Elevating Your Product to Perfect Market Fit with Nadia Al-Banna

Every place in the universe has events, conferences, webinars where you can connect with people and say, you know, I'm doing this, what are you doing? Oh, you're a teacher, that's fantastic. I have a product that's in edtech. I'm thinking about doing so and so, what do you think? Right? And you'll be surprised, people need to be heard. Everyone wants to be heard. So if you give give people the microphone, the virtual microphone. Like if you tell them, hey, I'd love to hear your thoughts, what are your thoughts on this? I had to, as I built my company, I built a company in consulting, and then later on I consulted different companies, I had to find my own value proposition to the company and also the company's value proposition to the different clients. So I wanted to start by saying that this is a journey and there's no one right answer. What is my value proposition? What— how do I get to my product-market fit? What I'm gonna try to do today, understanding that this is a global audience, so I'm originally Egyptian-Canadian, I've worked all across different continents from North America until to the Middle East, and I'm fluent English and French and Arabic. And so just out of inclusion, uh, as Canadians we like to include the two languages, English and French. And so you'll find some slides that have actually English and French on them, and I'm happy to answer in a quick Q&A in any language that you, uh, that you are comfortable with. Um, I think I'm sharing the screen right now. Hopefully, if, uh, if that's not the case, do let me know with typing or something. Something if there's a problem. I don't see anything in the chat, so I'm just gonna go ahead. Awesome, awesome to see everyone. Okay, so can you hear me, everyone? Hopefully you can see. Awesome, lovely. So I'm gonna start by just saying that when you think of value proposition, sometimes we feel like it's a standalone item. It's actually not. It's usually tucked somewhere between our product at the top and our product market fit and our market, basically the needs of the people. So a value proposition is something that you really have to start thinking of only after you've started thinking of your clients. So we're gonna think of our clients, what their needs are, and unserved needs are, even before we get to our own value proposition. And of course, keeping in our mind that there's a product. So I want to ask for us to think about this as this kind of pyramid where the value proposition only makes sense when it fits between the product and the market, right? And it's a journey, it's one step at a time. So what is a value proposition? It needs to be very clearly able to communicate the benefits that you provide or your company or your product provides to the potential client. And it also needs to show how is you're different from your competitors, right? So you're answering the question, why should I buy your product or your idea or your service, right? And ideally, there are 3 or 4 different sections for this value proposition. There is actually the customer's point of view. That wasn't expected, I think. Everyone thought I'm going to talk about my product first. No, no. Customer's perspective, the customer's needs, their insights, what do they need, that needs to be part of your thought about the value proposition. And what's in it for them? What value are you promising to provide to them? And then we think, okay, why does the person have to choose from us, right? What's our differential competitive edge? What do we have that's super different from anyone else, right? And then we say, prove it. Like, we have to show within the value proposition some level of proof and quantification for what we're saying that we do. So I can't say that my product is the best idea that ever existed because I say so, or because my founders or my co-founders say so. It needs to be a little bit more than my anecdotal, anecdotal evidence. So you gotta have a bit of proof into that. So those are the 4 things that you'll find in every value proposition. So I'm sure some of you have seen this value proposition canvas. If you take it from the right, and I've actually taken this, it's quite popular, you'll find it in many different places online. But the idea is that when you look at your customer, see, every time I say value proposition, it's the customer. When you look at a customer, you want to see what jobs that your customer— what's the job to be done for your customer? What am I— what is my product here on the very left, supposed to fulfill in terms of a job requirement. So there are features, there are specific specifications, something that the customer is looking at when they see your product, and that should fulfill a job to be done, right, on their end. But you should also look at what is, what are their pain points, and what are the gains or the wants that they are looking for. And every value proposition needs to have those three covered. So you want to cover the features and the services, what kind of features do they have that corresponds to the customer's job to be done. You also want to show the customer that you're relieving a pain that he has, he or she has, or that you're creating something for them that they would have not found otherwise. Right? So it starts with this kind of very basic concept. The value proposition kind of links the customer needs to the products and services and the jobs to be done. I want to also just clarify one of the things that we sometimes do when we're talking to customers and when we want to show our value proposition. So for instance, if my value proposition is that my product has 4 different benefits, right? Has benefit A, benefit B, benefit C, and it's amazing price. Right? So I have 4 different benefits. I might need to position my— those benefits in a way that match Customer A very differently from Customer B. So you might have different segments of your customers. Customers are— don't come in all— they come in all shapes and sizes. So you need to think of that particular customer segment, which benefit is it that will resonate most with them? Right? What's your buyer's persona? What's the specific segment of the customer and what's their specific need? What's their specific gain? So this kind of previous circle, you kind of need to think about the different customers and maybe have different circles for those different personas. Right? So just even from the very beginning, even when you're looking for your own value proposition, you have to see it from the eyes of someone else, from that person's perspective, from their needs, from their requirements, and also from the benefits that they