worthwhile to you. While many of the factors are highly individual, I do think it is important to point out where I found the real value so that others who are considering full or part time MBA programs can do the math for themselves.

With that in mind, here’s where I got the most out of my MBA.

1)   There Are Things You Can Only Learn in a Classroom

Contrary to popular belief, I’m going to say that my classroom experience was the most valuable part of my time at school. Following the logic that venture founding teams need both builders (engineers, operations specialists) and sellers (marketing, sales, business development), I focused my coursework on marketing, and some of these classes truly blew my mind.

Data is changing the way that businesses operate, and most of the start-ups that I see achieving success are highly reliant on customer analytics. While data science is still a nascent field, knowing basic calculus and statistics and learning how they are applied to modeling and forecasting changed the way I think about customers. Since customers are the center of any business, that changed the way I think. Period. Full stop.

Not all MBA marketing classes are created equal, but if you can find intensive, quantitative courses taught by leading researchers, you’re definitely going to get your money’s worth.  (It is worth noting that some of the best professors I had are beginning to offer some of their courses through Massive Open Online Courses but in my experience the real secret sauce is still being withheld and even if it were available, this stuff is not easily self-taught.)

2)   They’ll Invest in Their Own

After the courses, the next most valuable thing about my time in school was access to funding. Schools want the credit for the startups that come out of their students, and while it’s hard to attribute success to a classroom, it’s much easier to follow the money. For this reason, it seems that there is an increasing number of competitions with large cash prizes, such as pitch competitions, school-sponsored hackathons, and business plan competitions. Additionally, many programs offer opportunities to obtain support funding, which can be used to get internships at start-ups which might not otherwise pay, or to enable you to pursue your own ventures.

In my time as an MBA, I applied to around 11 different entrepreneurial competitions or support programs, won five, and was awarded nearly $25k. Not bad odds if you’re considering getting an MBA. The key is just to do your homework and make sure that you are looking at a program that is actually putting money behind what you read on their website.

3) Mentorship is Priceless

As a lonely entrepreneur, it’s often hard to find mentors in the real world. Maybe it’s easier if you live in a hub like Silicon Valley, but in my experience it is nearly impossible to find people (outside of family) who are really invested in your future and the future of your company. That’s why companies have advisory boards that get compensated—you usually have to pay for that kind of support and knowledge. So, as an individual, it seems pretty reasonable to pay for time in a classroom with someone who then becomes accessible outside the classroom as well. Think of business school as lead generation with mentors and advisers: as long as you are at a place with people on the faculty whom you respect, you can get a lot of value from those relationships.

At the end of his New York Times piece, Cliff states that you should only go to an MBA program that “offers real-world experience working alongside someone who is building a business.” To do otherwise, he says, “is pretty much like having athletes studying game film but never practicing on the field.”

Here’s the thing, though: if you need your MBA program to put everything on a silver platter for you, then you’re probably not cut out for entrepreneurship anyway. If, on the other hand, you find and are admitted to a program with a rigorous marketing department, ample resources, and faculty you respect, then any good entrepreneur should be able to make good on the tuition investment.

When it comes to this topic, I’ve sought counsel from mentors, fellow entrepreneurs, and numerous resources available online. While everyone has his or her own system for quantifying fit, the number-one piece of advice that I’ve heard and put into practice is to trust your gut.

The problem is that this is harder to do than it sounds.

As an entrepreneur raised in the era of analytics, I want to find metrics for everything. But how do you measure (and prove) a gut feeling?

The lessons of a business partnership test-run

When I was going through the co-founder “dating” process, I’d found a potential partner through my network who seemed to be perfect. We had complementary skill sets, aligned on the company vision, and were equally committed to the company’s success. We decided that we’d work together on a one-month trial basis and set goals for that time period. At the end of the month, we’d evaluate the partnership and discuss equity.

During our time working together, I was impressed by my potential partner’s sales abilities and drive to hit the personal goals we’d set. But when it came time to work together, we struggled to reach consensus on small details. Conversations that should have taken minutes would take hours, and would often require a post-mortem email or phone call to discuss our working styles. Though my potential partner was performing well by the numbers, my own productivity was dwindling as I spent more and more time on managing our relationship.

