No prototype survives contact with the (potential) customer
Thoughts about pivoting during WebSummit
This post is a part of an (almost accidental) building-in-public series where you can follow along as we build, pivot, and improve ethixly - a tool that highlights the gaps between company values and the day-to-day experience of those who work there. We need awareness to drive change. [This was the first iteration.]
When you trip over your own product pitch, something’s not quite ready yet.
Or when your audience responds with a measured “weeeelllllll…” to then come up with ALL THE THINGS that could go wrong. Fear and hesitation aren’t great ambassadors, after all.
That’s exactly what happened when we talked about our value-based employee feedback tool at WebSummit. So we decided to experiment with the positioning, right then and there - following the money in this case.
Who has a vested (monetary) interest in a strong and scalable company culture? Investors do - a lot more than founders themselves! After all, investors are trying to choose the winning team. A robust and aligned company culture improves the odds of success quite a bit.
Who benefits from strong and coherent teams?
At some point we settled on this description
Ethixly is a tool that allows investors to understand whether the team they are potentially investing in is functional and scaleable.
The change in conversation was impressive. Where before everyone was focussing on risk management and not quite getting why anyone would pay for this, now suddenly it was a no-brainer. OF COURSE investors want to know whether the wider team (not just the cofounders) is happy and invested enough to be on board for the long haul.
Our tool just became part of the due diligence phase. Obviously investors need financial and operational metrics, some basic understanding of the product and the market it operates in. They also need to connect with the founders,because they’ll work closely together in the coming months / years.
But “liking” the founders and their vision isn’t the same as trusting the team to pull it off. And that’s an insight that isn’t easily available. Until now.
Check for culture fit / proof of culture fit
Ethixly helps investors understand whom they are investing into, across the entire startup. We conduct the research, analyse the input, and create a report that highlights the strengths and weaknesses of the existing company culture - including guidance on how to improve the outcome where needed.
The core of these reports is still the feedback from employees, with the added security that neither the founders nor the investors will see the raw feedback. As an indepedent third party we can ensure anonymity, while still passing on solutions employees themselves might recommend.
For companies who are looking for funding can proactively invest into a culture report to add it to their pitch deck. All things equal, a strong and coherent team could make the difference.
How tech debt is made: updating the prototype (again)
For once these changes make my life a lot easier. Instead of slapping on yet another feature onto the protopye, I can declutter (throwback to those who still remember my past as a minimalist home organizer).
Gone is the company dashboard. We’ll be creating a report based on the data, sharing the themes and main pain points (plus some recommendations) without passing on the raw feedback. Think SOC2 or ISO27001 - you get the insights and the recommendations, not every single data point.
We can also remove the /published-feedback page. The feedback submission page is now exclusively for people with a company code they get sent via email.
This means we can now focus on insight analysis, combining AI1 with our own experience in work culture creation and workplace design. Let me just say this: most successful work cultures were created with intention (though not always consciously so), which means there’s a rhyme and reason to what works. And we can help to get there. But first, awareness.
So now what?
We want to talk to investors, and to founders who are getting ready for their next funding round. WebSummit was super helpful, and also very scattered, so we want to do some more in-dephts research about what would actually be helpful to investors and founders alike.
If you are or know an investor who wants to talk, reach out. If you aren’t, I appreciate you anyway because you managed to read that far. There will be more insights to come in the not-so-far future. Promised.
I mean, come on. I just came back from WebSummit. There was AI everywhere, as if that wasn’t obvious. It was quite similar to the early 2000s, when everyone would inform you that they now work WITH COMPUTERS! How novel.