Founders, I love you, and your amazing product, but it's time to focus on growth and GTM.
Over generalizing here, but us founders (particularly tech founders) are overly enamored with product. Since this is a conversation that I find myself having on somewhat regular basis, thought it might be helpful to share a bit more broadly.
I know the valley narrative would have you believe that "if you build it they will come," but that has never been my experience.
As Ry Walker loves to say, the first 100 customers requires hand-to-hand combat (from the founders!), no matter how beautiful your product is.
Now that I've convinced you, allow me to get ahead of your next stumbling block. Over building your GTM machine.
You don't need to spend tons of time and money on a bloated CRM with all the bells and whistles, a world class brand, materials, comms plan, etc, yet. You need customers. Identify your ICP (a post for another time), build a list (excel, sheets, and airtable work fine, for now), and start leveraging the heck out of your 1st and 2nd degree connections on Linkedin to get meetings with them. This will require tons of outreach and disciplined follow up.
A key to making this work? Accountability. Set a goal for the week, track it, and report back to your co-founders/team on progress. Every week. Stop letting yourself be distracted with the busyness of urgent, but not important, tasks and focus on getting customers (and learning/iterating a ton through that process). Let some fires burn, for now. Your product is (probably) good enough to get customers, you just aren't putting in the work.
It's not magic, it's hard, diligent, work. Roll up your sleeves and jump in. Then, keep going! :)
Co-Founder, Investor in and Advisor to Early and Emerging Stage Insurtech Founders & CEOs
1y3motion.ai