Get all the FemtoConf 2019 notes
Website: WithJack.co.uk
Twitter: @iamashley
Background
- Self-funded
- single founder
Lesson One: Position your product to a tiny audience
- Ashley did not re-invent the wheel. She is selling an existing insurance product
- Messaging (“We’re the insurance company for freelance designers and developers”)
Tips for choosing your tiny audience
- Have experience in their world
- Like the audience you serve (would you have coffee with them every day?)
- Have an existing network in that space
- Target an audience others in your field are ignoring (but be mindful of why they’re being ignored!)
- Questions to ask when choosing your tiny audience:
- Do you need high volume to make money?
- Is churn high?
- Is the market big?
Lesson Two: Resist the urge to over engineer
- As a self-funded startup, you don’t have the resources (time & money) to build everything
- Ashley’s expectations before starting:
- A suite of products
- A dashboard to manage your insurance
- Instant quotes and cover
- Polished customer journey
- Reality:
- One product
- Manual quotes
- No dashboard
- Incomplete customer journey
The benefits of not over engineering
- Customer conversations lead to insightful data
- Where they’ve come from
- their thoughts on the experience
- what features to build next
- Converting at a rate of 40%
- Discover common questions to crate educational tools/resources
- Can you scale back the tech?
- Buffer emailed users when they got a sale because they didn’t launch with a payment system
- Stripe delivered ‘instant’ merchant accounts by manually adding users behind the scenes
- DoorDash collected food orders from restaurants and delivered to customers
Lesson Three: You’ll only discover problems post-launch
- My process to gather feedback and discover problems:
- Personalise the email
- “As a small business, this feedback really helps”
- Try surveys – when asking for feedback, I got more feedback with a survey form vs. asking for feedback in the email directly. I use iteratehq.com
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