In my Get Ready For The Year of the Entrepreneur (2021) I set one of my goals is to start a failing business in 2021. And I’ve been hard at work ‘failing’. This is part 2 of my two part post on Building a SaaS Startup. Read Part 1 here.
But we also did things right:
Set a forcing function to drive action. Since I’m very deadline driven, I knew I needed a date or event to work towards otherwise it’s easy to get distracted. Forcing function is one of my favorite actions to apply to any new venture I undertake. Our big forcing function is a conference facility management conference that occurred April 21-22. So I gave us 3 months to build a product to bring to the conference.
Bringing in specialty players. Building a company is a team sport, for me at least. I knew I needed help building the product but thought I’d be able to run sales and marketing on my own.
Man oh man. It’s so much tougher to book meetings and talk to prospects than I ever thought. I’ve gained a huge amount of respect for sales reps throughout this process. The best thing I did for this business is to reach out to my network and bring in someone to focus on sales.
Talking to prospects is something I really enjoy and something that our team really excels at. We’re speaking to on average 2-3 prospects per week. We take a very inquisitive approach to these conversations. Positioning our product but also still in search for what is that ‘hair on fire’ problem that we can solve with our current capacity.
This openness has been critical to how our ideas are evolving, narrowing down to concrete problems that people want solved.
Big Realizations
The lack of research/push showed us a few key elements to this particular product that we are not quite ready to solve.
The first issue with our idea is who is the buyer? We found it particularly difficult to narrow in on who buys this solution in a company from an outreach and marketing perspective. What’s the job title? What size organizations have this problem?
The next issue is I didn’t realize how saturated the market already is with existing solutions. The big 3-4 hoteling tools and CMMS platforms already adapted to provide these capabilities into their toolset as a free add-on. So any company that we felt was our target audience that was buying technology already solved some of this. And that put us in a head-to-head to rip/replace an existing solution. Not a battle we were going to win
Refining the goal of the business:
At the same time of my light bulb moment that maybe this wasn’t quite the right market for us to be in, I also took a step back to see what kind of business do I really want to build here. Naturally there’s a lot pressure to ‘Go big or go home’. How do you build something that gets on TechCrunch. And while that may be a goal one day, today my lifestyle doesn’t support that.
So we reimagined what kind of business we want to be. I want a business that enables me to keep my full-time job while diversifying my income. Looking at a ‘side-hustle’ where we can sign on mid-market tech companies and provide a strong self-service model. Part-time sales reps and annual contracts to bring in revenue.
Pivot:
It’s the cool thing to do, right? That’s what all the books say, at least. We’ll call it a ‘change in strategy’ as I believe our initial idea is viable and has raised a $1MM+ in the VC market. So why change? Well I outlined a few reasons why above. Our ‘change in strategy’ was actually prompted by a prospect call. Per our disco notes – yes, we keep centralized notes for ever call to reference back to – she said,
“I won’t use your return to office product but what I’ve been asking people to build for me is I want to be able to program QR codes everywhere (coffee machines, conference rooms etc.) to track and diagnose specific issues. For example if a coffee machine is broken…which location, what happened, etc and it needs to integrate into my existing CMMS solution.”
So we took that pain point and shopped it around in every discovery meeting we setup to further validate it. After receiving positive feedback, we built a true MVP of the solution. Borrowing from other providers, very little custom code to try and sell the MVP.
Current State:
So where are we today? Today, we have two customers moving into a POC phase building us into their office reopening plan. We’ve still not taken a dollar yet but that is our next step. Close out the POCs, charge for the product, ask for referrals, and bring in new customers. Looking at a few other infrastructure items like a Support portal and other areas to support customers easier.
That’s my story! Have you started a company? Are you thinking about starting one? Reach out! Would love to connect, share notes, and introduce you to my network.