FoundersDoor 3.0 — Product-Market Fit
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.
The focus of this week was concerning product-market fit. The most popular definition of this concept that I come across is one from Marc Andreessen, who describes the term (quite vaguely) as follows:
“Product/market fit means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market.”
I’m quite a fan of Steve Blank’s definition — which refers to the concept of product-market fit as “a step in between customer validation and customer creation” — not least because it makes me feel massively validated by the sequencing of the FoundersDoor programme, which is as follows 😛:
- Week 1: Customer Discovery
- Week 2: Customer Validation
- Week 3: Prototyping
- Week 4: Product-Market Fit
- Week 5: Sales & Marketing
Summary
The cohort had another lecture and live webinar with founder of Pitchsmith, Zaisha Smith, which saw teams yet again re-visiting their business assumptions, adapting their prototypes and continuing the on-going customer discovery and validation pieces through interviews and analysis of survey data.
For instance, the team GROW stripped back again what their problem statement is and resultantly scrapped the shop feature of their app (for now) and focusing on the education, care reminder and plant database aspects of their product offering. They have also reflected this in their prototype and are planning to do some user testing on the front-end/UI of it.
Curly Care (soon be known as something else) are using their social media to do more market research and have decided to look at data from the UK market initially.
AdaptED have had some really interesting updates in regards to their prototype. Using an open-source tool from the University of Cambridge called Concerto — they have actually been able to create some adaptive assessments and code over 100 questions to test with students. It’s impressive that they have already managed to create a full usable back-end but it’s just for them to work on the front-end to have a first iteration of an actual product.
Week Wins
I’d be remiss in not sharing an amazing win from the week: The AdaptED team won the social enterprise award at the Royal Holloway University startup competition. Great to know that they are already receiving positive feedback on the direction that they are taking and it doesn’t hurt that they have an extra £1K between them. Congratulations to Muhammad, Vamsi, Benjamin and Gideon!
Aqil from the ViewIT has recruited two co-founders for his startup which brings in a new source of ideas and energy. We all know that being a solo-founder can be a lonely and draining experience so the addition of two individuals to the team will be hugely advantageous.
Welcome, Irina Gugoasa and Arron Mardika!
Cohort Asks
AdaptED are looking for GCSE students to test out their app for adaptive assessments. If you are a student yourself or have access to some students who would be keen to do this (sibling, children etc.), please get in touch at kwaku@thisisysys.com!
The ViewIt team want to test out their virtual viewing concept using a Whatsapp based prototype. If you are happy to do/view a virtual viewing of a property please get in touch with me at kwaku@thisisysys.com
