3 experiments for early-stage founders seeking product-market fit – TechCrunch

and Human VenturesThere are funds for pre-seed and seed-stage investments, venture studios, and home entrepreneur (EIR) programs.

Through this work, we have discovered a lot about how different founders carry out their journey of customer discovery and product market adaptation. One of the biggest challenges for the founders of pre-seed and seed stages is deciding where to start. There are millions of things to do. What should I do at each stage?

We interviewed the three founders of the portfolio. Everyone conducted discovery experiments to confirm that the product market was suitable at various stages of the company’s development.

Here’s what they had to share:

Pre-MVP / Customer Discovery Phase: Tiny Organics

Tiny Organics Is a plant-based food company for babies and toddlers whose mission is to shape their taste buds so that they can choose and love vegetables from an early age.The company grew up $ 11 million in Series A In 2021, it is growing by more than 500% every year.

Founders Sofia Laurell and Betsy Fore joined the venture studio as EIRs for a six-week discovery sprint. As Sophia explains, they want to make something that makes their parents’ lives easier, from Finnish Baby Box 2.0 (Sophia is Finland) to the easy way to create Instagrammable baby photos on the wall. I threw a lot of early ideas.

They conducted several exercises to test the feasibility of the new parents’ most urgent and urgent needs.

• Conduct a “Why Start” Exercise
• Define a “job to run”
• Create a lean canvas for each (executable) concept
• Define a user journey
• Conduct user surveys using platforms such as pollfish.com and 1Q (Instant Survey Tool)
• Identify and define customer personas
• Conduct customer interviews and integrate them
• Build a concept prototype

They also met prospects and conducted a focus group of 10 to 15 mothers. When the founder asked them to text message a week with a photo of what they were feeding their kids, they realized there was no healthy finger food on the market and inspired the idea of ​​Tiny Organics. Did.