Hypotheses for early adopters

Late in June, I attended an event hosted by the new business incubator at Broward College.  Poormima Vijayashanker lectured on many lean startup concepts in her presentation “Will it launch?”. At Bimotics, we often pitched our startup as the “mint.com for small and medium sized-business”.  So I have to admit; I was a bit star struck to meet the founding engineer of the business we’ve strived to be like.  Turns out she is pretty cool and down to earth.  I’m going to ask join her Femigineer mentor group.

So the main takeaway I got  from the workshop was related to coming up with the right hypothesis for customer adoption- particularly for early adopters.  Bimotics is a cloud analytics company targeting small and medium-sized business, so here are the segments I hypothesize will be our early adopters. They are:

1. SMBs that were established in the last 5 years that already use other cloud based applications, like SalesForce and Quickbooks to run their business
2. SMBs that use Quickbooks but would like more analytical and reporting capability
3. Consulting companies with analysts and data scientists that need a software platform to deliver their results to their clients
4. SMBs with more than 3 resources running their operations (non-technical)
5. SMBs comfortable using online marketplaces and app stores to source applications for run their business
6. SMBs whose employees have begun to use mobile technology day-to-day, whether its a smartphone or a tablet
7. SMBs that use social media as a source for business news.

With these hunches, the next step is to confirm or deny that these are my customers in the most cost efficient way.  Since we are only in alfa, I cannot just prove usage of by these groups, I will need to try out the concept of “concierage MVP” also taught at the workshop.