see. So if one of the customers might be very interested in benefit B, you'll make, you'll design a statement, a positioning statement, right? It's a description of a product or service and an explanation of how it fulfills the need of that particular person. And maybe they're interested in benefit B, right? So you focus all of your sales pitch, your positioning statement on that particular benefit. But maybe for another customer, for another customer segment, what matters to them is the price. Maybe that's the most important element of the value proposition. So for that particular person or segment of customers, yes, they understand that you have all those amazing benefits, but for them, the most important is the price, right? So for them, the positioning statement needs to highlight that specific point. So you basically have a value proposition that's like an umbrella, usually that includes a lot of benefits and includes your customer's point of view and includes your competitive advantage or differentiation from your competitors. And then you also need to think, okay, if I'm gonna sell this to my customer, how do I position it? And here you have to be really careful and focused on your specific customer segment. Hopefully that resonates with people. I want to also just clarify one other thing that I've— that we usually confuse value proposition versus unique selling point. And I find a lot of the founders and entrepreneurs kind of— we fix— we mix those two together as if they're one thing. So I'll take a pause here and I'll say, look at the graph here on the right. Imagine that you have Café A and Café B, right? They're both selling lattes. They're all both selling coffee, right? So they have a common value proposition. They both sell coffee, right? But Café A might be unique in that they're quick, right? So they'll emphasize that in their positioning. They'll say, you know, grab your coffee, it comes with lots of varieties, we have the best coffee, carefully selected, right? So here they're emphasizing not the speed, but rather the music that they have, they have the best varieties, it's a quality kind of the unique selling point is more about the quality and the environment that they create when people are ordering coffee. Café B might be just, yes, of course, they have the German value proposition in that they're selling maybe coffee and in a similar geography, let's say, but Café B has a unique selling proposition saying, 'You're gonna have your coffee in 5 minutes. We're the fastest coffee people, right, on the block.' So you could think about your, uh, uh, value proposition with a little bit of an edge when you talk about the unique selling point. Your unique selling point needs to be different, um, specific for your customer. Yes, it's like a positioning statement, but it also goes beyond that, and you start to position yourself differently from your competition, right? I don't want to sound academic. You can have a mix of all of these. You can have a value proposition that also includes your unique selling point and your positioning statement, but you'll find that different elements of that, of those, will be required for different kind of people. So if you're talking to someone, a customer, maybe they just need the positioning statement. They want something that will stand out to them. They want to see this kind of benefit that's specific to them. And sometimes when you're talking to someone, you realize, wait a minute, they know the benefits, but they want to see exactly what am I unique in, what's my uniqueness apart from a competitor who seems like they're providing similar benefits, right? So all of that goes under the umbrella of value proposition, but it's very different for different kind of customers as you're speaking to people. So if you want to jot down a value proposition, you need to be very clear into your target. So you want to have, you know, for a particular target customer who needs so and so and so, right? My brand, product brand, is a product category that provides a key benefit. And here you need to specify a key benefit statement or a compelling reason to buy. So It could be the benefit and it could be unique selling proposition here, where unique selling point here, we could be a little bit flexible. Again, it depends on the segment itself or the target customer. And then you need to clarify, unlike my competitors, right, I do something differently. My product, my brand has a primary differentiation that my key differentiation point is so-and-so. So I can give you guys a couple of minutes to think about it. Or I can show you what Slack writes. Let me do this. And we can talk about it on the Q&A a little bit more. So Slack will just say, you know, for work teams who need better workflow, Slack is a team communication tool that seamlessly integrates apps and allows users to easily search through files, calls, messages, and talk to different colleagues. 'Unlike Microsoft Teams, right, Slack has the best option for integrations for third-party apps and is much easier to deploy.' So they have to come out and say their clear differentiation. It can't be, 'Oh, we just do the same, but we do it faster,' or 'We do it cheaper,' or— what is exactly the feature here? There's a feature, there's a technical feature, and there's an ease of deployment. So they're clarifying two different differentiation points. Hopefully that is helpful for people to think of, to think of value propositions. Just gonna quickly— yeah, I was gonna say if you have any questions put them here because I'll read them. Okay, cool. So how does that go back to our classical product development, you know, product product-market fit, right? If you think of product development, and we all have this process where we really think of our idea, we have an idea, and then we build a product, and then we define all features of the product, we do some prototyping, and then we start detailing every single feature in that algorithm or in that software or in that process. And then we say, oh, we're gonna validate it, let's talk to the customers, let's release our MVP, let's beta test it. Right? And then let's scale it and commercialize it. Right? And we call all of that product development. So that's a very traditional kind of view, in my opinion, of product development and finding the product market fit. Usually, sometimes people would wait until that end of product development to reach the product market fit. Right? Whereas in reality, you need to think of your value proposition, which is right here at the beginning in ideation and product definition, you wanna think of that along with that value proposition, along with the product early on in the product