Early Stage VCs are our new target market for Ideas Forge
Here's why
I am building 12 AI MicroSaaS startups in 12 months!
This is an inspirational project to dive into the AI revolution… not just watching from the sides as our world is transformed, but getting hands-on to build useful, profitable businesses fast.
Loving this so far and it has been awesome to collaborate with Henry Latham on his project!
August: Interesting signals from Startup 2
In August we launched Ideas Forge. This allows startup founders to discover, generate & assess their next big startup idea. You can see the app here: https://ideaforge.me/
We got interesting signals from users and research calls, but we generated no revenue and only a handful repeat visitors to the app, so not enough to warrant building this out.
But, we did get a lot of positivity from users and discovery interviews. There is definitely value in this proposition.
We have explored repositioning this idea to increase the chances of business success.
We have pivoted to target Early Stage VCs
Ideas forge helps to validate business ideas. So we evaluated several target markets beyond founders where this is an acute pain point.
Early stage VCs are a good option for a few reasons:
VC partners face one of their biggest challenges in identifying which startups to invest in. This involves filtering through hundreds, sometimes thousands, of potential deals and determining which ones have the best chance of success. Given that early-stage companies often operate in uncertain and evolving markets, predicting future success is complex.
This is Idea Forge’s UVPOne of the most important aspects of VC investing is evaluating the founding team. A great idea can fail without the right execution, so VCs spend considerable time assessing the skills, experience, and resilience of the entrepreneurs they are considering backing. A startup’s success often hinges on the founders' ability to adapt, lead, and pivot as necessary.
Evaluating and supporting innovation teams from a product perspective is Henry’s and my specialist area.VCs are cash rich and time poor. (Very different from from startup founders.)
A solution that saves time and increases productivity will have value.
Accelerated Customer Discovery Program
Customer discovery programs allow you to work on an important problem closely with a group of customers. Marty Cagan – who writes about this in his book Inspired – advises to limit to one target industry at a time. The end result is a group of delighted reference customers, and product / market fit.
As a next step, we can run a high speed, 1 month customer discovery program aligned to our high speed startup launch.
1 month to build an launch a startup (Usual process)
4 Early stage VCs to provide insights and shape the solution
(30m research call each week covering: Ideation, Design review, build review, launch)The outcome is we follow our high speed startup launch, and we get strong validation by a niche target market. This will create a strong signal on the potential of Ideas Forge to support Early Stage VCs.
This will be a great way to validate a new iteration of Idea Forge!
Next step - simple landing page
As a next step I will invite early stage VCs to join our customer discovery program with a simple landing page.
Will they bite? I dunno! This will be the first test of this market.
About me
I am building 12 AI MicroSaaS startups in 12 months!
Loving this so far and it has been awesome to collaborate with Henry Latham on his project!
Subscribe or connect on LinkedIn to follow me on this journey.
