Rejection was an eye-opener for my startup
It’s rare to come across a first-time founder who has it all figured out — moving quickly, failing quickly and jumping on to the next item, all while being scrappy, hustling, and trying multiple avenues to research and launch their audience and product.
I fell into the category of someone who was treading very carefully and wanted to bring the best world-in-class product out there.
It’s not that I did not speak to customers or that I did not speak to the right customers; I did not speak to enough customers, and I did not ask them the right questions — until it was too late.
My co-founder and I got the idea to build a product like Geeks and Experts in 2020. Our problem statement was pretty clear to us — accessing experts is too difficult if you want to reach out to someone to get quick advice on a topic — you spend too much time watching videos and reading lengthy blogs! A quick face-to-face conversation is much easier and quicker and gets you the personalized response you need.
We started digging a bit deeper and found that multiple use cases could be applied to this problem — consultants, subject matter experts, and content creators — could join as an expert and give advice to users.
Of course, we quickly realized that we needed a focused and specific target audience. After a lot of customer discovery and interviews, we concluded that independent solo entrepreneurs struggle to get first-hand advice about startups. Social media DMs and finding “someone who knows someone” doesn’t cut it. That’s why we started narrowing down on this audience to give them a directory of experts available to talk to 1:1.
With a bootstrapped approach, we had to find efficient and cost-effective ways to approach our audience and get sign-ups once our MVP was ready in September 2022. We got our friends and family members to join. (One of the most crucial things a founder can have is a strong support system, and I am more than grateful for the hype squad I get to rely on each day!)
Our user base had been growing at a reasonable pace with organic, word-of-mouth marketing working and users referring others to join our marketplace. Great! Maybe we’re ready to take this up a notch?!
I began approaching accelerators, mentors, investors, and other networks to get on to the next step and quickly move forward with their support. I even got a response from some advisors who invited us to present our idea and product for potential investment and access to their ecosystem. I was thrilled with how things were going and felt ready to take the plunge.
It wasn’t until the second meeting was over that we heard back from the team with a rejection. I wasn’t mad or upset; I was just disappointed. I faced rejection when I was fundraising for a non-profit! I even faced a lot of rejection in job hunting when I first moved to the USA.
What disappointed me was how I wished I had done much more sooner. I read the book “The Mom Test” a bit too late in the day. I “hustled” to find scrappy ways to reach my target audience by simply sitting at my computer. I spoke to all the people to guide me to master this important pitch, but in the process, I lost track and focus of the product and users. It was a real hit in the gut to know that I had let a lot of things go off my radar.
For starters, I was so focussed on the MoM growth of users I did not even look at retention. When I looked at some retention figures, I did not even understand cohort-based retention. I had no idea what the users wanted most. Secondly, once I did understand retention, I completely missed the big picture of how I would increase the LTV of the users. Thirdly, I had been “talking” to customers, but instead of getting out of the building and finding them, I was waiting for them to respond to my messages on Slack, Reddit, Twitter and so on.
In the 6 weeks of going from almost getting funded to getting rejected, I learned much about the importance of not standing too close to the elephant. I wasn’t attached to the product or the idea, but I wasn’t married to the user either because I did not know the user’s journey well enough.
I got back to it, and here are some things I did:
I got out of the building and attended IRL events to meet prospective customers, interview them, and understand their pain points.I built multiple landing pages to A/B test what the audiences resonated with and sent them a follow-up form to ask them for feedback.I got into scrappy mode, joined Facebook groups, Telegram, and Discord channels, sent DMs on social media, and personally wrote to 100s of potential customers about what I was building.I drafted newsletters inspired by some of the best content creators I have been following and sent them to the segmented audiences to see what they resonated with and if they’d be happy to get on a call.I tested different hypotheses of who would be my customers by testing B2C and potential B2B clients who I could pilot the product with.
As confusing as this sounds, it is now beginning to put the full puzzle together for me. Instead of leading with the product, I am leading with the users. But first, I am finding a good number of users with whom I can share my product and focus on how I can provide value to them in the future. I will keep iterating the product based on discoveries and retention metrics.
What would be your advice for a first-time founder (bootstrapped) trying to find product-market-fit? Let me know in the comments section!
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