As the month drew to a close, I found myself increasingly uneasy. I knew that there were issues with my potential partner, but I also knew that the company would grow at a slower pace if I had to start the co-founder search from back at square one. When it came down do it, I trusted this person for the tasks we’d initially set out (mostly sales), but I didn’t think we’d be able to deal with the ups and downs of running a business together. At our one-month meeting, my equity offer reflected this feeling, which in turn, led my potential partner to pursue other opportunities.

After we parted ways, there was a brief moment of self-doubt—followed by a long stretch of relief. PopInShop’s progress retroactively validated my decision, as the metrics on overall growth supported my gut: after reverting to my status as a lone founder, the company made fast strides on product development and partnerships. Even better, my stress level went down and my relationships with contractors, advisors, and part-time support improved.

And from this pool of talented people, I ultimately ended up with another co-founder—this time one that would stick.

Finding the right business partner for me

It had been several months since I’d started PopInShop. For most of that time, I’d been working with a contract web developer to build out our site incrementally as I learned what customers wanted.

At various times during this contractor’s projects, we’d talk about what else he was working on and whether he’d ever be interested in joining PopInShop full-time as a co-founder. But we kept the conversations casual, in part because I wasn’t sure early on what our technical needs would be, but also because I’d been conditioned to believe that finding a technical co-founder was impossible.

Why did I think that? In my first year at Wharton, I attended an info session led by David Tisch of TechStars, a well-regarded start-up incubator. With a short hand-raising exercise, David found that in a lecture room full of 100+ aspiring entrepreneurs, only one person had a technical background and was looking for co-founders. (Another person in the room detailed that talk and his tips to overcome this challenge in a great piece that later ran in TechCrunch.)

I’d heard similar things in other entrepreneurial courses and at speaking events, but the number—1 out of 100—made it exceedingly clear: If finding a business co-founder was hard to begin with, then finding a technical co-founder was impossible.

Given that reality, my conversations with the contract developer didn’t move forward very quickly. But this actually turned out to be beneficial.

We worked together for months and over that time formed a great working relationship. We built trust and respect gradually, as opposed to having to constantly evaluate our trust and respect levels on the period of a trial schedule. There was no meta discussion—we just got things done.

Another reason this turned out to be beneficial was that I was able to show this would-be partner what I could do as an entrepreneur. I got customers, found partnerships, and generated revenues. I wasn’t just going to boss around the product guy and make demands. I could hustle.

By the time I was sure that I needed technical talent in-house and was ready to try again with co-founder dating, my contractor wanted to throw his hat in the ring. And because we’d already worked together and answered some of the tough questions with our actions, we went from casual conversations to talking terms within the week. Today, this contract developer is my co-founder and partner in the business.

The lesson from my experience with failed co-founder dating is to trust your gut. But when things are right, my gut is usually pretty quiet. It’s the absence of anxiety that made me realize that I trusted my co-founder and wanted him to be a partner in the business.

And after going through both experiences, I suspect that formal trial periods vs. contracting may have a big impact on gut reactions. Contracting is a much better way to build a relationship, if your business can afford it.

Fundraising is hard work. It’s a simple truth that every entrepreneur knows: Getting the capital to start or grow your business is often harder than running the business itself.

Or at least, it can seem that way when you’re in the fundraising cycle, with the endless meetings, pitches, and negotiations.

In my experience, the most time-consuming part of the process is relationship building. Although it might seem like there’s a formal process in place to raise capital—an application or pitch deck to submit, an opportunity to pitch, a decision made—nobody ever signs a check based on one interaction. (And for good reason—that would be super risky!)  Instead, people want to get to know you, the entrepreneur, and to see your progress, even if over a short time period. If you can build this into your fundraising process, you’re more likely to see success.

I learned this lesson when I raised the first round of seed capital for my startup PopInShop, an online platform that connects brands and boutiques to facilitate short-term, cross-promotional shopping events. I was finishing my MBA, and through the university had access to a fund that invested in student-run businesses. The fund was overseen by an investment committee of 10-15 individuals, and each week, they evaluated pitches from two companies seeking capital.

I heard about the investing group when PopInShop was still very early-stage. We had just finished our business plan, and were still in the process of trying to figure out exactly how we would validate our business model and assumptions. We knew we’d need money at some point, but we thought we should wait to talk to investors until we knew more about our product, market, and plans to deploy the capital.

Fortunately, as we began to discuss the idea in public, our peers and advisors suggested we talk to the investment group. One person even went so far as to make an introduction to someone on the committee. We didn’t want to be rude, so we followed up.

