Table of Contents
- Tell us about your product and what inspired you to start it?
- How long did it take you to acquire your first 50 customers, and what was your growth strategy?
- Which technology stack are you using and what challenges and limitations does it pose?
- What are some of the most essential tools that you use for your business?
- What have been some of the biggest insights you've gained since starting your entrepreneurial journey?
- Your recommended books/podcasts/newsletters etc.:
Olu Adedeji is the founder of Prelo - Frictionless prospecting platform to help agencies, consultants and early stage startups find paying customers.
Tell us about your product and what inspired you to start it?
Prelo was my second startup. In 2019 I built a B2B SaaS to help job seekers find work in Startup. We ran this Startup for over 2 years, looking for customers and spending time with clients only to find that they didn't have the budget to pay for our services. We failed after 2 years because we couldn't find enough Startups that had the budget to pay for our product. We found the Startup space to be extremely tough to crack with most Startups faking it.
That failure propelled me to look at how I could create a better way for early stage startups like myself to find first customers. So we embarked on building a product to help other early stage SaaS businesses find paying customers.
So the failure of my first startup was my inspiration to Start Prelo.
How long did it take you to acquire your first 50 customers, and what was your growth strategy?
We launched Prelo at the end of August 2021 and got our first customer in September. We actually got to our first 50 customers 3 months after launch.
I also think the black Friday promotions really helped us too.
Generally we spent the early days (and still do) visiting Facebook groups and connecting with individuals to try and understand if Prelo was useful to them. That engagement was really useful, it allowed us to understand who our ideal customers were especially with a product in MVP.
One thing many founders fail to understand is this, your customer demographics will change as your product matures. While Prelo was built to help early stage b2b startups find customers (other funded Startups), our initial customers were solopreneurs, freelancers and consultants looking for funded Startups as clients. Consultants and Solopreneurs were our early adopters and they helped with the testing and feedback.
Which technology stack are you using and what challenges and limitations does it pose?
We are a LAMP (Laravel, Apache, MySQL, PHP) tech stack with some Node and NoCode thrown in
What are some of the most essential tools that you use for your business?
Airtable, Slack, Trello, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn
What have been some of the biggest insights you've gained since starting your entrepreneurial journey?
The biggest insight for me has to be "listening and talking to customers" Building a product for customers starts with building rapport & engagement with them to make sure that the product serves their needs.
The other useful insight is undertsanding how to market my SaaS. I had a misconception that I had to let marketers do the marketing. Then I figured that, at an early-stage startup, the founder is the marketer, the sales person and the developer.
Talking to customers is vastly underrated, the more we as founders listen and engage with customers the quicker we can get to building the products that meet their needs
My approach to marketing has been an education. I've spent the last year trying to understand how social media (Twitter for example) is used to build a brand and build rapport with your target audience, specifically a founder brand.
So far, I learned a lot from the experience and plan to move on to trying a similar thing on LinkedIn which I'd abandoned for over 12 months.
Your recommended books/podcasts/newsletters etc.:
Deploy Empathy - How to conduct customer interviews
Traction - understanding how to run a business with focus on what moves the needle
