This was a defining month for us! We now know who we are, what problems we should pick up to solve and how to go about solving them. Most importantly, we are clear on who we are NOT.
The first baby steps on building Kaapi were taken in February!
Who are we
Kaapi helps remote managers run high-performing teams via regular team checkins, performance reviews, 360 degree feedback and more! We knew that we wanted to build something that fit all of our mission criteria, and did a bunch of thought experiments to validate our assumptions. Talking to customers helped too! Check out the featured image to see the constraints we put ourselves on ourselves to finalise on what problem to solve!
Hat's off to Tyler Tringas for writing this and this about Micro-SaaS that helped a lot. And this interview with Tyler King from Less Annoying CRM.
I am currently working on Kaapi full time (Linkedin, Twitter), while Ankit (Linkedin) is working on it part time as my tech mentor, devops guru and sounding board all rolled into one.
Metrics
- MRR - nil, not launched yet
- NPS - nil, not launched yet
- Runway - 10 months, Dec' 20 (personal savings)
Biggest wins
- Did customer interviews with 11 remote managers, and 13 employees across 9 countries. Some of those will hopefully end up being our early customers and champions
- Shipped out a working slack MVP to give and collect feedback
- Got into Pioneer (remote accelerator)
- Shipped two blog posts
- On the personal side โ> I lost 3 kgs down to 77 kgs and learned my first song on the Uke
Help needed
- Do you know anyone who works remotely or in a distributed team? We would love to talk to them for 10 mins on a quick call to understand their biggest challenges.
What didn't go well
- Personal health issues continue โ> I got another bout of Ankylosing Spondylitis inflammation on my lower back.
- Struggling and feeling a little shy to activate my old network again, be out there, talk to people and brainstorm with them.
Plans for March '20
- Do basic UX testing with a simple Figma prototype
- Talk to 10 more potential customers and keep building the beta customers list
- Launch the slack MVP beta with all functionalities laid out
- Get first 3 beta customers to signup and pay upfront for a month if possible