development and figure out the product market fit very early on and kind of iterate on it as you go, but you still have to have some level of understanding of your product market fit, right? So if you think about it in a different light, this is kind of a neat representation of the process that we all go through. We have an idea, we're very keen to solve a problem. And we know that there is gonna be some level of need for our product. We have an idea that's gonna be fantastic. And we start to begin really early in our journey. We try to get some money from family and friends, right? And we're reaching out to make a minimum viable product, a minimum product that has the minimum features, right? And here we start to think a little bit about feasibility. Right? At this point, we're not talking about product-market fit. We're just saying, I have a product, I have a minimum viable product, let me validate it with some, get some money from some angel investors. It sounds like we can wait for product-market fit so much later. But in fact, it's only when you get this kind of product-market fit that you can actually accelerate get validation from larger pockets of money, but also what's more important is that you get the revenue. So the better you are at finding this product-market fit earlier on, earlier on, and linking it to your value proposition that you promised people earlier on, that's when you really get the revenue and you can generate that kind of upwards slope that we're really hoping for. And the idea of product-market fit is also that you want to make sure that the product is viable, desirable, and feasible. So from the client's perspective, right, it's desirable, the product the client wants it, and they have a gain, and it clarifies the job to be done, it matches exactly what the customer wants. It's viable, right, you can actually make it, make it happen, and it can— the business model is viable, i.e., you can actually generate revenue. You're not just making it as a free kind of service. I don't think that would help your viability of the company if you do that for too, too long. And it's feasible, meaning you can actually implement it, right? So think about all of those things. And when, and when your customer sees your value proposition through that product-market fit, you'll be able to kind of then fly into this part of the graph, which we all are looking for, right? We want all the scaling of our products and service up to a level where it just is solid and we see that right away. So I'll go back to my initial pyramid and I say, okay, so you told us about the value proposition. We spoke a little bit about, yes, we have to have the product matching to the market. How do we actually make it happen, right? As we, as you investigate the customer's needs and you talk to people and say, okay, I have this idea, What do you actually need? You're building your value proposition, right? You need to go through the customer, understand their need, and get into value proposition. But when you're building your value proposition, you're also building a something, a product, a service, right? You're building something. And every time you build a little bit of it, feature a little bit of a minimum viable product, some particular detail, you want to be very clear about measuring how people use it. So you want to leverage connecting, you know, leverage your customers, your potential customers, all the surveys and interviews that you can do, beta test as much as you can, and learn from the data that you collect and bring it back to your product, right? When we think about that, we want to just clarify that you want to make sure that you're— when you're talking to customers, you want to talk to the right people. No one's wrong, but the right kind of customers, i.e., the customers that you initially had in your target, right? If I'm targeting children, I am— I have a product, as I'm thinking, I'm making a toy that only works for ages 5 to 7, right? I'm making some sort of toy and I want them to learn through that particular game. When I'm building my beta, building my features, and I'm testing it, I want to make sure that I ask the same people. I don't go into a different age group or ask a different set of people what they think about the MVP, right? So you want to start selecting the right kind of customer and ask people open-ended questions. So when you give them a demo and you want them to try the product, don't ask them to buy it right away and have some open-ended questions so that you're capturing as much data as you can. Ask them why something is working or not working. Ask them, what if this product was already available, what would you pay for? You start to think a little bit about, you know, willingness to pay, right? You're thinking about how much they would be paying versus how much you can afford to provide it at. And make sure to let the customers talk, right? Don't ever think about you know, gauging their interest before they completely get everything they want out of the way. As you start doing those customer interviews, it feeds back into, it feeds back into what if it's some data, so it feeds you some data that you could then use to develop your product further, right? You can test, you know, how many people are aware of your product, How many people have tried your, your product, your MVP? Are they willing to pay something for it? If people have paid for it, are they coming again to pay something else for it? Like, are they repeating their process? Are they talking about it online? Are they recommending it to others? So even if you don't have a complete sale, you still have some elements that you can detect, some pieces of data that you can collect from your customers and figure out, um, how well your product fits their needs, right? Because the more you have that, the closer you're getting to their needs, the better your product-market fit, and you actually are serving something back to your value proposition, the promise that you will provide something to your customers that, that matches their needs, right? So basically, as, as you go and iterate on this process, we started with a customer, We started understanding their needs. We had developed a value proposition. We started putting in the product together and asking them what they think and iterating and prototyping and figuring out, wait a minute, maybe they need a different feature. Maybe they need, they have a different, maybe they discovered a different value proposition altogether. Like you'd be surprised sometimes when you talk with your clients or your potential clients, you might find that they see your product or your service with very different perspective. They