The First Few Weeks Recruiting GuardianUI Beta Users
We started approaching projects to join our beta for Q1 about three weeks ago — literally the day the wheels fell off the FTX situation. Not great timing from an industry distraction / noise perspective…
I thought I’d provide a quick status update on our progress so far in the spirit of building in public.
TL:DR
The response has been fantastic so far, and we’re incredibly grateful to have 15+ high-quality projects commit so far including some of the biggest DAOs and highest profile organizations. Roughly 80% of the projects we’ve spoken with have agreed to join the beta. Of the 20% that didn’t, all of them value what we’re doing but declined for different reasons (bandwidth and budget were primary reasons).
Here are a few other observations about the process so far.
Creating a deck is useful
I go back and forth on this at times, but pitch decks are helpful to keep conversations on track — even if they feel unnecessarily formal at times. We typically jump around some when presenting but having slides to facilitate the convo keeps things organized and compact, especially since we typically only have 30 minutes to hit the high points.
We used pitch.com to create the deck. I’ve used it before and have found them to be pretty generous on their Free plan…and we appreciate that generosity given we’re bootstrapping.
The way the deck is structured is important too. We’re not raising money, but I saw this tweet from Alex Banks recently and think it suggests some solid guidelines for how to organize your slides to help your audience understand the salient points of your project — even in a ‘sales’ environment. We’ve loosely structured our deck in a similar manner.
A video is worth a thousand pictures
The most valuable resource of our presentation material has absolutely been the loom video of our framework running against Uniswap’s frontend. I can’t say enough of about this video.
GuardianUI Uniswap Approval Demo — Watch Video
From a logistics standpoint, we can easily share the video link and have people view it async.During our pitches, we just toggle to the video and press play instead of fumbling with audio/video/internet issues and dealing with the voiceover explanation each time.
From an ‘aha moment’ standpoint, nearly everybody says “wow that’s cool” after seeing the demo. We could never get that effect by just speaking to the product without the video. There’s still some explanation required but the video does so much for us to demonstrate what we’re doing.
Documenting feedback and activity
We use notion to stay organized operationally and have done a pretty decent job compiling feedback so it’s organized and actionable for later. This effort should pay dividends later. There are two main notion workspaces we’ve created to do this:
Biz Dev Tracking: We’ve had calls with ~40 people so far including prospects, developers (for future use / feedback), referral sources, etc. To stay organized, we’ve created a notion database with columns for things such as project name, contact info, meeting date, next steps, in beta (yes/no), and detailed notes from calls.
User Feedback Tracking: It’s actually pretty incredible how these early conversations have already informed areas where we need to do a better job explaining things and how it’s shaping our potential future roadmap based on feedback. We created a separate notion database with columns for the following:
- Remark — Original feedback or comment
- Type — Feature request, blocker, comprehension, usability, improvement
- Summary — Concise version of their feedback
- Reason — The issue, cause or problem actually being expressed
- Pain level — where does it hurt exactly? What pain level would they say this causes for them?
- Solution ideas — How would you solve it? Have you tried any solutions so far?
By doing this, we’re already starting to see where similar feature requests are being requested multiple times, for example.
We’re running really fast at biz dev for beta so keeping track of everything across our team is important. These two simple notion databases have proven valuable so far.
Scope creep is real
The other thing we’re having to do is distill signal from noise — especially from a product feature standpoint. We’re getting really good feedback and starting to incorporate them at a high level into our roadmap milestones, but our focus is on shipping a minimal marketable product (MMP) with basic features so we can get in the market, get feedback from live users, and adjust as necessary. It’s easy for MMP scope creep to occur after hearing all the great ideas coming our way.
To really understand the importance of these feature requests, we ask everyone making a request whether it’s a deal breaker for MMP. In other words, if we didn’t have X feature, would you still use MMP? Nine times out of 10, they still want to use the MMP — so asking that simple question has provided valuable guidance on urgency/importance of these requests.
Always ask for referrals
Like everyone, we started speaking with projects in our immediate network, but that only stretches so far. I make sure to ask “who else should we speak with” at the end of every call, and roughly 50% of our referrals have come from projects we’ve spoken with referring us to other projects in their network.
Most impressively, I get the sense that what we’re doing resonates with developers / projects who genuinely want to protect their users (and their projects), so they’re more than happy to refer us to their friends because they see GuardianUI as a net positive for the space.
Excited to make good on that promise.
Follow us on twitter as we build this thing out. If you’re a project wanting to secure your frontend, please complete this waitlist form :)
About GuardianUI
GuardianUI is the testing and monitoring platform for web3 frontends. Our SaaS platform integrates and automates end-to-end testing, application performance monitoring for web3 critical paths, and real-time alerting and observability to ensure deployed applications create the expected smart contract interactions for users.
