Techstars Diary: Pain Points and how do you build your product further than ”nice to have land”

Our first batch of JTBD  (Jobs To Be Done) interviews revealed some insightful information about our initial set of customers. We were still in ‘nice to have land’. More specifically, we discovered some pain points, but our product was not capable of solving them. 

There are a couple of ways of advancing from here. First, curse. Next, rejoice that you actually found valuable information and then analyze your options: 

• Option A - build another MVP and check whether this solves their needs. But don’t jump into building one just yet. One of the best ways to approach that, especially if you are B2B, is to find a customer who is willing to pay you upfront for the development of that product. It takes more time, it’s a harder sell, but it’s kind of the only way that actually proves that your product is solving a need for that customer. 

• Which leads me to option B - continue to iterate on the value prop when doing outreach, measure the response rates and dig deeper wherever the numbers are in your favor. Value prop and product are two very different things. Iterating on the value prop doesn’t cost as much as building product. You can test four different value props in four calls during a single day. Try building four MVPs.  

We went further with option B, while aiming to implement option A. And to be fair, we started this process way before Techstars. Any tech founder is familiar with it: the process of finding product-market-fit. Learning about it or speaking about it is easy. It’s the doing that’s the hard part. 

And this journey tends to be painfully slow, leaving you as a founder to eat glass and swim in a pool of shit. And when living in San Francisco, this more than triples your burn rate compared to Bucharest, the race gets tighter, the stakes get higher. Go big or go home.

It’s even harder when you’re building something that’s innovative, because your customers won’t exactly understand what it is, or how to use it, unless the damn prototype is advanced enough to be self explanatory. 

Imagine Henry Ford trying to convince people to replace horse carriages with a car that’s not moving properly, has 3 broken wheels and keeps falling off the road because the steering wheel is jammed. 

I remember a demo we had in 2022 with a prospect’s entire HR department of 15 people or so. We were super excited to showcase our latest product iteration. The whole demo lasted 5 minutes - the time it took me to go over the history of our startup - because when we came to the actual trial, the god damn thing didn’t even start. At least I felt like that imaginary Ford. 

A bit of soul food to keep us through the waste lands of dead ideas and fallen prototypes. The graveyard of trials that sucks out the joy of life and churns out but a handful success stories over a desolation of lost fates. Where were we heading? To Mentor Madness!

Read the other diary entries about a Romanians startup journey at the Techstars accelerator here.

You can follow me, Gabriela and Chambr on our Linkedin accounts.

And if there is anything you would like to know about being accepted at Techstars, feel free to ask us.