Inquisitive

So the rocket emoji might be bit OTT, but very happy to have our first paying customers on the pre-launch beta of Inquisitive!

We had three customers last week, which made us £225 (c. $300). What’s more - (using Inquisitive) - they’ve all already connected with potential early adopters for their products.

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Here’s a few things that helped us get there.

Picked a target sub-segment

Although most of our customers in the future will (hopefully) be ‘lone’ entrepreneurs or those on accelerators, we’ve been targeting ‘venture building’ firms in the early stages.

These companies cycle through different startup ideas quickly (so we’ll get lots of feedback), have pre-existing budget for this kind of work, and feel the pain of trying to validate your idea a little more than others (so are easier to convert at these early stages).

Did as little as possible

In short, we tried to do the bare minimum to get to this point. For example, we currently build lists of a startup’s target market manually, and we didn’t even have a payment page until someone said they wanted to pay…!

To do this, we demoed much earlier than we felt comfortable with, and iterated based on feedback until we had some people convert. This also allowed us to refine messaging etc.

Kept plugging away

These customers took a couple of months to get on board. We first spoke to them to see if they experienced the problem we wanted to solve (i.e. challenges validating the problem existed and connecting with early adopters), and tested our solution with them once/twice before they converted.

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Obvious points perhaps, but hope they help spark some thoughts.

Over the next month, we’re going to focus on:

• Ways to increase the number of early adopters that connect
• Improve our behind-the-scenes workflow
• And of course, plugging away at acquisition

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And of course, if you’ve got any feedback, it’d be great to hear it!

Thanks