might say, well, it actually works faster than da da da da, so and so and so, right? Or I've tried this and this, and it actually has this, it's actually quicker for me to purchase it than to do something else. So you start to uncover some of the value proposition also when they themselves use the the prototype and you start to think, oh, okay, that's a different value, it's a different benefit. I didn't realize that it was that important to those particular potential customers. It's also possible that when you talk to your customers about the prototype, you actually end up uncovering a completely different need. They might say, yes, you had a fantastic, you know, product prototype, it helped me do 1, 2, and 3, but it wasn't really great because I couldn't integrated with this particular system that I have, right? So you start to uncover a particular need that is unserved, and it's something that you can then repeat, right? Repeating the circle and further developing your value proposition for the new prototype that you'll be providing, right? So you want to iterate and improve your product-market fit, and the more you iterate, you're actually also building your value proposition. So there's a kind of a neat way to think about iterating value propositions. We start with refining, you know, the sales messaging, the use cases. We refine the value that we provide to customers first, right? That's your value proposition. You're refining the value, and then you're also then also refining a particular messaging. Sometimes it's a pain point. You want to focus on a pain point that you're, you know, the customer wants this and they really need that, you start defining your marketing, right? And once you have those covered, you'll also be able to improve the value of the product to your customer and you get a lot of high value, high value out of that because you've matched the value to that of the customer. And the product. And then finally, of course, problem-driven roadmaps or problem-driven products. It's like if you have a product and it's— it's— you're iterating it based on the problems that the client, the customer faces, right? You know, I— it's nice, I like it, but, but it's better when you have the product providing a value that is key and provides that that aha moment. People are always iterating across all of the 4. So there's, you know, here there's 1, 2, 3, 4, but ideally you're also always iterating the value for your customer and you've got the value of the product, and then you're iterating on the pain points and you just keep iterating, right? And that's how your product gets a particular closeness, you know, becomes very close to what the customer is requesting or is thinking that they need. I also want to say that this is something, a process that takes time. So if you think of all the different companies here, and I'm sure you're familiar with many of them, Udemy took 2 years to get to a product-market fit. Airbnb also took about 2 years. Uber took a year, right? They knew exactly that there was a problem, so the word of mouth went viral for them. DoorDash was within less than a year. If you look at other companies, like Lyft was just very quick to get to product-market fit. Other companies might take more or less time. So there is no right answer of saying what time taken to make sure that I have a product-market fit, but it's somewhere between 1 month and 5 years. I mean, try not to go into the 5 years, 5 years would be a little bit too much, but somewhere there that you can iterate on your product and your prototype to really get that product-market fit and bring it back to the value proposition. And think about the value proposition as a way to explain how, what you're providing in terms of the product not only fits the market, but it also differentiates from other people in the, in the competition. I want to close by just also mentioning one thing, you know, the title, it talks about product-market fit, which is clearly important, right? We have to develop a product and we have to make sure that the product is fitting to the market. But there are also other things that play into it. So if you have an amazing product, uh, but the channel of communication is not that good, right? The, the marketing channel is not good. The communication channel is not that good. You, um, you need to find the right product channel fit. Not every product needs to be communicated or marketed in the same way, right? Um, not every market can be reached to in a, in the same way. Every market is very different. And there are some markets that have particular business models that don't fit other markets. So model-market fit is also, you know, something that you need to pay attention to. And of course, the channel-model fit. So it all kind of, it all fits together, all for those 4 pieces of modifications. It's not, you can't just say, I'm gonna make sure that the product fits the market requirements, I don't care about everything else. Because guess what, in order for you to get from product to market, you have to communicate it through the right channels, you have to get through the right business model, the right payment system in order to actually get to your market. So there's a subtle kind of multi-step between getting from product to market and you can't really ignore these, right? You'll find sometimes that your product fit your particular market, your particular segment, but then something happened in the market, uh, you had an unexpected change in the economy, and all of a sudden whatever model that you thought, the other price point that you thought you were selling this at, no longer makes sense. People are no longer paying at that particular, uh, business model. So you, in order to really get from product market fit, you need to think of all the other channels, how the channel fits the product, how it builds the model, how it fits the market, and keep iterating all of these, right? And all of these become also part of your value proposition. So your value proposition can include elements of your product, but it could also include how you're getting to your market or how you are allowing the customer to pay for their, uh, for their, for their product. And value proposition becomes all of these put together in one, one or two statements. So I wanted to just say thank you so, so much for your time, and hopefully this was not too, too overwhelming, but I just wanted to make sure that you had all what you needed to translate your value proposition into product-market fit and get to that perfect revenue section of the graph, and up to scaling and onwards. Let me know if you have any questions. I'm happy to answer some questions on the chat here.

