Case Study: Fisherman Founder Ameet Kallarackal's Trip To Catch The Product-Market Fit Fish
Ameet's willingess to build alongside his customer made all the difference in Fisherman's journey to product-market fit.
Introduction:
Fisherman was founded by Ameet Kallarackal and Nick Loeper in 2018 with the mission of democratizing the web for small businesses.
Problem: An effective online presence is table stakes for small businesses to survive, but over 50% of them still don’t have a usable website. Many small business owners lack the time, money, or technical knowledge to pay an agency to run their web presence or do it themselves.
Market: Fisherman is targeting the 14 million US-based independent small business owners that do not have a usable website, beginning with restaurants.
Solution: Their software automatically converts a business’s name and address into a complete, SEO-rich website in less than 5 minutes. Their team and software continue to maintain and update everything so that their clients can be successful online with 0 effort.
Team: Ameet is a second-time founder, primary responsibilities include managing Business Development, Customer Success, and Marketing, setting strategy, fundraising, and building organizational culture.
Kallarackal was previously on the founding team of Campus Insights, which provided user testing research to tech companies targeting college students. Campus Insights helped brands like Venmo, GoFundMe, and AirBnB better understand how to create and sell products for a young millennial audience, before eventually being acquired by Harvard Student Agencies. He also worked on the Product team at Blue Apron and as an Android developer based in Medellin, Colombia.
Executive Summary:
Problem: Creating And Selling A Technical Solution To A Non-Technical Buyer
At first, Ameet found it difficult to build something that didn’t resonate with him but did with his target user. Through detailed customer interviews, he started to understand what excited his users and set out to build.
Market: Building Along Side Your Non-Technical End User
One of the major things that paid off for Ameet and Fisherman was the decision to build along their customers. That choice allows them to clearly observe what pain points restaurant owners faced when trying to build their websites versus just getting answers to hypothetical questions.
Solution: Building A Frictionless, Easy-To-Use Product Is Key For Adoption Among Non-Technical Users
Ameet clearly focused on the following to deliver the most value to his customers who aren’t tech-savvy: eliminating effort, time, and technical know-how. Making the product easy-to-use is an intrinsic competitive advantage as it lowers a potential user’s barrier to adoption.
Team: A Clear Division Of Labor Helps Prevent (Most) Co-founder Arguments
Ameet and his co-founder, Nick, avoid most major arguments about what should be done next and how to do it because they have a clear separation of responsibilities.
Fundraising: How Will You Use This Money To Test Hypotheses?
As much as fundraising is about generating FOMO and charisma, the core function of a successful narrative is weaving how you will test key hypotheses with the money you are raising to generate even more value for your startup (and potential investors!).
Takeaway: Product-Market Fit Is A Moving Target
Markets aren’t static. Your product shouldn’t be either. Product-market fit is dynamic and evolves over time, therefore you need obsess over how your customer needs are changing as time goes on.
Case Study: Fisherman
Problem: Creating And Selling A Technical Solution To A Non-Technical Buyer
Tell me about a problem or set of problems that you’ve had to solve on your journey to product-market fit.
Fisherman primarily sells to independent small business owners who are not technically knowledgeable enough to effectively manage their own online presence, wouldn’t spend to hire an agency, and lack time to figure out an alternative. A set of challenges has been figuring out how to build, market, and sell a technical suite of products (automated website development & digital marketing) to a non-technical buyer.
Why were these problems so critical to solve? What was it like personally struggling to overcome these challenges to achieving PMF?
Our choice was to either change our target demographic or figure out how to translate technically complex jargon into digestible messaging and intuitive user experience. We must solve these problems in order to sell. I’ve worked with restaurants for years, but as someone who comes from a technical background myself, it has been personally challenging to develop messaging and user experience that doesn’t necessarily resonate with me as much as it does with our customer base.
We didn’t use a specific framework, but customer pain points can be identified by asking the right questions and observing customers directly. It’s important to avoid leading questions and to ask follow-ups on key points. Observation is key because often, people answer hypothetical questions differently from their actual behaviors. We spent time measuring lost revenue caused by specific pain points and iterated in direct collaboration with early customers.
