SaaS for helping you find Waldo in large companies
Hi IndieHackers,
I’m working on a tool that helps you find a particular person in a company based on search attributes like job title, location, team name, skills or hobbies. I worked at a 2000+ company before and would have loved to have something like this. The ones who have experience in working at large companies - have you had moments where you had difficulty “finding waldo”? If so, I’d love to hear more about how you went about it!
Landing page: https://www.whoandwhat.io
Hey Max,
I like the idea, and even in a 500 person company I sometimes need it. I started going into MS teams that had a hierarchical structure of the company (based on active directory) to find people who's name I forgot (haha) at least I knew the manager.
Other tools also provide such an AD sync (we had peoplegoal as HR tool, and it was similar there). But in general it's quite poor. Now, me as a user, I doubt I'd pay €4 per month for a search I'm doing once or twice a month. But from a corporate point of view this might get very different. Corporate pricing usually looks at scale, therefore you'll need a different pricing when they take more accounts. Also, for a single company with 2000 people, you'd receive 8k/month, that's good earnings! But I believe too steep for what you're currently offering.
My advice is: go back to your target audience (you're now reaching out to the users on IH, but my feeling is that this should be driven by corporate strategy - think HR, office management... - to make finding people and building connections easier.) When you talk to them, your value story is going to be entirely different (It's somewhat in your website, but too far down)
You're currently talking about a lot of different value propositions, and knowing the corporate processes and tooling I think you might drown if you provide all. I think you're better off going to talk to the right people (both who will be spending the money and who'll have to use it), understand what their pain points are and build around this. Maybe you're going to be building a corporate mentoring application in the end... :-)
I'm doing more of this mentoring as part of Validator.phalox.be. I'm looking for a couple of alpha testers in case you're interested...
First of all, thanks so much for taking the time to write up such elaborate feedback, really really appreciate it! I completely agree with you regarding the target audience, the people I should talk to don't hang out on Indie Hackers. We've tried doing enterprise sales and it's turned out to be very difficult. We've tried:
and neither strategy really bore fruit. We feel like a good people search solution on its own is maybe not something that companies are jumping at right now, especially not in times of tight budgets. That's why we're going to try to be more strict at applying the Mom Test when talking to prospects rather than just present our solution. And as you said, who knows what our product will be in the end! 😄
And thanks for sharing your site, bookmarked it! Being bootstrapped, I think we're going to try doing idea validation and customer development on our own for now, but I'll happily get back to you if we need professional help!
Hey Max, Can you send me a DM on twitter (@phalox) (I can't send you any messages it seems...). I'd like to tell you a little more & no strings attached!
Holy shit you guys quit your jobs to start this! You've got balls.