[Techstars alumni] What has become…Inyo?

Techstars Paris
Nov 4 · 5 min read

by Claire Caminati, Head of Communication & Events

Yannick Mathey is the CEO of Inyo, that went through the Paris program back in 2018. His story is super interesting and perfectly shows the way Techstars could actually shake the startups: Yannick joined Techstars with a product (Prototypo) and left Techstars with another product (Inyo). Yep, this is what we called a Techstars pivot. To know more about it, you should carry on your reading ⤵️

⭐️ What is your one-sentence elevator pitch?

We help freelancers focus on what matters by automating tasks they don’t love to do and spend (too much) time on.

⭐️ Your were part of the program in 2018…what are you up to since then?

We have spent the last few months building a brand new product thanks to the feedback of our early adopters. Yes, we have been working very hard on it with a bunch of interviews, demos, workshops…and so on. 😅We are now proud to say we have also built a community who support our vision and the V1 of Inyo has just landed. 🤘🏻😎

⭐️ You were THE 2018 company pivoting during the program. Could you please tell us a bit more about it? What product did you have at the beginning of the program and when did you realize you had to pivot?

We came to Techstars Paris program with a powerful technology enabling anyone to design custom fonts in a matter of minutes: Prototypo. Even if we have gathered a community of more than 110.000 people around the world (a community that is still growing today!), we felt that we hadn’t reached the product market fit.

People love the concept of Prototypo but they had bigger issues and wanted more than just creating custom fonts for their projects. Also, we started the program interviewing over 250 people from our community to better understand their needs. 😅

When asked “why don’t you pay for Prototypo?”, most of the people we’ve interviewed replied: “I really love the concept of Prototypo, but you know, I’m a freelancer and I have a bunch of problems with my clients… I spend my days running after them to get approvals, content, payment… Due to the delays, I have to handle many projects at the same time and I struggle to find some time to develop new skills, like creating custom fonts. But I really love Prototypo and once I get some spare time, I will give it a new try and even pay for it!”

…We understood that they would never go back to using prototypo because of the issues from communications with their clients. But we also discovered that most of Prototypo’s users were freelancers and shared the same problems.

We decided to take this opportunity and pivoted to build Inyo. 👊🏻

⭐️ What was the toughest decision to take when pivoting?

When you get 150-200 new users every day without spending a single euro in marketing for months, it is very hard to decide to focus on another product. But since the creation of the company in 2014, we’ve also learnt to run a business: it is not a question of how many people signing up to your product, but it is more about how many people are actually paying for it. 💰💰

Yannick Mathey pitching at Demo Day (December 4th, 2018)

⭐️ Any advice you’d like to give to a startup that has some doubts about a potentiel pivot but does not know how to do it and where to start with?

I don’t have any advice apart from telling them to ask their market for advice first!

⭐️ Is your first product, Prototypo, still available?

Up and running! We are currently exploring some ways, like partnerships, to make it free for everyone and we still get a lot of sign ups every day!

⭐️ You recently officially launched your smart assistant for freelancers. What kind of feedback did you get from users?

Since we’ve run a beta with more than 1,500 users for months, we haven’t got some big surprise. But the satisfying part of this is that all the new users asked us for some features which were on top of our roadmap: custom templates for emails, statistics, mobile app… It is quite rewarding to know that you did your homework well. 🤓

⭐️ How did you manage to get your first users? Did you do some PR? Advertising campaigns?

We did it the hard way: we spent quite a lot of time contacting manually users we thought would understand (need?) the value of a Smart Assistant like Inyo. We’ve sent a lot of emails, DM on Twitter, LinkedIn invitations, etc. If we were younger, we could also have tried to send Snapchat messages…but unfortunately no one in the team understands how the UI works!🤷🏼‍♂ #teamvieux

We were convinced that we needed to fully understand the problem before building the tool we had in mind. Talking to every user was the plan and we did it.

⭐️ What are you the most proud with Inyo?

I’d say: the vision we have of the product in a few years. Definitely. The current version of Inyo is only the tip of the iceberg and we think we could have found a way to build the ultimate tool to make the freelancer’s life as cool as it looks. Think “repeat business at no cost for freelancer” and send us an email if you want to know more details about our plans for the future!

⭐️ Who are your main competitors on the french market? And how do you differentiate from them?

There are a lot of tools used by freelancers to help them manage or automate some daily tasks. But there are still two issues: those tools are rarely built for freelancers but for teams, and secondly, freelancers are fed up with using a lot of different services, especially when they only need a few features of those services. I would say that our main competitors would be a mix between Trello and Mix-Max.

An important fact is that there are a lot of tools that help freelancers to manage their accounting, etc., but there is no application to help them communicate efficiently with their client. We want to turn the customer relationship into something “fun”, or at least not as boring as it currently is.

⭐️ Where do your customers come from? How did you manage to reach them out?

They start to come from mouth-to-ear, and recently from some users we don’t even know. It is probably the best thing that could happen to a new service!

⭐️ What is the next big milestone for Inyo?

We are looking to raise money at the beginning of 2020 to give us the means to push a lot of new features and make the life of freelancers easier! Be ready!

Techstars Paris

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