In early 2019, we partnered with Shujinko, the team bringing cloud compliance know-how together with software automation to make compliance and audits easier for their customers. Together we helped them have conversations they needed with potential customers in order to find critical product market fit.
Here’s what we did:
The Challenge
When Shujinko first developed their product, their three main challenges were finding product market fit, understanding and developing compelling messaging, and learning how to talk to potential customers about the product they built. Senior Marketing Leader, Brett Goodwin, stated, “As an early-stage company that had no brand awareness, it made it difficult to explain what we do and get initial meetings. It’s critical for an early software company to have customer conversations in order to learn and assess a market fit.”
Left: Scott Schwan, CEO. Right: Matt Wells, Co-founder & CTO
Co-founder and CTO, Matt Wells, added, “When you’re building B2B SaaS companies, getting customer conversations is critical. It’s very different from B2C where you can be a little more data science-driven. With B2B there’s a little bit of dark magic to where you have to have a lot of conversations before you can start coalescing on product market fit”.
The Solution
While considering running their outbound efforts in-house, Shujinko quickly realized that they did not have the capacity or experience to run an outreach campaign while growing and managing an entire company, so they turned to Au Partners. Within just a few short weeks, Au Partners had 273 conversations and booked 22 meetings for the team.
The Results
These conversations allowed Shujinko to determine their product market fit. Matt said, “The only way to find that market fit is to have a bunch of conversations. The conversations we received through Au Partners were a critical piece to that journey for us, and helped us align on what our vision needed to be so that we could build the right product.”
Working with Au Partners also helped Shujinko understand how to frame their questions and develop their messaging properly to resonate with their ideal target customers. They went from telling their prospects what they do, to being more problem-centric and focusing on the prospect’s pain points. Matt concludes, “I would recommend Au Partners for companies that want to get a number of conversations going in their space so that they can try to find product market fit.”
If you’re looking for results like Shujinko, see how we can help you find product market fit and nail a niche here.
Additional Resources:
Read about Shujinko’s journey here and learn 5 ways early stage technical founders can master the art of sales.
Follow Shujinko’s blog here.