Observation is key because often, people answer hypothetical questions differently from their actual behaviors.
Market: Building Along Side Your Non-Technical End User
Let’s get deeper into the pain point or points you were trying to solve. Imagine I’m a customer thinking about using your product or service. How do you go about understanding my pain and creating a solution to address it?
First, we ask a handful of questions to understand the specific pain points and how we can help. We’ll ask questions to determine the current landscape of alternatives and what they like and dislike about these solutions. We’ll dive as deep as possible to get granular information and then ask questions to test hypotheses about potential solutions we can build to solve these problems.
We made it clear to our early customers that we wanted to build our product alongside them. This was valuable for us because it gave us a consistent source of learnings, and in exchange, we designed a product that met their needs, and we offered early services to them at heavily discounted prices. My last startup was a User Research company, so I previously had experience performing customer research. We used scripts and spreadsheets to compare results across some customers before making any new product decisions.
Assuming you’ve managed to address the pain points I face as a customer, what additional information did you discover in your journey to PMF that there’s a large market in need of a solution to the existing problem?
Especially since the environment is always changing, there are several ongoing activities that help understand the market size and pain points, like talking to other founders, investors, and academics in our industry, reading case studies and research papers, and leveraging industry reports and data tools. It also helps to attend industry trade shows and conferences to stay updated on the latest trends. One specific thing we did was build tools that helped identify how many businesses in any region had existing websites or social media. We also spend a lot of time in conversation with our existing and potential customers to learn about new challenges that surface.
How did you narrow your scope of what portion of the market you wanted to tackle first? Who did you decide would be your first beachhead customers and why?
Our vision is to serve a wide variety of small business verticals beyond restaurants. Still, we knew the value of focusing on a specific niche, especially because different subsets of a market usually require different product, sales, and marketing activities which can be a distraction to an early-stage company. First, we conducted market research to narrow down to verticals that were large enough to build a big business for our product. Then we ran many experiments to gauge relative interest for each of these segments. Eventually, it became clear that independent restaurants had the most immediate need for our product based on engagement rates, early traction, and demonstrable ROI.
We made it clear to our early customers that we wanted to build our product alongside them. This was valuable for us because it gave us a consistent source of learnings, and in exchange, we designed a product that met their needs, and we offered early services to them at heavily discounted prices.
Solution: Building A Frictionless, Easy-To-Use Product Is Key For Adoption Among Non-Technical Users
How did you build your solution to maximize its relevance with the customer and ensure product-market fit? If you haven't found PMF yet, what have you learned? What are the blockers for getting to PMF?
Given that our target market’s major pain point is lack of technical savviness and time, we constantly focus our product strategy on eliminating effort, time, and technical know-how to get the most value from Fisherman. We analyze many usage data and tweak our user experience by adding automation and process improvements that reduce time and effort to get our customers online.
Early on, we built channel relationships and custom integrations to enable seamless referrals from third parties. Given that our customer base is busy and not technically savvy, we designed and tested a sign-up experience that enabled small businesses to get a complete website in minutes with no effort. We also created a sales process to capture user attention as quickly as possible, tied to a customer success process that immediately supported them after a handoff from sales.
What are some of the things you did that “didn’t scale” to shape your solution today?
Before Fisherman Automated Site Technology (FAST) was built in the early days, we would manually create websites and spend weeks working closely with our clients before getting to a final product. We operated more like a consulting agency than a software product. We’d also spend a lot of time going door to door to restaurants conducting in-person sales instead of inside sales, which we strictly do today.
What did you learn to best engage with your customers? How did you build a tight feedback loop with your customers to rapidly improve your solution to their problems?
Our customers are extremely busy small business owners. It can be difficult to get their attention, so It’s important that you’re as efficient as possible sharing information and making the sale when you have it. We try to cover as much ground as possible on initial calls and provide multiple options for working with us to accommodate their hectic schedules. Additionally, since we handle website edit requests for our customers, our team has many opportunities to engage with them. We’ll often ask questions to learn more about customer pain points at the end of support calls to take advantage of the time we have with them.
Walk me through how you landed your first few customers as you were building your product or service.