Awesome. Nadia, thank you so much for that presentation. So I don't know if you can see the Questions tab, but we have a ton of questions. And I think the folks here, they really love the presentation, especially the aspects that you were talking about turning your value proposition into product-market fit. I think there's a ton of interest there. So let's just kind of—

Yeah, I can't see the Q&A though. So if you wanna— Yeah, I can do that.

So what I'll do is I'll just bring questions on stage for you. Super. How about let's start off with Gustav's question. Gustav asked, could there be different propositions in a startup? If so, Should there be a pain/job mapping for every target group?

So I'll start with the second question. Absolutely, you need to have for every target group, for every target customer, you want to think of their particular needs, of their particular pain points. And you might end up with a product that have this different value propositions for the different segments. So maybe the product is technically high quality and it matches people who understand the technology, right? Anyone who has a phone, an Apple phone, might be super impressed that the iPhone 15 or 16 has this particular chip and the chip has, I don't know what, the speeds, you know, all the technology behind it. So that caters to a specific group of customers. And at the same time, the same product needs to cater to people who like their phones to have blue, pink, and gray covers, you know. So the product may have different value propositions for different segments. You really need to, I want to say, study almost, like really, really think about each of the customers and who they are and what they, what they want from the product.

Awesome, thank you for that answer. And just kind of to go back to your points about positioning, Joy asks, regarding positioning statements, how do you know which value to focus on first in the beginning stage?

Cool, so you want to— I always start with the customer in mind. When you have an idea, who is your ideal customer? Who's your— why is this problem relevant? Who is this problem relevant for? You know, is it relevant for people who are moms who are working and they need some— they have some needs to save time? Or is it important for people who are older in age and they need a particular, you know, they need care and attention? There's a different kind of requirement there. It really comes from the key customers that you have in mind. Start with one. Don't get overwhelmed yourself. You might, your product or service might have 5 different, 10 different customer segments. Start with one. The one that you are most familiar with, the customers that you are most familiar with. And I would say interview them earlier on, even before you have a prototype. Who are your customers? Give them the idea. Don't worry, no one's gonna steal an idea, and even if they do, the execution is what we are betting ourselves on. We can have, everyone can have the same ideas, right? But it's the execution of those ideas and turning them into those products and services, that's what makes a successful founder or entrepreneur. So share your idea openly and say, what do you think? I'm thinking of this and this and this. Does this match your expectations? What do you need? Right? Open-ended questions. And let them just speak freely about, oh, I have this problem, you know, let them tell you. And that turns into the value proposition and you start thinking, oh yes, I can provide that. If my product had this and this and this into it, yes, I can provide. Right? So that becomes an important feature there.

