FoundersDoor 3.0 — Marketing Essentials for Early Stage Startups

FoundersDoor is a six week pre-accelerator for early stage tech founders from underrepresented backgrounds in London. The programme is delivered by YSYS in partnership with One Tech as part of the Mayor of London’s Digital Talent initiative.

Week 5

We have reached the penultimate week of FoundersDoor’s third cohort and as we near the end of it, many of the foundations have been set for the founders to begin switching focus to more forward thinking and life after FoundersDoor.

Customer acquisition is the process of bringing new clients or customers to your business, and this will be key to the future of our cohort’s startups, especially after the programme ends.

Customer acquisition requires marketing strategies, marketing strategies require budgets, and budgets require money!

At the stage that our startups are at, money is not exactly falling from the sky — which is why this week the topic had a particular focus on the marketing essentials for early-stage founders, with low to no budgets.

This was led by Narada McKoy, founder of Bravada and a marketing guru from the YSYS Community. He was honestly chock-a-block with gem after gem and it is no surprise that his client history is so extensive given how much value he was able to give our cohort in one lecture and webinar.

Insights

One of the perks of managing FoundersDoor is that I can sit in on sessions and just soak up information so here are just a few snippers of the insights I managed to jot down:

• When looking for micro-customers it’s best to start with a purely geographical filter e.g. if you’re from London use London, or even specific postcodes, as it is more likely people close to you will purchase/consume your product
• It is fine to use instinct initially to explore who your target audience is but then priority must switch to following the data, especially prior to doing paid advertising
• Engagement is more important than revenue when you’re a new business.
• Be absolutely clear on what metrics you want to use during the validation stage e.g. is engagement the number of sign ups? Number of articles read? Number of impressions on a tweet?

I could add more but honestly, I would have to charge you…

Cohort Updates

Kasai

The startup formerly known as Curly Care has rebranded as Kasai. They are continually collecting and analysing research data and have realised, following conversations with mentors, how difficult it can be to craft a useful customer survey, especially when trying to capture quantitative data that can give useful insights. For one, one person’s 5* rating isn’t necessarily equivalent to the next person’s 5* — cultivating objectivity is hard.

Kasai are also brainstorming ideas for an event so keep your eyes peeled!

Langamo

The team at Langamo are developing their marketing strategy and are thinking of how to implement organic marketing systems and leverage word of mouth and personal networks to get their brand out there.

The team also managed to decide on a micro-customer of “Ethiopians who like football”, based on the hypothesis that EMEA nations with high economic growth are more likely to want to learn English. Not quite sure what the thinking is behind the football bit though, but I’m excited to find out.

AdaptEd

AdaptEd are steady focused on perfecting their pitch decks, thinking about their business model and different revenue streams, and how to communicate their product’s value online.

They’ve also been leveraging direct and indirect LinkedIn networks to have some interesting conversations with experts in the machine learning space, which has introduced some potentially exciting prospects.

Grow

Similar to AdaptEd, Grow are focusing on their pitch decks and continuing to do customer research and also some competitor analysis. One method that they’ve adopted is trawling through the Play Store and App Store reviews of competitors and basically finding out what features they should think of developing for their app.

ViewIt

Did a couple of virtual viewings using Zoom and got some good insights from one of the founders on the programme (great networking ). This highlighted a couple of technical points to be ironed out and extra features that would be beneficial e.g. ability to see their viewing more than once.

ViewIt are also continuing to collect data to inform functions and working out how to present this as a prototype. They are also gathering information on the supply side of their business and creating marketing materials.

Samar from the Grow team has also put together an awesome vlog on a day in the week working on her startup whilst on FoundersDoor.

FoundersDoor Virtual Demo

The FoundersDoor virtual demo is 9th June! Register here