And in that first conversation with the investment committee member, we barely talked about the business at all—instead, we spent most of the 30 minutes talking about our outlook on the retail industry and about our personal experiences with the space.

This led to a second meeting two weeks later, in which the committee member wanted to learn more about the business. Three weeks after that, she offered to sponsor our application and gave us a time to pitch the whole committee.

One of her recommendations to us, as she helped us prepare for the final pitch, was that we should try to get to know the other committee members. She helped us set up meetings with four other people. This was crucial because it gave us a chance to learn what their reservations might be before we really had to make our case. We heard what each of them liked and were skeptical of in our business model, and were able to give them a sense of who we were as entrepreneurs.

When the time came for our final pitch, we’d already had more than 10 meetings with the people sitting around the table. We knew them, and knew what kinds of questions they would ask and how to pre-empt them. More important, they knew us, and believed that we were the right team to tackle the opportunity we were presenting. And best of all, our original conversation had happened earlier than we originally planned, so we were able to show significant progress over time.

A few days later, we got good news: They wanted to invest!

So what’s the takeaway?

1. Scout the decision-makers

While I didn’t follow this step precisely, I still reaped the benefits of it (and I would definitely follow this advice next time): Figure out who the investors are that will be making the decision about whether to fund your company, and learn as much as you can about each of them. What industries do they have experience in? What companies have they contributed to in the past? What issues are important to them? Do you have any personal connections to any of them—a mutual friend or colleague, an alumni connection, a LinkedIn connection, etc.?

2. Get friendly

If you do have a personal connection, this step can be easier to execute. (Not coincidentally, this is also why networking is so important to success in business.) But even if you don’t have a personal connection, this step is still viable—investors are in the business of making money, and if you and your business present an opportunity to make money, they’ll usually take your call (or answer your email, as the case may be). This is especially true if you’ve done your background research, and know how to present yourself to each investor in order to pique their interest.

It’s incredibly valuable to establish contact with your prospective investors and let them get to know you on a personal level. Successful businesses are the result of the management team, not the business idea. The investors want to know who you are and why you’re the right person to run your company, so make it happen!

The more you can build trust with and get to know each of your prospective investors, the better off you’ll be when it comes time to deliver your formal pitch.

3. Make your pitch specific to the investors

You only have so much time to make a pitch and win over an investor, so you want to use your minutes wisely.

Once you’ve gotten to know the team of people you’ll be pitching to, you can tailor your pitch to meet their unique needs and concerns and avoid wasting precious time on issues that don’t matter to them.

At this point, you probably also know enough about your prospective investors and their interests to have a good idea of what kinds of questions they’ll be asking you during and after your presentation. Prepare good answers. Pre-empt the questions and include the answers right in your pitch.

Make your pitch specific to the people in the room you’re trying to persuade—the return on your effort will make it time well spent.

I applied for the Innovation Fund in February of 2013. Working with a classmate, I spent two weeks putting together our forms and creating the required video explanation. We decided to ask for $5,000—the maximum amount granted—to test the idea for PopInShop in a few Philadelphia boutiques.

After submitting our application, we were elated. There was something about putting our plans in writing and sharing it with others that made us we feel legit and full of momentum. We were so confident that we’d get the grant that we started to spend the money before we had it. In March, we negotiated fees that we’d pay boutiques to host PopInShop pilot events.

But as the weeks went by, we began to get nervous. We heard nothing—not even notice that our application was under review. Our sense of urgency magnified as the date of our first pilot event got closer, so we decided to get more aggressive.

We found out the name and contact info of the individual who oversaw the fund and began sending regular emails. When we didn’t get a response, we called and left voice messages. When that didn’t work, I began to stop by the Innovation Fund office, desperately trying to make myself difficult to ignore.

It seemed like the persistence paid off when we finally heard back. Out of the blue and with no explanation, we were told that we’d been awarded $1,000 for our venture. There was no feedback on why that amount was chosen—just directions for how to sign the documents and get the money. Not wanting to look a gift horse in the mouth, we took the check. The only problem was that we needed more: We’d already committed $2,000 to local boutiques.

Try, Try Again

We went forward with our plans to pilot the PopInShop concept, confident that we’d find some way to meet our shortfall. After the event was complete, but before our first payment was due, I went back to the Innovation Fund office to see if there was a way to ask for more money. Though the person in charge was hard to track down, I did have some casual conversations with others in the office. Through this, I learned that there was an informal policy to award small grants first—most people who were awarded got $1,000—but then the fund would do follow-on grants if the grant recipient could demonstrate progress. I also learned that they rarely gave out the full $5,000 grant, but instead awarded ventures a maximum of $4,000.