Awesome. Because you're speaking about customers, and Joy had a really great follow-up question as well. Joy asked, how, where do you find potential customers to interview? Do you have any recommendations? And just to kind of add to this, Nadia, I wanted to ask, how do you really approach a customer, you know, when you want to interview them? Especially if you're like, you know, you're really early into your product? Like, how do you— what's the messaging that you have to get there?

Okay, so first of all, um, I am answering this not as a marketing person. I'm answering this as my really, you know, the real life experiences and the, the, the, the technical person who I am. I was— I used to be a few years back, I would never approach a customer without a product in my hand. I would be so worried about talking to someone and then they like, where is it that I feel like I don't have it ready at my hands? So it's also on us to lower the expectations, right? When you go to speak to someone, you know, it's, it's an idea. So first of all, where can I, where can I find my customers? It depends a little bit on your product. So if you want to tell us a little bit about your product, I'll be able to get a bit more specific. Info. But, you know, let's say it's an edtech tool for kids that are trying to learn something in, you know, adding some gaming to, to their curriculum. I would go to schools, and I would ask people, I say, you know, ask the principal and say, hey, I have this idea, I'm still developing it, I would love to just chat with a few parents or students or or teachers and just share with them my idea? Is there an event that I can go to? I find that sometimes the events— every place in the universe has events, conferences, webinars where you can connect with people and say, you know, I'm doing this, what are you doing? Oh, you're a teacher, that's fantastic. I have a product that's in edtech. I'm thinking about doing so and so, what do you think? And you'll be surprised, people need to be heard. Everyone wants to be heard. So if you give people the microphone, the virtual microphone, like if you tell them, hey, I'd love to hear your thoughts, what are your thoughts on this? You'll be surprised at how many people will give you their blunt feedback. Sometimes you'll like it, sometimes you won't, but it's all sorts of feedback will come your way. But I'll say leverage the events that are already existing. Leverage non-for-profit events. You don't have— sometimes you don't have to pay to get into an event. Sometimes there are trade shows, associations, people where the professional associations where your customers come from. So if you're trying to sell something to engineers, guess what? There's always an engineers association, and they always have events, and they always want to talk about stuff, and you could be there, you know, interacting with people and networking and just simply asking, you know, do you have 15 minutes? I'd love to share with you my idea. It doesn't have to be anything formal, um, at least in the beginning when you don't have a product to actually showcase. If you have a prototype, go ahead and say, you know what, I just need 10 minutes of your time You know, be respectful of people's time. Don't ask for a full hour. You know, I just need 10-15 minutes of your time. I'll just tell you briefly about an idea that I have. I'd love to have your thoughts. Also acknowledge the person's expertise. So if you're— if I'm going to an engineer, I'm not an engineer, so I would then want to acknowledge that person. You know, I want to— I'd love to hear your thoughts because you've been in this space for 20 years. You've been working as an engineer 'You have a lot of experience in this space. I'd love to hear what you think about my idea.' You'll be surprised. A lot of people would just want to tell you about themselves. So do use that. Awesome.

Yeah, I love that answer because we also kind of get a lot of founders within the FI programs across the world who join events like these to kind of speak to other founders and sometimes just get feedback on their idea, not necessarily the product. So yeah, events are always a great place to go for when it comes to interviewing customers. What we'll do, because we're about to hit the hour mark, we'll take 2 more questions. And we have this really interesting question here that Nadia wanted to bring up. So what are the key metrics that can help determine if a company has achieved product-market fit? And how many iterations should one decide before you—

okay, how much money do you have? How many paying customers do you have? Is it picking up? I think those are the key metrics. And people who are, you know, trying your demo, are they coming back to you again, or are they just kind of paying once and then disappearing? Those are some of the metrics. Of course, there are other more technical metrics that again, depending on your product and where you're at in the journey. But I would say just be very careful about actively listening to your customers. So when you talk to someone and you showed them a demo, you know, give them a chance to try it and then come back to them next week and say, hey, what do you think? How did it feel? And just let them speak about it. And then watch their words and watch their actions. So if they say it's great, I love it, but they haven't paid anything, right? So you start, then you start to ask them, oh, I noticed you've, you know, taken the freemium option and you did not take the, you know, the next phase, let's say the paid option. What value would you have liked to pay for? And they might say, oh, you know what, you put it at $5, I would have been okay with maybe $3. Right? So even though they did not pay, you know that they're interested and they're willing to, and you're setting up your willingness to pay at a particular point. So when do you know that you got this product-market fit? When you get the person to pay automatically without you asking them any questions post-demo. And how many pivots? I'd say just be careful about how much time you use for experimenting with the product or the service. You know, people, some companies took 6 months and then they said, oh, this is enough. And pivot time, sometimes it's 3 months, sometimes it's a year. It depends really on your industry. I hate to answer it depends, but it really does. It depends on your industry, it depends on how much cash you have, it depends on your phase of development. Um, there's loads and loads of details. So if you want, I mean, I'm available on LinkedIn. So if you guys wanna reach out and just let me know of your questions there as well, I'm open to that.

