First1000 has an interesting article on how Doopool grew in the early days. Here are some notes:
- They had their first MVP completed in 4 days and tested it in a co-working space to get feedback.
- In the early days, they mistakenly focused on a feature that customers didn’t want. They just wanted an easy survey tool.
- Cold calling and direct sales was what worked early on.
- Outreach with tools that fake personalization and use gimmicks to be humourous didn’t work.
Business Lessons:
- Starting a business is difficult. It’s likely that the founder has to be the first salesperson to make calls and get meetings. That is a very common start to most successful businesses
- Gimmicks to make it look like you are doing something personalized can be interesting early on, but can also be irritating.
- How fast can you get a MVP out to for initial feedback? 4 days is awesome!