4Degrees

With myself as the only sales person, we grew MRR by over 3x and our customer base by close to 3x. Some lessons learned:

• Charge more. The customers that we charged the least in the early days appreciated our product the least and were most likely to churn
• Build real relationships with your customers. Though your product may not be perfect, being highly responsive and human can help overcome a lot of flaws, and ultimately turn customers into fans and advocates.

We focused heavily on building out the technical side our team initially, hiring a designer + two engineers to rapidly move on building out our core product (alongside some contractors we hired to help). There's still so much ahead of us, but excited to see how fast we can move with more help!

We wanted to quickly figure out if the initial product we'd built was valuable and where the critical holes were - so instead of getting users onboard in exchange for 'a lot of feedback', we started asking for $$. Not too long afterwards, we got our first customer - a firm that had been watching the product progress and decided it was worth paying for!

Coming out of Techstars, we began fundraising to grow our team and begin heavier engineering and data science work on the product we had in mind - up to that point, the entirety of the product had been built by David (CTO), with some limited assistance from a friendly engineering contractor. We started raising that round in October, and finished in March - with most of the round comprised of angel investors.

As we got started in Techstars, it was clear to us that while we had a number of critical skillsets for building a company (sales, operations, development), we were missing a critical one to building a great product - design. So we quickly began looking for a designer to join our team full-time and help shape what we were going to build. After a lot of interviewing, we found someone we were excited about - and thanks to some of the Techstars funding, we were able to bring on our first employee!

We were lucky to get accepted into Techstars Chicago, one of the top startup accelerators in the world! While we already were planning on going full-time after our contracts at work were finished, this was too good of an opportunity to pass up - and our bosses were kind enough to let us go with their blessing.

As we were doing research, my co-founder was working on an initial MVP of the product in parallel with some of the basic functionality we envisioned - connecting to email and calendar, and giving you the ability to set reminders with your network. Once complete, we started to get initial beta users from our research in the product!

My co-founder and I had both had ideas around better management of professional relationships for a long time, but decided to start working to determine if there was a real need in the market. So we kicked off a set of 100+ user interviews, starting in February.