Podcast
Building a Tech Company Without a Tech Background
4 Takeaways from our interview with Carrie Griffith, CEO and founder of Little Nugget
This week’s episode of the Better Product podcast featured Carrie Griffith, founder and CEO of Little Nugget, a baby photo app that helps parents personalize, organize and treasure their favorite moments. Carrie brings a unique perspective to the conversation because, despite being the founder of a tech company, she doesn’t come from a tech background. There is a lot of wonderful insights in this episode, but a few standout takeaways come to mind:
1. The value of user research in multiple facets of your startup
Carrie prioritized talking to both current and potential users of Little Nugget about the challenges they faced when trying to document and sharing memories or their growing children. Carrie used this research to craft clear product positioning and messaging, and to guide her product roadmap.
“So what I did is, working with you guys, a lot of user research to understand what challenges moms were going through. How they perceived a little nugget and how they perceived the importance of capturing those moments in a safe space. And a lot of what you’ll see in the messaging now is from that research.”
2. The importance of getting outside your four walls
Since Carrie was technically a member of her target market, she could have simply based her decisions off her own personal experience. But she got outside her circle and gained new insights into what problems her product solved for other people. This allowed her to make more confident decisions for the future of the company.
“I had a full set of features and functionality that I had at the top of my list to add to the 2.0 roll out of the app. And after this research, a lot of it was invalidated as things that the user, not current user but even potential, future user didn’t want in the app.”
3. Using positioning and messaging to stand out in a crowded space
The baby photo app market is a crowded one, and even though Little Nugget was one of the first, there were a lot of fast followers. Instead of getting in line and describing herself the same way as everyone else, she created a unique position that helped buyers understand Little Nugget’s unique value.
“As I was looking at my competitive set, everybody was talking about moments and milestones. It felt like as you went through the app store, every headline, every sub header was talking about capturing moments and milestones. So as a mom and as a potential user not knowing anything about the category it was really hard to pick out what app was you know the one that was right for me.”
4. Taking brand and messaging beyond marketing and external communications
Brand voice isn’t just important in marketing efforts, it is just as important to have a consistent brand experience across every interaction. Little Nugget has the same brand identity inside the app that you’d see on their social channels, to connect with users and keep them coming back.
“It’s important that the brand is something that just a real mom can identify with. It’s not just those beautiful perfect moments it’s for those messy moments as well. So we try to take on that voice in my branded social platforms as well.”
Listen to the full episode on iTunes
Innovatemap is a digital product agency helping startups, scale-ups ideate and launch digital products.
