44% of freelancers will experience a client not paying on time
Ashley is a solo founder, with no co-founder
Self funded by money from work as a photographer
“Better to be a solo founder than have the wrong team/co-founder for the sake of it”
Only full time employee, works with freelancers
“Are you working on too many things?”
Made mistake of not putting side projects on back burner
Was just one of many projects
“Because we have the skill set to work on ideas, it means we all get pulled in lots of different directions”
“Building projects to 60%/70% complete before getting bored and move on” (Sounds like me!)
“The problem you’re solving can evolve over time”
“That’s okay, for things to change and emboldened over time”
Problems that With Jack set out to fix:
- insurers aren’t investing money into technology
- 2 out of 3 customers are unhappy with the customer journey
“Most insurers acknowledge that advance in technology is a problem but few are willing to do anything about it”
“Shopping for insurance sucks”
“We just cross our fingers and hope we never have to use it”
“Nobody cares”
All want better stuff but no one is searching for insurance based on what technology stack it uses
Not solving a real problem
Ashley asked her customers “Why did you sign up?”
Lots of really nice answers
"Made me feel really good”
“Commenting on onboarding”
“Simpler and easier to understand”
“None of that told me why people wanted to use it”
“Stopped asking that” because the answers were nice but not useful
So instead asked “What benefit have you received since signing up”
“Widely different answers”
“More confident in business”
All conversations led to realising the idea was a bad idea. It is not about making it easy to buy insurance. It is in business of keeping freelancers in business.
“This shift in the way I looked at this idea changed everything”
Focus now on being a confident freelancer
More verticals. Creating a platform about keeping freelancers in business opens up more avenues than insurance
Don’t be precious about your idea
Stop thinking as an industry expert, think as the customer
Ask the right questions
Problems not about insurance industry, the problem solving was about customers.
“Make sure you’re asking the right questions”
Slight tweak opened answers up for emotional responses
Otherwise just massage your ego because of answering wrong questions
Validation before writing too much code
Need to know if people actually want what you build
Previous project was best looking app on the market for the industry. Became confident cider so refactored app with zero users. Made £0 and time consuming
“The playbook of starting small and testing ideas quickly and cheaply doesn’t apply to everyone”
“I’m building something in a regulated industry”
“If you’re building something in healthcare, financial then it becomes impossible to test small ideas”
“£10k+ for approval to work in industry”
So signed up as an affiliate first, so not needing to be approved. Test the waters
Couldn’t solve issue of tech. Start page looked amazing but got pulled off to an external site leaving customers confused and meant didn’t know who customers were
Couldn’t have customer conversations which is “the lifeblood”
Able to bypass FCA authorisation by asking for email process before on-boarding. Didn’t feel completely comfortable but was the only way to figure out what kind of businesses use it. Could have been anyone.
Because businesses use custom domains, able to collect hundreds of websites to build for specific type of business... freelancers
That’s how validation worked. Landing page was deeply flawed and embarrassing but defined target audience
Even if not same barriers to entry but “let’s face it most of the low hanging fruit has been done. We don’t need another to do list”
NomadList started as a spreadsheet now doing £30k+ monthly revenue
Ghost started as a blog post, several hundred thousand views in first week before Kickstarter
Shipping anxiety
“You have created something but feel this apprehension of sharing it with the world”
Can hinder momentum
“If there is one thing I have learned it is momentum is everything”
“In an ideal word I would have shipped with a suite of products, a dashboard because every aspect should be digital, instant quotes and cover, customer journey would be very polished [...] still isn’t how it looks, reality is launched with one product, manual quotes” “processed a quote on top of a volcano in Spain”
Hadn’t even built key parts at launch. Sending to Typeform to complete purchase
“How could I have launched like this”
“Become advocates of resisting the urge to over engineer”
If you’re having conversations with your customers then you will learn lots about them. Automatic wouldn’t do that
Conversion was very high
A competitor was 20% vs 40% conversion
Common confusion and questions people have to create content or tools
Tool about vulnerability of business
Freelancers don’t know which insurance, coming with irrelevant products
“Desire to launch with pixel perfect”
“Get into habit of shipping things”
“Is there a way to do this manually?”
You will discover problems after you launch, that’s a good thing
Use pipe drive for following up with people
Iterate for collecting customer feedback
If somebody gets a quote but doesn’t buy then followed up with an email from real person
Two weeks later another email, to extract barriers
Response rate for open feedback is really low, more success with surveys
Personalising email as much as possible
Only 3 questions in survey, to know it only takes a minute or two
Mentioning being a small business shows not a big faceless corporation
9% higher response rate than open ended feedback
“I discovered you all like the cheapest products
“I don’t want to be the cheapest I want to be the best”
Able to use survey to go to insurer to explain how many customers they are loosing
“There will always be a point where it is really hard and really not fun”
Book “The Mom Test will help you learn how to speak to your customers”