Awesome. So let's take one last question before we close things off here because we were talking about customers paying for products. Let's have this question from Liana here. During beta testing, should I charge for the product or give it for free to get learnings from them? Currently my AI security startup Sunny Labs is in the beta phase. We are letting customers secure their AI apps with us for free. What are your thoughts? And in general, Nadia, like how do you assign a price or value to your product when you're starting out?

Okay, so we'll do, we'll do two, both of these questions together. So how much should I, uh, where are you at with your product when you start off? You need the feedback, you need their thoughts, and it's very difficult to get people to pay even a dollar for something if they haven't tried it. So usually, you know, setting it up for a freemium, i.e., um, it's free for a week, you know, look at Coursera, they'll do free for a week and then the trial runs away, you get to have to pay, um, you know, it's free for these number of users It's free for these numbers of transactions, right? You need to get people to test it and try it out and feel comfortable with it, and then they'll be able to pay. It's very difficult to get someone to pay when it's not— when they haven't tried it and felt comfortable with the app. I'd say you want to give people a few tries, a few a few weeks of free time on the app to really, for you to actually ask them. I would say at that point, if you're giving them something free, make sure to leverage their time. You say, you know what, I see that you've used our app 5 times and downloaded, I don't know how many transactions on it, I would love 5 minutes of your time, this is a 5-question survey, it will take you 3 minutes, right? And get as much data as you can without making it too, too much, too cumbersome. And one of those questions needs to be, if you were to pay for this product, how much would you pay? What are you using currently and how much are you paying for it? Right? And it really also depends if it's a B2B product or a B2C product. And if it's targeted at you know, which category of income or disposable income are you focusing on. I've seen a lot of B2C apps that are setting their price too, too high, and my kind of quick knee-jerk reaction is to say the price needs to be somewhere between a loaf of bread and a sandwich. For that particular country, wherever the country is. And I say this because I mentor founders in the US, in Africa, and in the Gulf. And so it's very difficult to say a particular price, you know, for that matches all the founders across different countries and industries. But I say if you're talking to a B2C, a parent who wants to use this for their kids, or if it's kind of one of those apps where you know it's not going to be used used every day, it's very difficult to have it at $100 a month, right? So you have to think of the, the disposable income of the customer. If it's B2B and it's a company and you know that they are supposed to run, you know, it's an SME that has at least 100,000 people, then obviously the price point is going to be a little bit high, right? But you need to go through the interviews and ask people what, how much would they pay. You need to run mini experiments where you put the price point a little bit higher or you do multiple pricing and you see which customer, which segment picks up more customers. And it really depends also on the kind of customer that you wanna attract.

Awesome, thank you so much, Nadia, for your answer. And with that, folks, we are closing off the Q&A. Thank you so much everyone for joining us today. Thank you Nadia for joining us today. Guys, if you loved what you heard, show us how you feel with the emojis. Nadia, you can see on your screen a ton of hearts, a ton of thumbs up.

That's awesome. Thank you guys. Thank you.

Awesome. Folks, what we'll do is we'll end right here and head on over to the networking lounge. Nadia, hopefully if you have some time, you can maybe stick around, to some of our participants here. I'll be there for a little while and you can of course speak to everybody, all the great people from around the world here. Nadia, before we close things off, any parting words?

I'll just say that make sure that your value proposition matches your customer and it will change over time. It will evolve. Allow your value proposition to evolve over time, just like you iterate on your product market fit. Your product in order to get it to a market fit, there's also a little bit of time for your value proposition to really hit all the key points that you wanted to. So don't be too harsh on yourself. It doesn't have to go right from the first sentence.

Awesome, folks. There you have it. Don't be too hard on yourself. With that, I hope you all have an awesome day. We'll see you in the next event.