EpsiFund
Tech-enabled revenue-based funding with a human touch
We'd like to claim all the credit for where we landed but, in reality we probably were lucky enough to bump into a few Shopify App developers and Agencies that somehow clicked with the product we were building. From that moment it has just become way easier to build and refine our product and a revamped MVP was finished by early September.
By July we've had a few paying clients and it has become even more apparent that we need to refine our focus and chose a better defined niche... The scalability was a massive problem even though we really remained at the MVP stage at that point. We have decided to divert our scarce resources to a new cusdev exercise to better understand whom we actually want to be servicing in the first place. More on this here: https://medium.com/@team_92127/how-we-landed-on-our-beachhead-market-6ef493f65797
Well, this was absolutely amazing to actually see how the process has ultimately worked albeit in a very manual way with some minimal automation and loads of number crunching in Google spreadsheets and model running in Google Colab 😬 Great feeling of finally delivering a solution to your first customer and getting paid for it! What followed wasn't that pleasant as we've discovered that other clients falling into our pipeline were way too diverse...
We probably spent too much time on a customer development but really enjoyed this process as we were mentored by a very strong cusdev guru. At that point we started getting some serious interest on the back of some previous interviews/chats so we thought we settled on our target audience. This was a false start as we quickly learned the hard way... We started building our first MVP but had to put a break and carry looking for narrowly defined customer persona.
It all started from an investment club that I've launched as a side hustle. I spent huge amount of time researching and studying some basic machine learning techniques and eventually worked out a few plausible underwriting models. Got a few friends who were excited to follow and launched a smallish credit portfolio investing in loans via lending platforms. It's been a great success but difficult to scale... I therefore decided to go independent looking to build my own origination and underwriting app. It turned out there is an unmet demand in alternative funding sources for founders who aren't willing to go down the VC route. This is how the idea of EpsiFund was initially born! There is a bit more to it one can read here: https://medium.com/@team_92127/go-with-the-flow-2943713c96e5
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