Get in touchValue proposition research to help an early stage startup secure seed funding.
Instant is an early stage startup building on an existing domain search and registration technology. Their customers are people building their own businesses online. After securing a place in Y Combinator’s 2022 cohort, they were challenged to identify a more specific user and a value proposition with the potential to scale. This is always a difficult time for startups: simultaneously exploring who the product should be for and what features they need most. They approached Muir Wood & Co to help them evaluate alternative customer segments quickly and rigorously.
“Andrew and Maia helped us to break down a complex problem into manageable pieces. They understand what startups need and have been able to quickly flex their approach as our strategy evolves.”
Beau Hartshorne, Founder at Instant
In startup lore, we’re taught that product market fit can be measured by sending out a quick survey to customers asking how they’d feel if they lost access to the product. Easy peasy. But this assumes you have a working product with 1000s of users: it’s a lagging indicator. Pre-launch startups don’t have this luxury, so we need to be more creative about finding leading indicators of fit. We need to find evidence that a problem exists and enough people are willing to cough up cash (ideally repeatedly) to solve the problem. And we need to be certain we can market to those people affordably.
Instant had existing users of its domain technology, but also wanted to explore other types of people building businesses online. We set up Typeforms to learn more about current customers and invited the interesting ones to be interviewed. We also sourced relevant users from recruitment platforms. The research allowed us to quickly segment different types of online business-people and quantify which buckets Instant’s current users were in. We learned that they had vastly different business models, budgets and levels of technical ability.
This was a full service project where we took care of all research activities for the team, so that they could focus on the design and build of their emerging product. We conducted multiple sprints of research at a scale and pace in line with the company’s development. Throughout the sprints we tested the evolving value propositions and then prototypes that the team were building. We actively worked with the design team to make sure that we had research-ready prototypes that focused on testing core assumptions as opposed to the fine details of the UI.
“Muir Wood & Co’s research played a huge part in securing our seed funding round. They were our secret weapon for impressing VCs.”
Beau Hartshorne, Founder at Instant
We built a framework that allowed the Instant team to evaluate the requirements and potential of alternative customer segments. This meant that they could walk into meetings with VCs and talk confidently about who they should build for and the pros and cons of each segment. They could refer to actual interview quotes, user profiles and survey numbers, not rely on conjecture or abstract demographic data.
The most significant outcome of our relationship with Instant was their securing seed funding for the business [can we say how much?]. This enabled strategic hires to be made and the design and build to accelerate. A year on from our first interactions, multiple iterations of the product have been launched with pilot users.
Our relationship with the team is ongoing; we provide a mix of projects and ad hoc research support as the company develops.