Unifyo Post-Mortem Analaysis
Unifyo was a funded relationship management startup which spanned across six products. Product Manager and Android developer Ben Wirtz wrote a post-mortem of what he thinks went wrong with Unifyo. Unifyo targeted enterprises, which has presented its’ own unique challenges. Here are their lessons learnt:
Sales and Marketing
Although somewhat spread across a few lessons, the Unifyo team identified that they didn’t focus on enterprise customers at the beginning. This lead them to focus on enterprise too late in the game, without salespeople. Ben even went as far as saying that having a co-founder who had sales experience would have been a good idea. I am unsure whether I agree or disagree with this, my assumption is that he means so they feel they have a larger stake in the outcome. This article has a nice overview about B2B sales.
Once targetting enterprise customers they hit another problem. When dealing with enterprise customers, the sales cycles were quite long. Even after a customer committed, the internal processes in the company would take too long. The sales cycle was around the same length or longer than their remaining runway.
Although this lesson might seem directly related sales and marketing, fundamentally it seems like it was a problem of not understanding the target market well enough. This then led to targetting later in the startup’s life and unable to get the money from the sale quick enough.
Some might say this is a weakness in enterprise (Not being able to move fast enough), however it could also be viewed as a survival mechanism. Let’s say Unifyo needed X amount of customers to keep themselves afloat, X/2 sign up, Unifyo gets no more funding then shutdown. Those X/2 who paid, now have a shutdown product and need to find an alternative.
Impression of Quality
One of the tough problems that Unifyo identified they faced was managing customer expectations. Although their proposition of allowing customers to see contact details within a web page (Somewhat similar to Rapportive’s offering for email). When the system didn’t work however, customers would take note of it (Availability Bias). They were trying to solve a hard problem (But an easy problem for customers to understand) and underwhelming a customer isn’t ideal, a rule of thumb is to “underpromise and overdeliver”.
Company’s Goals
Not having a written down set of goals or statement for your startup may seem small but the simple activity of writing it down gives you more clarity and helps when explaining it to others. One useful template I used from the Founders Institute’s Adeo Rassi is:
My Company <name> is developing <offering> to help <target audience><solve a problem> with <a secret sauce>.
Really helps distill and narrow your vision.
Conclusion
I would like to thank the guys at Unifyo for their post-mortem and congratulations on all that they achieved. The article was a good read and provides a lot of useful information for B2B startups. I do think that their post-mortem only looked at the surface and didn’t look beyond the obvious mistakes, so I hope I was able to add an outsiders perspective.
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