-
finding and talking to forum owners takes time
If I could reduce our issue with failing to achieve the necessary growth to convince early-stage VCs and angels to a single thing, it is this.
Our target market is made up of hobby communities, user groups, residence groups, craft groups, sports clubs, and even small companies, charities, etc. Groups with an average size of between 50 and 500 members, though a few outliers in the thousands+ region.
I always knew that the sales process would be slow, but I vastly under-estimated how slow. Instead of weeks as I anticipated, we're talking 3+ months per customer at a best-case scenario and some of our potential customers are only now converting after a year.
Every potential customer is effectively a committee of (small-c) conservative members who are against change and whom have different views about what is best for them. Each sale is an attempt to herd cats towards a set point, and if the cats don't all reach that point at the same time the sale falls through.
Then, we've failed to adequately build awareness of our product. Having already failed to understand how slow the process would be, I didn't understand that I needed to compensate that effect by putting an even greater effort behind marketing such that we should build a much larger funnel so that even more potential customers were being talked to simultaneously so that the conversions might have been achieved at the desired rate even though each conversion took so much longer to win.
It's not that we didn't build the product that the market asked for, nor that we screwed up the core task of managing the business itself. But that I failed to fully understand that my decisiveness in making decisions for LFGSS isn't reflected by any other organisation or group, and that in fact it's an outlier that isn't reflective of the market.
I just didn't get how slow and painful the sales would be, nor how we should react to those conditions given the tight financial constraints we had.
When some of this became more apparent, I pushed harder for LFGSS to move to Microcosm as it could act as a convincing argument during the sales process that the product really does do everything we promised that it would.
I suspect we should've aimed to be here a year ago (though how with the resources, I'm not sure), or that we should've put less effort into moving LFGSS and spent that money on pure sales resource instead (though I'm watching other startups go after the group market with precisely this sales-led effort and I can't say that is working for them either).
My issue with the #2 option is still that the time that is needed for those conversions to happen is still really long. Far longer than the (just over) £10k in the bank would get us, so I'm not wholly convinced the gamble works. I have Google Docs open and a projection of this in the works to see whether it's truly realistic.
You are reading a single comment by @MrDrem and its replies.
Click here to read the full conversation.
Velocio
@MrDrem
Another problem for Microcosm (us essentially) I suspect from what David has said is that our user growth is what's being looked at, not our forum numbers growth, and that previously any sales effort took away from the development effort.
Investors would, I suspect, like to see growth patterns like those, not quite understanding that Forums are maybe a little different, and the the numbers will jump if you can bring existing forums on-board, but that finding and talking to forum owners takes time.
I can think however of loads of places that they fit. David has suggested that he thinks that car forums are out of reach, I say we should start them, and go after the little car clubs that are all across the UK. I know of two that exist, that as far as I know don't have a forum at the moment.
I really feel like Microcosm has only been in a place where it can be marketed outside for a month or so, and that it's not yet been given it's chance to shine as a product.
I think that what I'm trying to get at here is that I have a strong preference for option 3, but targeted at a larger amount, maybe via overfunding?
Followed by Option 2, with it left as late as it can be for the SEIS part
Followed by Option 1.
I'll go away and leave this now, I've said my bit several time over, and have been very rambling, for which I apologise.
TL:DR
David, do you you think is best, my preference is strongly 3 (but try for a bigger round to get sales over the next year, even if just one person), 2, 1.