Seven Lessons We Learnt While Acquiring Our First Customer

It’s been one year since we formally registered Vade Labs Private Limited. I started Vade Labs to enable people to bring their ideas to reality. I never knew implementing this idea would lead me to the journey I had never expected.

On 1st January 2022, we started working on our flagship product Vade Studio. Our goal was to build it in three months, start onboarding users, and get paid for the hard work.

Well, we were in for a surprise.

Bootstrapping is hard; it’s synonymous with “I don’t have money”. So our need to be frugal made it harder to hire developers. That inherently led to the slow development of the product.

However, as we were clear on our goal of “making it work”, we took multiple shortcuts and got a demo of the product ready with the help of a couple of interns.

It gave us some leverage, and we could demo our idea to prospective customers.

This strategy helped us land our first Vade Concierge customer.

Here’s the summary of seven lessons we learned while acquiring our first customer:

1. Make it work, make it right, make it fast: We followed this mantra for developing our product. It enabled us to take multiple shortcuts and cut down on features we wouldn’t need in our first release. We didn’t focus on making it pixel perfect from the start. This helped us reify our concept idea into a usable product.

2. Slow hiring is always better than lousy hiring: In retrospect, I had become desperate to hire someone to help me out in building the product. That desperation led me to hire someone who wasn’t the right fit for our team. It took me a lot more time to let him go. Once I did that, we had much more synergy in our group.

3. Take your time and be patient: Being worked in multiple VC backed startups, I was yearning for the adrenaline rush that comes with the urgency of building the product. VC backed companies tend to have a lot of rush but no speed. It’s the primary reason I am adamant about bootstrapping the company instead of raising funds. This realisation helped me feel comfortable with slow and consistent progress.

4. Finance with the side hustle: I couldn’t set a deadline on when the product would be ready, so I had to figure out a way to finance the development. To keep it going, I end up taking up development contracts. Striking a balance between the contract work and building vadelabs is a real challenge. Having this income stream for running the company keeps us afloat and stress-free.

5. Find the correct niche: We needed to figure out who would pay for our product without having a full-fledged product. To do this right, we scheduled customer interviews with people who would land in one of the following categories:

1. Freelance Developers
2. Data Analytics Companies
3. No Code Developers
4. No Code Agencies
5. Dev Shops
6. Startup Founders

After three months of research and hundreds of customer interviews, we focused on data analytics companies. We are building our product with this persona in mind. This focused approach helped us do more things with fewer resources.

6. Don’t do things for the sake of doing them: We were following the ethos of building in public. We shared our weekly progress over Twitter. Over three months, we realised we were not getting any engagement on those posts, and no one cared about our weekly progress. They care about what can we do for them. Once we realised that, we stopped doing it and took a step back to develop a better content strategy that should help us grow when our product is ready for public beta.

7. Focus on UI/UX from the start: This has turned out to be one of the best decisions. We prototype the whole concept before handing it off for development. All the market research is done at this stage, and the goal is to come up with an intuitive UX for the problem we are trying to solve. The result has been staggering.

Vade Studio enables users to generate back-end APIs and workflows in just five clicks. Here’s a small demo that showcases the simplicity of our platform:

We are learning new things daily, and we share them publicly, so you don’t make the same mistake we did in our bootstrapping journey. If you want to be a part of it, follow me on Twitter @pragyanatvade.