Getting Back to Thinking Small

We're at an interesting point in our early startup life cycle. We've launched our product and are trying to sell our product to any company that we can get a hold of. While this has been exciting and provided us with a lot of knowledge, it's not the right way to go.

We started off building an MVP and conducting customer discovery calls at the same time. That started us down this path wherein we'd develop new features and follow up with more meetings.

There was interest in our product and our interviewees were asking for updates. Great!

Not so great...

Yes, it's awesome to have positive feedback (as long as you're also uncovering the negative). But it lead us to chasing every opportunity. These people belonged to marketing agencies, technology companies, consumer brands, and more... All sorts of industries, businesses, and sizes.

Our simplistic process turned into a shotgun approach. We were getting feature requests and having a difficult time finding common themes. That's when we realized we needed to specialize.

(That in combination with reading various books and talking with a handful of mentors.)

Let's Think Small

Moving forward, we need to contract in our way of thinking. Let's simplify and specify who we go after. As Paul Graham is famous for saying, "Do Things That Don't Scale." Let's find that one person that makes the most sense and solve their problems. Doing this will give us the knowledge we need to improve our product and eventually expand our targeting in the future.

Both the FAU Tech Runway Venture Program and 1909 Accelerator will help us with this part of our business...starting this week actually.

If you're just starting out, make sure you keep things small and agile. Do them well, then worry about growing. While we thought we knew this, it was nice having a reminder. We're excited to move forward with this (re)new(ed) mindset in our quest for the first sale.