A founder explains how joining the NFX accelerator led them to abandon their first software product after a year and pivot to Incredible Health. The accelerator's guidance was the turning point that shaped the company's actual direction.
You know, but what were the actual kind of first steps that you took to starting Incredible Health?
Honestly, we were working on a completely different idea, a completely different idea. And we've been working on a different idea that did something totally different, also in software for almost a year. And we just couldn't grow it. And so around that time, I had joined, we had joined, we teamed up with NFX, which is a seed stage and Series A fund at the time. They had an accelerator. So we joined their accelerator and decided to really pivot the idea. And that's sort of how we started to formulate the idea for Incredible Health.
How do you think that kind of helped shape, you know, going from an idea and kind of the pivot at the time to, you know, eventually landing on Incredible Health?
Yeah. I mean, look, the great thing about the content, the team and the content that NFX provides is that like it really does give you the playbook for marketplaces and for network effects in general. And I admit many people here probably have read that network, their network effects Bible. And maybe you've heard, you know, Pete Flint and James Currier like speak and, you know, they're, they're like the OGs, right? They've been doing this stuff since like the late '90s. And so learning from them just allows us, you know, everyone on this call, including myself, to just leapfrog and like skip a bunch of steps, right? And like avoid a bunch of mistakes. Because, you know, and so, you know, we went through a very robust, like, ideation exercise where we, you know, put— we had like 100 different ideas of what we wanted to pivot to for a variety of reasons. And we really put together like a sort of a decision-making framework or an ideation framework on how to assess the ideas. You know, the first being market size, like, is this large and is this You know, even if we capture only 1% of the market, is this going to be a huge outcome? Another one is competition. Is there like an enormous amount of competition where it's like going to be extremely difficult to get through? Like, I don't know, CRM software, business intelligence software. Those are very, very busy places with lots of competitors. So it's harder to break through. And then third was like, what's my unique insight? Like, what have I come up with that's, you know, 10x better than what's already out there? Better meaning faster, cheaper, However you want to describe it. I mean, you could, we can all agree that like Uber was, it really was probably 100 times better than the taxi experience, right? And so that's like the unique insight piece. Now, once we put all our 100 ideas through these filters, the filters being market size, competition, and unique insight, a lot of them fall out, right? A lot of them don't meet the mark. And so we went from 100 ideas down to like 10. And then at that point, we started to go way deeper on those 10 ideas. We started to do actual customer research and market research. So when I mean market research, I don't mean just like a bunch of Googling. What I mean is like calling up my friends on Wall Street and getting the equity research reports for that industry, right? I mean, like speaking with, you know, industry experts who are already, you know, who are already in the industry who can at least give you the lay of the land. When it comes to customer research, what I mean by that is like speaking to 5 or 10 users and like not even mentioning the product or company, just saying, hey, I'm, you know, I'd love to understand your problems. You ask a bunch of questions about their problems and then you just say, I'm thinking about this concept. And by saying concept, it doesn't sound as serious, right, as a product or a company. So therefore they're gonna be more honest with you. And what you're looking for actually when they answer is Their emotional reaction. You don't really care that much about the content of what they're saying, but like how they react. If they're like, yeah, you know, that sounds good. Have you considered XYZ? Probably means you're on the wrong track. But if they say, when is this going to be live? Sign me up. My bonus is tied to this. My freaking boss is giving me hell about this, et cetera. Like that's, you want to hear a very over-the-top reaction like that. And then maybe you're on the right path. So that's a little bit about just like the ideation process we went through. And I think it's super important for founders to invest a lot of time in that process because at the end of the day, you want to make sure that you're, you've chosen the right idea to pursue. I mean, this is like years of our lives, right? Like we're sacrificing our freaking families. Sometimes they're sacrificing those financials involved, you know, et cetera. Like you have to make sure this is the point in time when the ship is leaving the harbor and You want to make sure it's pointed in the right direction. And if it's not pointed in the right direction, you're going to end up someplace very, very random, right? So all of this upfront work and ideation is something that I don't think founders actually spend enough time on and should invest. They should invest a heavy amount of time in ideation.