Our first few customers came from going door to door in Boston, talking to as many restaurants as possible during non-peak hours. We worked very closely with these first few customers and could get referrals to our next set of customers. Then we created case studies and testimonials based on initial work and started experimenting with various growth hacking strategies.
Given that our customer base is busy and not technically savvy, we designed and tested a sign-up experience that enabled small businesses to get a complete website in minutes with no effort.
Team: A Clear Division Of Labor Helps Prevent (Most) Co-founder Arguments
If you have a cofounder, walk me through a time that you two had a conflict. What was it about? How did you handle the situation? What was the resolution, and how did it impact your working relationship with your cofounder?
Despite living and working together for the past few years, my cofounder and I haven’t experienced much conflict. There are often disagreements about product or business strategy. Still, we’ve been able to limit these escalating into larger conflicts through clear distinctions of responsibility and a culture of open dialogue. We have complementary personalities and regularly have scheduled conversations to share direct feedback.
Also, I joined a CEO peer group called The Raffoni Group, where our small group meets every two months for a full day to present detailed cases about pressing strategic obstacles. It’s a great opportunity to get feedback on our biggest decisions and learn how others approach their business at an intimate level. I’ve also been a part of more casual founder networks and recently organized a small group of founder friends running similar stage companies. We meet monthly to go over updates and more tactical challenges, and I always have several takeaways from these sessions. We encourage everyone on our team to take online courses to level up their skill sets or learn new skills as a benefit. For example, I’m currently taking a corporate finance course to better prepare for handling finances as we grow. Each team member has multiple 1:1s per week with collaborators on respective teams where direct feedback is encouraged to help one another improve and feel supported.
What key qualities did you look for in key early hires to increase your chances of discovering product-market fit, and how did you prioritize what types of hires you needed to make first?
Hiring someone with experience in a similar role with similar responsibilities is helpful. Still, it’s critical that their personality traits also fit what’s required of a startup since things constantly change and unexpected challenges can surface at any point. We screen for people who are adaptable, hardworking, and self-starting.
If there was a potential employee of your startup reading this Case Study right now, how would you convince them that joining your team is the next best step in their career?
The startup experience is not for everyone, but if you’re looking to grow skills and experience as quickly as possible, it can be amazing since you’re less likely to have strict boundaries around your role. At Fisherman, everyone is given significant decision-making autonomy and the opportunity to initiate projects that can immediately impact our growth. We’re at an exciting point in the startup journey, having a stable product and early traction, with a ton of room ahead for growth. We’re also mission-driven, and every day we help more small businesses stay alive and transition to the digital age.
Fundraising: How Will You Use This Money To Test Hypotheses?
How did you set expectations with investors at seed and Series A? What is the main difference in those expectations as your company grows from one stage to another?
I think the product-market fit is an ongoing process since markets generally change, and products need to adapt with them or stay ahead of the curve. So it is important to stay close to customers and dive into pain their pain points regularly, in addition to generating and testing hypotheses for solving these pain points.
How does dilution work as you go from seed to Series A?
A rough proxy is to shoot for 15 - 20% dilution at each stage of fundraising.
Takeaway: Product-Market Fit Is A Moving Target
What are the key lessons have you learned so far from your journey to achieve product-market fit?
I think product-market fit is an ongoing process since markets generally change, and products need to adapt with them or stay ahead of the curve. So it is important to stay close to customers and dive into pain their pain points regularly, in addition to generating and testing hypotheses for solving these pain points.
What’s the hardest problem you’re facing now after solving the prior one(s)?
The hardest problem we’re currently facing is achieving more predictable growth. Most of our growth to date has come through referrals, but we’d like to invest more in direct marketing efforts to help us have more control over the levers for growing faster.
Three Cool Founders You Should Know About:
Kallarackal: Here are three founders you should check out next!
Branick Weix, Founder of Aryeo: Aryeo is a leading content management platform for the real estate industry.
Peter MacDonald, Founder of Wunderlite: Wunderite is a data exchange that aims to bring efficiency to the commercial insurance marketplace, transparency to stakeholders, and actionable insight to decision-makers.
Max Friedman, Founder of Givebutter: Givebutter is an online fundraising platform powering more than $100 million in donations per year for over 30,000 organizations and causes.
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