Joanna McFarland Q&A On Finding Product-Market Fit

Hey, Jill, do you have a question? Do you want to come on? Sure. Thanks. Thanks for being here, Joanna. My question's about achieving product market fit. How did you— what were some of those strategies that you used? And was it before or after you pivoted to B2B? Yeah, so I think we did have product market fit on the consumer side. And, you know, we looked at a number of things, you know, we just looked at I think in the very early days, you know, just literally how many people were booking, how many people were coming on, how many consumers were signing up, and we— and how many then were repeat users. And so we found like we could acquire families and then we would keep those families and we would see, you know, families were using us for one kid a couple times a week and then like, oh look, now their other kid is doing this activity. And so you started to see that kind of thing building. We were looking at care driver retention. Are care drivers staying Are we offering them enough value once they go through that really hard funnel? Are we offering them enough value where they're staying? And we have care drivers who've been with us since 2015. You know, they really love this, this work that they're doing. So I think we found product market fit, but it's kind of you're, you are looking on both sides of the marketplace, right? I think as a marketplace, you always have to think about who is your user and is your user coming back and is your user showing signs of They would be gutted if this wasn't in their lives. When we got to the school side, I think we hit— we had already built this product, this system, the marketplace. So we had supply, we had drivers, and I think we very quickly hit product market fit in a few very specific use cases, particularly if you think about students who are experiencing homelessness or who are in the foster system. They move around a lot. Right? These kids might move— an average child in foster care might move 4 times a year, and they're moving far. They have the federally mandated right to stay at their school of origin regardless of their housing situation. Transportation is one of the biggest blockers to that. If a kid moves at 10:30 at night, you can't reroute a school bus to get them to school the next day. And actually, it takes like 2 to 3 weeks to reroute a school bus if there's one even available. Hop, skip, drive, get them to school the next day. So that was a huge unlock for transportation departments, for social workers. And so we hit product market fit very quickly. I think what we realized pretty quickly there is the number of users exploded, right? Now we've got a transportation department who is booking the ride, a kid who is in the ride, their parent or caregiver who was not really part of the buying decision, the Care Driver, The school secretary who's at the school waiting for this kid to show up. Like, there's just, there's a lot of different people that are users that our product touches. Not all of them are making the buying decision, but they all have to be kind of satisfied. We look at customer satisfaction across all those user groups, because if you have an unsatisfied user, that's gonna impact your relationship with the school and impact their wanting to use the service, right? So We think about all of those users all the time. And are we achieving product market fit with kind of each of those user groups? And we're building product for all of those user groups all the time.