Ashley Baxter - Talk Recap FemtoConf 2019

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”)

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?

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

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

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