Armed with this contextual information, I re-submitted our application, this time asking for an additional grant of $3,000. I mentioned our pilot event, and shared press clips from that first launch. Based on my past experience, I followed up on the application with daily emails, calls, and office drop-bys. After a week of this, we got the second check—just in time to pay for our first pilot.

The Takeaways

Perhaps the process would have been less stressful if we’d gotten the casual run-down before submitting. Looking back on it, it seems obvious that external factors often dictate funding terms. This is one of the reasons that our current advisors recommend that before pitching any particular venture capitalist, we learn about their average financing round size, and how much they’ve already committed of their total capital.

It also seems obvious to me that when dealing with busy people, persistence pays off. I’ve seen this play out when approaching angel investors, many of whom are difficult to track down (and not because there’s something inherently wrong with our pitch).

But overall, I think the biggest success factor in getting the second, larger check was having an ace to play. I hear this now all the time, when getting advice on fundraising: Save some good news about your business so that you always have an update to share that demonstrates progress. We did this unintentionally, but it certainly worked to our advantage.

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It was good for a lot of reasons. Most obviously, we won $1,000 in prize money that we put towards our minimum viable product (or MVP). But even if we hadn’t won, the competition itself forced us to move from the business planning stage to the real world, and in the process we learned what makes for a compelling pitch.

By the time I learned about the pitch competition, I’d already spent a few months doing market research and writing a business plan for what would become eventually become PopInShop—an online platform that connects brands and boutiques to facilitate short-term, cross-promotional shopping events. Given the work I’d already done, then, the pitch application should have been easy. All we had to do to participate was submit a one-page overview and a two-slide deck. Judges would review the applications and then pick up to 10 finalists to pitch in front of a panel of experts at a public event.

Despite my 20-page business plan, the idea of standing up in front of a room full of people and pitching was intimidating. It was tempting to not apply, to tell myself that we needed more time for research and more time to craft our application. It was also tempting to tell myself that the perfect pitch would come from the perfect slide, and the perfect slide would include an amazing infographic that encapsulated our entire business plan and all of our research to date.

We resisted these temptations and decided it was time to change the way we worked. Instead of spending all of our time on the research and document creation—which, as MBA students, was relatively easy and safe to do—we would, from then on, spend our time talking to people. We needed to get out of our heads and see if anyone else thought our idea was a good one. Although we cared most about what our customers thought, getting feedback and validation from the judging panel at the pitch competition would be a good first step.

Galvanized by our new focus, we submitted the application and were pleasantly surprised when we were selected to pitch. We already had our two slides ready to go: one slide on the problem we wanted to solve, and a second slide on why PopInShop was the best solution. What we didn’t have was any of the key things that investors might use to evaluate a business, as opposed to an idea. We didn’t have a tangible product to show. We couldn’t demo a website since we hadn’t build one yet. We didn’t have any customers or revenues to show traction.

Fortunately, a few days before the competition we came across a helpful post on Pandodaily. The author was providing tips on how to pitch to investors, and the key message was simple: Make sure you address the question, “Why now?”

With this advice, and partly because we didn’t have much else to show, we planned our pitch as follows: In the two minutes of time we were allotted, we spent 30 seconds on each slide and then a full minute talking about why the problem was particularly relevant NOW, and why our solution fit with the way retail was moving NOW. We really wanted to contextualize PopInShop so that the judges would not only appreciate our idea, but would understand that now was the time to take the plunge–or in this case, why now was the time to give us $1,000 so we could take the plunge.

After pitching, we sat back and watched our peers. As expected, other finalists focused on product and traction. Many of their pitches were well-done, and one especially competitive business founder brought in not only a prototype, but also a sales lead that could potentially see his product in stores across the country. I thought for sure we were beat. But when the time came to announce the winner, PopInShop took the prize.

We walked away with our first bit of capital to put into the business, as well as validation of our idea from a panel of judges that included investors and business journalists. It was this momentum that allowed us to start approaching customers.

I can say with certainty that we wouldn’t have won if we hadn’t applied—Step 1 in any situation–and also that we wouldn’t have won if we hadn’t made our business seem immediately compelling, which is Step 2 of delivering a winning pitch.

