Do things that don't scale but think how to scale: Building weeks #17 to 20 🏗️
A couple of really intese weeks, but also some exciting updates!
TL,DR
Intense weeks but stuff got done
Found 2 rockstars co-cofounders
Started first pilot
Spoke with angels and applied to YC and TS
Problem & Solution
To test our latest MVPP, I stopped random people at WeWork asking them to try it. It turns out most felt the stress and reported increased confidence in picking up the phone and calling a real client (I know it’s not scientific 😉). What I have also learned over the past weeks, is that as Ai makes outbound effortless the chances of talking to humans will decrease, so perfection will be key!
Ai is a really good sparring partner and it turns out to set it up properly is not as easy as giving a good prompt to chat GPT. In any case a key aspect for sales leaders is how easily it integrates with their data and how they can manage reporting.
Who buys this?
Now my challenge is to pick who to focus on first, my goal was to find a pilot customer to prove this tech works and there is willingness to pay. So I casted the net wide talking to many different companies and asking if they wanted to try. Now that we have a pilot customer it makes sense to narrow down on a specific use case and probably a segment. Here it’s a list of potential type of companies we could focus on:
Appointment setting agencies: they have crazy turnover and sellers there most of the time juggle a portfolio of products.
B2B SaaS: usually growing fast, easier to reach through my network and shorter sales cycles. The catch is the market might not be that massive and these companies might have other problems which take priority.
Solar panels & heat pumps sellers: sales training is key for these companies and they already have programs in place, it might be harder to start from them.
Banks: one of my co-founders (Now a full stack dev) used to work as seller in a bank and had to do cold calls. Banks have a lot of turnover especially for sellers, already pay sales coaches but coaching is not frequent enough.
In general a good focus is industries were leads are more expensive, think solar panels. It’s crazy to have a new joiners training on real leads. Alternatively you can have them trained on low priority leads, which also mean they are not in target, making training less effective.
Execution
🟢 Pick a co-founder and go through a trial project: I haven’t only found one but two, great fit and love working with those guys, hope it goes both way 🙂
🟡 Build and sell a MVPP (Minimum valuable paid product): we built a marvellous product, zero latency, close to real conversation and our pilot customer already used it multiple times. But we haven’t charged yet!
🟡 Finish the deck and start pitching angels: the first version is done and we spoke with two angels already, I then pulled back because we still need to refine our stories
🟢 Applied for YC and Techstars: still waiting on a feedback but confident we left it all on the pitch!
What keeps me up at night
A good friend, fellow founder every time we catch up asks me: “Do you sleep?”. I have to say I luckily do, so this section might need to be renamed, but I like to make it dramatic.
What if the pilot customer is not willing to pay: every entrepreneur I know told me those first bucks are incredibly hard, you want to get someone to pay you for something that is not done. But need that to prove it’s worth building it. What if when I ask them to pay, they say: “No thanks”.
How to properly frame the problem: give me a big number, that hurts. A feedback I got on my deck: “You have impressive numbers there, but show me how much it hurts”.
What if zoomed in too much on single customer and lost the big picture: in my past startups I focus too much on the big picture and didn’t validate fast enough
How can I choose the right niche to focus on: Sales training is a ocean, wouldn’t define it blue but I would definitely not red. Picking where to start might be the single more important decision we got to make.
Next 2 weeks
Get first revenue: charge something to our first pilot customer, key to show we are building something needed.
Get 5 more LoIs from target companies: show we can replicate revenue and it’s not only one company in need for the solution.
Write new deck: the first version was good, but got to make much clearer the impact of the problem and how massive is market.
Formulate the problem and test hooks: I have started working with a sales coach and over the next two weeks, starting from our value prop we will test several hooks to see which part of the problems our ICP care about (Saving money, increase revenue, increasing retention)
The next two weeks are key, once more, picking up speed and start filling the pipeline. This will put us in the best position to raise, right before the summer break (For the investor not for me 😉 )!