Early Stage Growth: Part 1

Contemplating the “what’s next” is a serious dilemma for any entrepreneur who is starting a company and building it from the ground up.

Gone are the questions like “Is this going to work?” “Am I going to be able to see my product?”

The new questions are:

How am I going to get my product to market?

What is the cost to acquire a customer?

What is the value of each customer?

What is my plan for growth?

Is my plan for growth sustainable?

For Pass the Plate, these questions and several more have become the questions that we need to address and the answers that we must find.

Getting a product out into the marketplace is one of the most difficult hurdles that must be overcome.

What we have found with Pass the Plate is that our early adopters have been important part of the early stage growth.

Why?

Our early adopters have given feedback early in the development process that has allowed our company which operates under Agile principles to make necessary course corrections to help bring the best possible product to market.

For instance, with Pass the Plate, one item of feedback from early adopters was having issues with the search function.

While this is important for us to correct, we have learned that this seemingly simple function is not only important but very expensive when done correctly. Fortunately, for us while at a StartupGrind event in Los Angeles we met an engineer who have a simple solution for our platform.

Another item that early adopters wanted was a method to more closely monitor their donations. From making the donation on the Pass the Plate platform all the way into their chosen charities bank account. Then if possible, the donors wanted to be able to make sure that the charity that they gave them donation too was actually being responsible with that donation.

Wow… thats a lot to say. But it is very enlightening. Donors want transparency. So then, you would think, if we were to build a platform that gave 100% transparency, then the donors would all come running… Not so fast!!!

What donors want and what donors will actually use can be vastly different. This is part of what we have found!

More on user habits and what that story tells us in my next article.