At the Human Enterpriseswe have a fund for pre-seed and seed-stage investments, a development studio and an Entrepreneur in Residence (EIR) program.
Through this work, we’ve discovered a lot about how different founders fulfill their journey of customer discovery and product market fit. One of the biggest challenges for founders in the pre-seed and seed stage is determining where to start: there are a million things to do. What should you do at each step?
We interviewed three founders from our portfolio, all of whom performed discovery experiments to find their product market fit at different stages of their company’s development.
Here’s what they had to share:
Pre-MVP/Client Discovery Phase: Tiny Organics
tiny organics is a plant-based baby and toddler food company with a mission to shape children’s taste buds so that they choose and love vegetables from an early age. The company raised $11 million in its Series A in 2021 and is growing more than 500% per year.
Founders Sofia Laurell and Betsy Fore joined our venture studio as EIRs and went through a six-week discovery sprint. As Sofia explains, they knew they wanted to build something to make parents’ lives easier and threw a lot of early ideas on the wall, from the Finnish Baby Box 2.0 (Sofia is Finnish) to an easier way to create instagrammable baby pictures.
They went through several exercises to test the feasibility of the most pressing and urgent needs of new parents:
- Conduct a “Start with why” exercise
- Define “work to be done”
- Create a lean canvas for each concept (feasible)
- Define user journeys
- Conduct user surveys using platforms like pollfish.com and 1Q (instant survey tool)
- Identify and define your customer personas
- Conduct customer interviews and synthesize them
- Build concept prototypes
They also met potential clients by conducting a focus group of 10 to 15 mothers. When the founders asked them to text them what they had been feeding their children along with photos for a week, they noticed a lack of healthy snacks on the market, thus sparking the Tiny Organics idea.