How we are building our product based on feedback from industry experts?
by Rohit Anil
Six months back when I decided to turn down the offer from a famous service-based company and instead embark upon my startup journey, I couldn’t even start a formal conversation with a stranger, let alone pitch in-front of the CEO of an established product company. Six months down the line, I am sitting inside the office of Mr. Abilash Krishna , CEO of Good Methods Global, pitching our company’s first product, EVE.AI which is an acronym for employee value evaluation using artificial intelligence
After exchanging a lot of emails, we finally got an appointment with Abhilash. Our meeting was to happen at 12 noon. Just to be on the safe side and create a good first impression, we reached half an hour before the scheduled time. His assistant took us to the visitor’s room and asked us to wait as he was busy with another meeting. While we were anxiously waiting, we did a final test run of our product to ensure that it was functioning smoothly.
EVE.AI TEAM at Good Methods Global office
The meeting began at 12 noon sharp. To be honest, we were intimidated by his presence, and we had all the reasons to be. Being a fresh graduate, this was my first time pitching in front of a CEO, that too someone who had recently raised 9M USD from people who have invested in Facebook. This guy had convinced the same set of people who have previously invested in the world’s largest tech company to invest in his startup. I had all the right reasons to be terrified out of my wits.
We started off casually and slowly moved on to shop talk- our product. We showed him how EVE works and the user value propositions of our product. Fifteen minutes into the demo, he took the first shot which was followed by a lot more.
He said “This is not gonna work, guys!!”.
He followed it up with the reasons, which all seem worryingly valid to us. After twenty minutes of criticism, he stopped! Then, he showed us where we have gone wrong and what we should be doing instead. This is one aspect of his personality we liked. He neither tried to sugar-coat criticism nor end the session quickly so that he could get back to work. He took almost two hours off his busy schedule to help five students realise the mistakes they have made, which by the way is quite commendable for someone of his stature.
The next one and a half hours have been the most productive time I have ever had in my startup journey, and I guess my teammates will also agree with me. He helped us understand the importance of writing code that can be scaled up, pricing strategies, scraping the current prototype and building a web API in its place, understanding the market segment and a lot more. He stressed the importance of building a product that solves a real-world problem. Earlier, we had convinced ourselves that the way we approached this problem was the most effective way to solve it.
“One big mistake startup founders tend to make is they have the audacity to convince themselves that their way of solving a problem is the only efficient way to do it.”
The interaction with Abhilash has helped us fathom how flawed our approach was and enabled us to look at the problem we are trying to solve from a different perspective i.e, the customer perspective.
“The best engineers are not in the game for intellectual masturbation but to solve real-world problems”. Intellectual masturbation simply means the engineer does something because it is a challenge for his brain to apply a new technology, and he will get satisfaction from it, but does not take into account whether this adds any value to the product or company that he is actually building. And until now, we were trying to build something that looked cool rather than solved the pain points of a customer.
The perspective of founders determine if a startup makes it big or bites the dust. The ability to look at the crux of the problem and devise an efficient way to crack it, is indeed a tedious task. This involves a lot of trial and error. One of the most important qualities of a good founder is to ask for feedback from people who have solved real-world problems and take criticism constructively. Iterate your product based on the feedback received and release it as early as possible.
We have been meeting industry experts to take qualitative feedback. Last week we also met Mrs Shanti Mohan, CEO, Lets Venture. Excuse us for a bad picture but it was a great moment to meet and learn from industry experts about the product which we are committed to build in the months to come.
Time to head back to the drawing board!!!
Watch the Journey of EVE.AI at SV.CO School of SaaS
