Launching The Network — Part 2
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about our journey so far, the inspiration for building and why we’re building software for VCs. Check it out here.
Here’s part 2.
How we found our early beta users
We were very lucky that this was actually the easiest part of the journey so far.
- Our existing networks
Sompani has a large list of existing clients, as well as a network of contacts I could tap in to. It also really is an unfair advantage having myself spent time at a VC in the past, so I reached out to a lot of people I used to work alongside in the London ecosystem.
Asking customers for intros into other potential customers was another great way to find new funds interested in what we’re building.
2. Basic marketing
A simple website, a blog introducing the new venture, several tweets and some juice on LinkedIn resulted in 100+ emails of VCs from all over the world.
3. Cold outreach
I spent about 1 hour every day making connections on LinkedIn and sending cold emails to Head of Platform’s and VCs. This worked incredibly well and response rates were high. For better or worse I also spend a good amount of time on Twitter, so I did the same there!
The outcome was a lot of demos and we learned intricately how VCs support their portfolio companies.. I’ll save the insights for another post however the most exciting thing was gaining validation that we were really scratching an itch.
Communicating often with your beta users is so important, and what worked well for us was creating a Slack with everyone in. Private channels were used to manage onboarding feedback and I used public channels like #changelog to provide an update on new features, improvements and fixes.
The tech powering our product
Our Lead Engineer Daniel put together a nice write up here for those more technically inclined but I’ll give a brief overview.
Our tech is react, clojure, PostgreSQL on GCP. It’s a multi-tenant system built using the Fulcro framework.
The services we use are Mixpanel for analytics, Customer.io for messaging, all data handled via Segment. Cloudinary is used for binary storage / hosting images. Webflow is still used in a couple of forms and for whipping out new landing pages. We deploy via Gitlab and have Apex + Sentry monitoring our logs.
Trello is king and we use it to run our product + engineering operations. We were close to choosing Linear.app (which is where I found and understood the term ‘Opinionated Software’), but chose the familiarity that Trello provides for this stage of our company.
Roadmap and what the future holds
Our roadmap is beautiful.
Ok, it’s a trello board full of products ideas, feedback and feature improvements. But it’s beautiful to think about what our product can help everyone achieve.
Soon we’re launching a Verified Partner program. I’m putting out a call, interviewing and selecting the best-in-class services providers in Europe to join our exclusive group to be showcased to the portfolio’s of our VC customers.
If this is you or someone you know, please contact me directly on jamahl@the-network.io
Other features on our roadmap include:
- Company & Community Directory
- Relationship strength analysis
- Hackernews-style threaded chat
- In-app private messaging
- Analytics dashboard (more on this soon!)
- Affinity export
The road has potholes
Building a product like this isn’t easy. There are some non-trivial processes to be improved and figured out before we can scale. But like I mentioned in my last post, this is the magic of company building, and will be our advantage against a) the spreadsheet and b) any competitors that may pop up along the way.
Q4 will be fundraising, product improvements, launching our Verified Partner program and rolling out The Network to more VC portfolios across the world.
Thanks for keeping in touch,
Jamahl
If you’d like to learn more about what we’re doing or have any questions / feedback, I’m on jamahl@the-network.io
