The Journey to Product-Market Fit

Last November, I had the idea for my latest startup: an employee engagement platform tailored to Icelandic companies. Such tools are widely used abroad, but here in Iceland, few measure employee satisfaction in a systematic way. Given the bottom-line benefits of an engaged workforce, I hypothesized that this would be something that customers actually want.

For the rest of the month, I validated the idea. I spoke to CEOs and HR managers at five different workplaces, discussing their problems and current solutions in this domain. The results were promising, and one of them even agreed become a customer right away. With the idea validated, I went ahead and Moodup was born.

I spent all of December building out an initial version of the service. In January, I onboarded the pilot customer into the service and sent out the first employee survey. I also finished various implementation details, which I had left unfinished in the initial building process, and started offering the service to the contacts I had spoken to in November.

Next up: product-market fit

Since the beginning of February, the service has been up and running and my focus has been on finding more customers. Inspired by the essay Do Things that Don't Scale, I felt that the best way to do this would be direct sales: calling and meeting prospective customers directly.

As it turns out, B2B sales is a slow and time-consuming process.

Each prospect needs many meetings, 1-2 weeks to consider things in between, and I have taken 3-4 meetings with some of them. This means that signing up a single customer can take months, with many hours invested in the process.

To solve this challenge, I plan to focus on two things for the coming weeks: 1) streamline the sales process, 2) experiment with marketing to find prospects.

1. Streamline the Sales Process

Over the last month, I have been inefficient and made many mistakes when communicating with prospects. After learning from them and improving each time, I can already feel the process becoming smoother.

Additionally, there is an endless amount of resources which I can use to improve further. I read a great book about negotiation, which has helped me a lot, and just came across this guide, which has many great suggestions which I can try implementing.

Gradually, the process should become more efficient. And no less importantly, I will become better at sales. I have never done corporate sales before. It takes an extra amount of effort, as it is outside of my comfort zone, but I already notice a difference in my skill level. My goal with this company is both growth and learning, so streamlining the sales process hits two birds with one stone.

2. Experiment with Marketing

Another path that I have already started working on is to experiment with marketing to support the sales process. The idea is to have prospects come to me if they are interested after learning about the service by themselves.

I still want to speak to prospects before signing them up, as the service handles sensitive employee information and is tailored to each company's needs. But marketing can partially automate the prospecting part, i.e. finding new leads, which can be time consuming otherwise.

The first step was to improve the public website so it converts visitors into leads. I made booking a demo meeting my conversion goal, and remade the website to support that goal.

The next step is to attract visitors to the website. There are many different paths possible here, including SEM, SEO/content marketing, social media advertising, events and conferences, traditional media advertising, and PR.

I can now clearly see how important resilience is when starting companies. For this startup to succeed, I need to spend a lot of energy on activities that are outside of my comfort zone. I am now experiencing the fact that every startup is a sales/marketing problem.

Newer: Deploying Elixir and Phoenix