Intrepid

We reached out to 30 of our most enthusiastic early customers and asked them to pay for our early platform founders launch.(https://intrepid.technology/service-providers)

20 companies agreed, and we onboarded them to the platform.

Our membership fee is $1000 USD per year, but we asked for $100 USD, because we saw them as our supporters and advocates at the earliest stage of our business. This price was very attractive to the first group of early adopters. They understood that our product is in its early stages, but they were excited to be a part of something at the ground stage. The believed that our product has the potential to help them grow their business grow, so it was a risk well worth the price.

In parallel to building the MVP, we completed an early customer research sprint.

We started the validation sprint with assumptions based on our "quantified user personas". We used the playbook from Profitwell: Pricing intelligently,(https://www.priceintelligently.com/) to help setup the framework in Typeform.

We were surprised to see about 700 views, and just under 300 form completions, for a 20min typeform.

These prospects were generous and honest in their answers, (https://intrepid.technology/service-providers) because we wanted to learn about them: their size, geographic location, most valued propositions, most valued features, and establishing their willingness to pay if we could solve their problem.

Customer validation is great because it gave us the opportunity to meet new people, ask them direct questions and get a deeper understanding if we are on the right path and can genuinely help them solve their problem. When done in the right way, it builds confidence and motivation for your team that you're on the right track, and provides a small base of customers that you can test your product with.

We made a landing page, (https://intrepid.technology) and used typeform to validate our idea. It was done in 2 weeks.

To complete our first MVP, we looked at every available 'off the shelf" option we could, and none we're capable of helping us solve the problem for our users.

We didn't want to go "fully custom" for the MVP, but lucky for us we looked into Webflow, and found that it's a really great tool that we still continue to use.

We finished building our minimum viable product 4 weeks after. the launch of our landing page using Webflow, Airtable, and Zapier.

I highly recommend this stack for making quick and dirty marketplaces. it's easy to setup and very feature rich, we could probably use this for years to come, with little technical debt because everything is modular and extensible, even if you have to migrate in the future.

We kept our MVP to the core value proposition. without indulging on features that did not efficiently solve our users problems. This was very hard because our stack is so easy to use and fast to move with you can find yourself getting lost in all the "cool' things you can do without the proper validation, but our team stayed focused on delivering efficient value and consistently talking with our platform users.

Why is it that there are so many options for businesses that want to sell goods, but few options for people who sell services?

If you want to sell clothes, or cosmetics you have a lot of e-commerce options, but if you sell design, custom software development, or digital marketing services, you have no options?

if you're a growing design or development company, why is it so difficult to attract and acquire high quality customers to work with? and why does it take so long to actually figure out what we need to build for the client?

these were some of the questions we asked as ourselves as we started formulating the for Intrepid. (https://intrepid.technology)

Remote work wasn't as cool back in 2015-2018, and as a bootstrapped team working on client projects - doing software development, UX Design, and digital marketing - while iterating on our own internal projects, we thought that there should be a better way for businesses to connect, work and grow-that specifically sold services to other businesses.

We wondered why there are so many tools for e-commerce businesses that sell goods, and not that many for businesses that sell services?

We thought that a community marketplace might be the right format because, network and collaboration are major factors in acquiring customers for service based businesses.

We were sick of spending countless hours searching for new clients and chasing down leads on linkedin and angellist.

having a presence on social media is table stakes, but everyone is doing that and we wanted a better way to display our work and build our reputation, without constantly running the same social media playbook that every other business was running.

We thought that by making a shopping cart for services, and a UI that was specifically designed for buying services, we could provide what a growing design or development company needs to reach a global customer base and sell their services.

We thought that we could create a great way for remote startups and global brands to access to huge pool of talented teams, professionals, and clients- all in one place, but cut down on all the things that suck about the client developer hand-off.

We started to iterate on this idea and we really liked what platforms like Shopify does for small merchants and we expanded
our idea to incorporate a marketplace network.

We imagined that we could create a shopping cart for services that would allow people to sell beyond their borders, but mostly we wanted to make it easy for startups to be able to purchase services, digitally, without the back and forth of requirements gathering.

We wanted startups, our customers, to be able to buy our services with confidence through a specially designed shopping cart and user interface-- made for specifically for creative technology businesses that sell services.

As we formalised this idea, and the team became familiar with our basic pain points, we started to discuss what this could become if we continued to stay passionate about solving the problems we and our industry colleague experienced.

We believed that we could make it easier to facilitate global trade for technology and creative businesses by providing features that go beyond simply matching you with technology creatives. eg, like providing remote first companies with access to financial tools like: Escrow, B2B card payments, POS business Loans, Invoice Factoring, and Lines of Credit.

We’ve spent years as a remote first and distributed team, selling our services to companies, big and small, all over the world, and we understand the needs and motivations of small teams with limited resources. You need to build your reputation, trust, as well as acquire high-value clients from anywhere in the world, and you want to get paid consistently and on time.

We experienced the challenges of buying and selling services and we believe that there needs to be a better way for businesses to connect, work, and grow.