If you build it they might come
Sometimes “if you build it they will come” actually works.
I spoke with the founder of one of our portfolio companies yesterday. He told me that, with zero time or money spent on sales and marketing, their business is consistently growing at 15% month-on-month.
In fact, they’ve grown by between 5 and 35% every month for the past year.
How is this possible with no spend?
↓↓↓
This is what Patrick and Dan did when they started Duellix:
(If I was starting my entrepreneurship journey from scratch, this is what I would do too).
- Find an existing niche where seemingly everybody hates their supplier, and yet those suppliers still seem to do well.
- Talk to as many customers in that niche as you can.
- Find out why they hate their suppliers.
- Find out why they haven’t yet given up.
- Understand what it would take for them to defect.
- Work out if you can provide what’s missing.
- Set up in direct competition.
- Actively pursue your competitors’ disaffected clients.
Pat and Dan realised there was a gap in the Southeast Asian corporate services market.
Most providers fit into one of two buckets:
- SMEs with a flexible, manual approach, which were slow and expensive; or
- Startups with a fast, heavily-automated product offering, which lacked flexibility and customer service.
Duellix set out to win the middle ground.
They would be highly flexible with customer service as their North Star, then use technology and automation to become faster and more cost-effective.
It’s a simple strategy: give existing customers what they are missing elsewhere.
There’s so much scope for this approach.
Where else could this apply?
What should we tackle next?
