CoDo was an early startup team with a vision to boost productivity with social reinforcement mechanics. When initial attempts to gain traction with B2C products proved difficult, the CoDo team sought an advisor who would lead a more deliberate process to discover a new market and a new Product-Market Fit (PMF) narrative.
As a hands-on advisor to CoDo, I led the PMF Discovery project to find a new direction for the company. After the discovery, I also participated in the Alpha launch and outlined a fundraising pitch deck based on the new B2B SaaS direction.
Please note: Some images on this page have been re-created and re-styled with placeholder content to illustrate the work process and the output without disclosing the actual deliverables.
PMF Discovery
Customer Research
PMF Interviews
Pretotype Tests
Research Synthesis
PMF Narrative
Coaching
Team Vision Alignment
Traction Workshop
Weekly Founder Coaching
Fundraising
Pitch Assist
Alpha Launch
Product Design
Email Marketing Setup
Creative Assets
React Components Styling
User Guides Documentation
Every startup begins with a unique point of view (POV) from its founders.
CoDo founder & CEO Hisun Kim had a life-changing experience which taught her that small wins and encouragements from a close-knit social circle can help you achieve amazing things. Scientific research confirmed her experience too.
A serial entrepreneur, Hisun explored ways to apply the power of social mechanics and small wins to health and productivity problems in the B2C space. But it can be tricky to find an intersection between your vision and a viable PMF narrative. That’s when I got the call.
The ask: Help the CoDo team find a viable business direction in the B2B space, while staying true to the founder vision.
The first thing we did was to gather as a team and talk about our personal motivations about why they want to work on this hypothetical product.
This exercise confirmed multiple things: The importance of staying true to our mission, our willingness to explore different problem spaces within B2B to achieve commercial traction, and a consensus on our strengths and the team-mission fit factors.
Pretotypes are created to address the question “what should we build?” — as opposed to prototypes that address “how should we build it” or “how should it look and behave?”
Based on the team alignment, we quickly drafted a very simplistic PMF narrative draft. And then we went through cycles of pretotype test process:
After rounds of pretotype tests and PMF interviews, we had a mini breakthrough — coming up with ideas where CoDo’s social nudging approach can be used to solve a B2B customer’s problems.
After the team converged on two candidates directions for CoDo, the founder and CEO made an executive decision, largely based on the founder-market fit factor:
Which problem is the CoDo team, especially the founder, better positioned to solve?
The direction discovered through this qualitative process then fueled CoDo’s initial customer acquisition and fundraising campaigns.
The CoDo team was able to hit the following milestones and expand their Product-Market Fit to eventually focus on onboarding and activating gig workers.
