My startup is ufound - a platform where we help founders get in front of their ideal customer profile for user interviews to validate their startup idea. All you have to do is provide a user interview to someone else on the platform in return.
Throughout my past ventures, I learned the struggle of getting in front of your ideal customers. Doing hours of outreach, social media posts, cold emailing, and all the rest of it. We decided there had to be a better way so we set out to build it.
ufound is a "persona marketplace" where founders exchange user interviews as each others ideal customer profiles (ICPs). Here is an example of how it works:
Founder A is building a fitness app targeting gym-goers. Founder A also happens to be a sales executive for a tech company for their day job.
Founder B happens to be an avid gym-goer, which makes them the ICP for Founder A. They would provide Founder A with a user interview.
Founder C is building a CRM for sales managers. Thus, Founder A would fit their ICP and would provide them with a user interview.
In this case we are focused on Founder A, where they got an interview from someone (Founder B) and gave one to someone else in return (Founder C).
We just onboarded our 100th founder and are so excited for what is to come! We have done it all through organic marketing channels without spending a dime.
My biggest learning so far is to just take action. Don't spend months building something you don't know people will need. Find a way to get a simple MVP out in a week that still provides the same end result to the user. For us, we are using email + calendly + google meets as our MVP and it is doing the job! We don't even have a fully built out platform and yet we have 100 happy users
Still a long long way to go in regards to monetization plan, scalability, and building out a more robust and automated platform, but want to try and inspire those who feel they need a perfected product before launching (especially people who are non-technical like us), because you don't!
Throughout my past ventures, I learned the struggle of getting in front of your ideal customers. Doing hours of outreach, social media posts, cold emailing, and all the rest of it. We decided there had to be a better way so we set out to build it.
ufound is a "persona marketplace" where founders exchange user interviews as each others ideal customer profiles (ICPs). Here is an example of how it works:
Founder A is building a fitness app targeting gym-goers. Founder A also happens to be a sales executive for a tech company for their day job.
Founder B happens to be an avid gym-goer, which makes them the ICP for Founder A. They would provide Founder A with a user interview.
Founder C is building a CRM for sales managers. Thus, Founder A would fit their ICP and would provide them with a user interview.
In this case we are focused on Founder A, where they got an interview from someone (Founder B) and gave one to someone else in return (Founder C).
We just onboarded our 100th founder and are so excited for what is to come! We have done it all through organic marketing channels without spending a dime.
My biggest learning so far is to just take action. Don't spend months building something you don't know people will need. Find a way to get a simple MVP out in a week that still provides the same end result to the user. For us, we are using email + calendly + google meets as our MVP and it is doing the job! We don't even have a fully built out platform and yet we have 100 happy users
Still a long long way to go in regards to monetization plan, scalability, and building out a more robust and automated platform, but want to try and inspire those who feel they need a perfected product before launching (especially people who are non-technical like us), because you don't!