Did you know this article is part of our Bplans Pitch Guide? Everything you need to know about creating your pitch, all in one place.

The ideas behind lean startups can be drilled down to a few straightforward ideas:

1. Deploy resources stringently, incrementally proving out the assumptions that drive your business model.
2. Get customer feedback as early as possible.
3. Revise your product or service as quickly as possible.

Over the last year, the combination of these ideas has changed the direction of my business, PopInShop, an online platform that connects emerging designers and retail brands with independent boutiques across the country. The end result is that brands can get exposure in new markets by setting up pop-up shops or trunk shows within existing brick and mortar storefronts that are a good fit for their product, and store owners get a source for consigned merchandise to attract new customers and engage existing customers.

When I first started PopInShop, I pitched it as a marketplace for brands and boutiques—I said it was ”like the AirBnB for retail.” But after following the lean startup principles and learning from my initial customers, I now pitch PopInShop as an online dating site for brands and boutiques—I say it’s ”like the eHarmony for retail.” It’s a nuanced difference that has had significant implications for our product development and business model.

This is the path my business took from the “idea phase” to our current product, using the lean startup methodology.

Deploying resources stringently

In my experience, the most organic lean startup principle to implement is the incremental use of resources. Like many entrepreneurs, we didn’t have a choice on this matter since capital for PopInShop trickled in gradually. First, I won a pitch competition with a $1,000 prize. Then, we were approved for a $4,000 grant. Finally, we got a small round of seed funding from a local investing group.

Each of these milestones happened a few months apart, so at no single point did we have enough capital to hire a developer and create our fully-imagined retail marketplace. Instead we asked ourselves a lean startup question at each juncture: How can we use this money to get in front of our customers so that we can re-evaluate and revise our product?

Getting customer feedback

Our customers are retail brands and stores, so the first step was to build out a basic version of our website to reach these companies. In lean startup speak, this was called a minimum viable product, or MVP. We designed an attractive landing page and a simple registration process. We wanted to answer the most basic question about our business: Would brands sign up for our services, and would they pay us for what we planned to offer?

We could have sent out surveys, but with a lean startup, the goal is to get closer to a real market response. So we represented ourselves as the business we believed we’d become, and emailed 100 brands. Fortunately, nearly half wanted to give us a shot. Brands were more desperate for our service than we’d originally anticipated because the alternatives in the market were worse than we’d realized.

We used this information in our grant application, and when that second round of capital came through, we asked ourselves again: How can we use this money to get customer feedback? We’d learned about brand response to PopInShop, but boutiques were wary of our non-existent track-record.

We decided to used our grant funding to pay stores upfront to rent space on their floor. This was the quickest way to build credibility for future sign-ups, and to collect valuable data on the in-store experience. We sectioned off corners, shelves, and window space in participating boutiques and then sourced product from the brands in our initial outreach campaign. We set up displays with iPads so that shoppers could buy the products in our sectioned-off areas more easily.

The in-store display at PopInShop’s first pilot event at a boutique in Philadelphia.

Unfortunately, it turned out that shoppers didn’t want to buy from iPads in a boutique environment. It also turned out that store employees didn’t have much incentive to direct shoppers to our products when we’d already paid the store upfront.

To sum it all up, here’s what we’d learned for $5,000:

• Emerging brands were desperate to get exposure in stores.
• Stores were very picky about what to put on their floor.
• Product doesn’t sell itself in retail.

Intuitively these qualitative findings and the statistics that backed them up seemed less valuable than our assets. After all, we now had an MVP. We had users. We even had a prototype for an iPad purchase display. But the lean startup approach is about getting closer to product-market fit, and these findings indicated that we needed to rethink our product roadmap and our business model.

Revising and re-launching the product

As we evaluated other models for online platforms, we remembered some of our early customer conversations. Many brands and stores had described PopInShop as a matchmaker when paraphrasing our pitch back to us. We hadn’t thought much of the analogy beyond its implications for sales and marketing, but now we dug deeper. We looked into the digital equivalent of matchmaking—online dating—and found that the user experience on premium sites was more about curation and recommendations than a pure marketplace. We also found that these sites had different revenue models, charging membership fees or performance-based matchmaking fees as opposed to only taking a commission.

Using this as inspiration, we repeated the lean startup process with a new set of MVP features and payment plans. Today, it’s these features and payment plans that are driving brands and stores to sign up and use our services in increasing numbers.