Launch First and Listen To Your Customer Often as You Scale
By: Springboard Enterprises
Tags: Entrepreneurship, Customer Engagement, Scalability, Entrepreneur, Women

Launch First and Listen To Your Customer Often as You Scale

Danielle Bodinnar, a passionate entrepreneur with a desire to solve a problem realized that in order to do so, her company had to pivot. Here she shares how to do just that based on customer insight

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

The best strategy I learned as an entrepreneur after starting Karista — a unique healthcare business that assesses people’s needs and then matches them to disability providers — was that nothing really got rolling until you heard from your first customer. Put simply, what I learned was that customers simply don’t know what they want until you serve up the product to them, which means launch first, then learn from customer feedback along the way.

Launch and learn. We launched our Australian based disability business and then set out to meet with our target customers. They welcomed us into their homes to share their insights. We were planning to initiate some very costly new product changes but once we spent time with real customers, the plan and our priorities changed. We’ve yet to implement those cool but costly products but we were quick to produce the product that our customers wanted. We were able to build a product that really added value to our customers and allowed us to scale. And they were simple to execute, for example a young disabled customer told us “do not put me in the same category as an old person” and so we built separate landing pages, one for the elderly and one for our young people with disabilities and linked our campaigns to the relevant target audience — cost of landing pages, less than AUD$2k. Value to Karista and our customers, priceless. Nail One Area First, then Expand. We did the whole let’s be all things to all people thing. We launched with options for the elderly, adults, teenagers and even newborns, right across Australia. Then I got some sound advice from my Springboard friends that there was a lack of focus and we were not in a position to scale with such an unrefined strategy. So we focused on the part of the market for which we had an expertise — teenage boys with autism. We’ve become the trusted source for that cohort, including the Australian government that is required to provide those services, and there’s so much business opportunity in this space alone. When and if we decide to expand, we know our company will be welcomed by both our service providers and clients seeking services. The key here is to launch boldly but be mindful of what your customers are telling you. Always go back to the ‘’why?’’ If you are confused about what to do next, or how to prioritise, or are not getting traction, go back to your why. Our why is about building the capability of people with autism — We believe that everybody has the right to equal opportunity; we give them that opportunity. When investors, staff members, clients, providers, suppliers tell me I should do something (and it happens often) I assess the suggestions based on our why. If it doesn’t fit with our why it does not make the cut. This helps me communicate with whoever is making the suggestion and helps me stay on track. Here’s a little TED talk on the “Why” — I recommend keeping it in your favorites: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPYeCltXpxw&feature=youtu.be

Danielle Bodinnar, a passionate entrepreneur, is the CEO of Karista. She has held senior management positions in sales, marketing, supply chain and project management in large corporations for over 20 years. She founded Karista after being inspired by the changes emerging in the healthcare industry.

Danielle has a deep knowledge of the Healthcare (specifically aged and disability sectors) from her experience at SCA HA (now Asaleo) where she spent 4 years as Healthcare General Manager.