Excelway

With my team, we've been working on the alpha for a while. Having bugs while facilitating meetings is not a cool experience so we worked hard for a non-buggy beta version. We learned much from alpha users from the UX side of things. Now is time to test the market for real :)

We're currently inviting beta users one by one, selecting as much as possible our "ideal persona". This way, we had 15 sign-ups in the first week. Our initial goal was to get 30 sign-ups in order to be able to be as close to them as possible and learn from them. Now we're realizing that even if people signed up and seem committed (we included a 1-hour one-on-one demo on the process), some of them might just not use it. Anyway, we don't regret this process so far because I (Sophia) have learned much in theses 1-on-1 demos and have sharpened my demo skills. Now I can tell if someone is interested or even interesting for us to have as a beta user. I don't try to prove anything anymore and I'm much more confident in feeling if the user would be a good fit. I also listen better.

It has happened many times that I redirect people to other startups that we can consider "competitors". This might be non-sense for a salesperson... but I'm not a salesperson (yet) and I feel that I'm gaining people's trust this way.

Now we're trying new ways of acquisition like social media. Our next goal is to reach 200 sign-ups in a month. Let's go then...