Think Like A Founder

What do you do when a potential customer says, “Could you do this (slightly different thing)?”

In the early stages, that happens a lot.

Mustafa Abdul-Hamid, Founder and CEO of Boost Sport, told me about a game-changing pivot that came from an entirely different market than the one he’d been focused on. “They asked, ‘Can you do that for us?’ I’d never thought of it, but I realized, ‘Yeah, I can.’” The pivot resulted in one of the biggest contracts the company’s ever entertained!

That accomplishment was a function of two important elements coming together: Mustafa and his team’s having built something meaningful (which a potential new customer segment could interpret and project into their radically different context), and then his willingness to reimagine what he’d been building in light of the market’s demand.

This is what we call “The Founder’s Mindset” in LaunchPad. Having a sense for what the market wants, but being willing to adapt based on real-time feedback, and continuing to iterate to achieve product-market fit.

But sometimes, it’s hard for a founder to hear the market.

JR Kanu, Founder and CEO of Reach (a technology company based in Lagos, Nigeria that’s bringing financial literacy and career guidance to young folks in Africa) says it took him two years before he was able to hear what the market wanted. “We thought it was all about the algorithm, the algorithm, the algorithm. And people kept asking us, ‘But what do I do with my money?’ It took us two years to realize we needed to answer. Then we started writing a newsletter, and people started asking more questions, so we wrote a book. Now, we have shifted away from the original product entirely.”

More recently, we worked with a corporate team that thought they had the code cracked on a new product, but it just wasn’t taking off in market. Describing why they hadn’t been getting much traction, they said, “The customer keeps asking if we could (do a related thing, but something slightly different)… And of course, that’s not what we’re trying to do!”

“Wait, wait, wait,” I said. “But you could do that, with your technology, right?”

“Oh, yeah! Of course!” … then the lightbulb went off. Why don’t we try selling them that?!?

The rest of the story is yet to be written, but it’s worth noting: the founder’s mindset is something that needs to be renewed often. It’s not a one-time event at the inception of a new product, service, or enterprise.

Related: Willing to Go Off-Road

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