A bit over six months ago we got seed funding for RUUM 🚀. My co-founder Florian Frey and I felt on top of our game. We had a fancy looking MVP; we had an excellent lineup of beta customers and even a few letters of intent from well-known brands.

However, the reality was that we were all over the map with our product. We had traction in the supply chain market, but also in HR, and we were getting promising leads from inside sales too. We were talking to SMBs on the one hand but had a test running with large enterprise customers on the other.

In hindsight, it’s no surprise that our advisors put a full stop on hiring and everything else in our first board meeting. They forced us to take a step back. We needed to focus. What is this thing we’re aiming to be 10x better at? The board’s consensus was clear; we’re relying too much on our fancy tech demo.

“Anyone can build a technology, but not everyone can build an audience.”

Having hot tech is a great place to be. But before you invest hundreds of thousands into building it into an actual product, better spend a few hundred into really understanding the value proposition. And have your first audience marked out. You probably won’t have product market fit on day one, but you should have started a systematic approach to getting there.

In all earnest, no one will know if your product or company will fly. Especially in the beginning, your data won’t be 100% conclusive. Instead, it will be trending in a particular direction — the stronger the trend, the better. And even then your traction might stop after 27 customers. So as soon as you see a trend emerging, you have to dive deeper into it. And if it plateaus you come back up and pivot based on the data and insights you gathered.

The key for us was to start exploring and collecting these data points early on — precisely so that we can see and follow the trends we discover. The goal was to be armed to the teeth with data. That way we can take decisions confidently and justify to our investors in which direction we want to take the company.

We attacked the problem in an intense five weeks hustle with the goal to get both qualitative and quantitative data to revisit and flesh out three fundamental questions:

What is the problem we are solving? How are we solving it? Who are we solving it for?

We used two work streams to get to the bottom of our value proposition: we drove traffic to multiple landing pages. And in parallel, we held customer interviews and ran surveys on competitors and current solutions.

Reaching out to customers with surveys & interviews