Case Study: Matidor's Sean Huang Builds For The Market, Not Any One Particular Customer

Huang says, "I think listening to the customer’s feedback is important but what’s more important is learning how to prioritize what you are building is actually for the market."

Jul 18, 2022

Introduction:

Sean Huang is a Vancouver-based serial entrepreneur who has worked on three startups with more than 12 years of experience in sales and business development. From door-to-door sales with one of the largest telecom providers in Canada to handling enterprise accounts, Sean was one of the fastest salesmen in his marketing firm to get promoted to senior sales manager for B2B campaigns. In 2015, Sean co-founded his first startup in the mobile VR space and after some initial traction, the company was accepted into a cross-border accelerator program in Shanghai (Chinaccelerator).

Currently, Huang heads business development for Matidor, a YC-backed project management software on a live map for environmental consultants working with energy exploration companies. In 2020, Matidor finished second place in the TechCrunch Startup Battlefield competition out of over 1,000 applicants, as well as a finalist in the 2021 SXSW Enterprise track.

Executive Summary:

Problem: Building A Centralized Source Of Truth For Field Service Operators

The problem we had on our journey to solve PMF was having a solution built on assumptions before we knocked on doors. While iterating the product, we didn’t identify who the ideal customer profile was early on, even though we did a lot of user interviews.
Market: Environmental Consultants Are The Ideal Customer Profile

We decided consultants would be great beachhead customers since they spend most of their time in the field juggling reports and doing a lot of admin work, followed by managing their client’s data. Since consultants have to juggle between time in the field and reporting, it quickly became clear that they would be the ideal user on the platform.
Solution: Maintain Focus On One Use-Case For One Type Of Customer

The biggest PMF blocker is to split ourselves too thin by tackling too many use cases/industries simultaneously. We learned that every industry has its own workflow, terminologies, and use cases through time.
Team: Focus On Improving The Group’s Efficiency And Learning Rate

I think it’s important that founders are aligned on the same goal, and therefore, any debates or conflicts are just talking points for us to hash out the best way to move forward as a team. Leveraging the best of each other and learning to step back from areas where you are not great will allow the team to flow and move faster while getting things done.
Fundraising: Raise Enough To Get To The Next Stage

When we came out of Y Combinator last year, we didn’t raise too much since we felt we just needed to raise enough to get to the next milestone before raising our series A. In this round, investors who invested understood our market and product potential, so setting expectations was not that hard.
Takeaway: User Feedback Is Important, But Keep The Market As The Biggest Picture In Mind

I think listening to the customer’s feedback is important but what’s more important is learning how to prioritize what you are building is actually for the market rather than fulfilling the demands of a single customer.

Case Study: Matidor

Matidor co-founder and Head of Business Development, Sean Huang.

Problem: Not Identifying The Ideal Customer Profile Before Building

Tell me about a problem or set of problems that you’ve had to solve on your journey to product-market fit.

In the beginning, it was a daunting task to figure out who in the field service industry faced the issue of collaboration. Vincent’s background in GIS (geospatial information systems) through his experience as the technical lead back at Google Earth has led to seeing many industries working off of maps and using this as a way to communicate in the field. When I first got back from Shanghai after my failed attempt at my first startup in the VR space, we decided to pool our experiences together by combining mapping and immersive technology into a joint product. We went door-to-door talking to urban planners, contractors, and engineers.

The problem we had on our journey to solve PMF was having a solution built on assumptions before we knocked on doors. While iterating the product, we didn’t identify who the ideal customer profile was early on, even though we did a lot of user interviews.

It became clear that it wasn’t just maps that were essential for people working in the field; it’s consolidating multiple systems into a one-stop shop that’s easily accessible by those doing cleanups and reporting status in the field. What’s different about consultants working on environmental cleanups in the natural resource space is that they typically have hundreds if not thousands of locations they need to monitor, assess, and cleanup at any given time. It became clear that a mapping tool.

Despite there having been benchmarks in the mapping space and dozens of project management software out there already, there isn’t an intuitive or mobile platform that allows people to see the status of their projects in real-time visually and at the same time track their budgets.

Why were these problems so critical to solve? What was it like personally struggling to overcome these challenges to achieving PMF?

These problems were critical to solving because we always felt we were so close to finding a pain point in the industry. We did over 300 customer interviews and tried to find a common pain point that was not only collaboration, but people spend a lot of time managing their project data on antiquated tools and spreadsheets. There were a lot of sleepless nights, and always thinking if we should either change our feature to cater to one industry or question the way we were pushing for POC. When you’re in the B2B space and constantly doing trials and POC, not being able to convert them into customers in the beginning, takes a toll on you.

Early in the days when we first launched Matidor, both Vincent and I sat in all sales-related meetings as we needed to learn specific pain points or rather what problems are the customers themselves trying to solve. We always began the conversation by relating potentially three common problems that we have found from previous interviews and see if any resonated with the prospect. The more probing we do and getting them to talk more, the better instead of us trying to run a demo of the platform. From here, we can have checkboxes inside our head to prioritize, “Ok, so would this problem be big enough for the industry?” and if most customers are telling us the same thing.

When we were building the first iterations of the platform, we had a list of features built out after thoroughly interviewing customers and using this method to determine which features should we build out first and which ones were “nice to have” specific to the customers and not for the wider market. This framework helped structure our sales process later on since, in enterprise sales, there are many stages to qualify the customer by asking questions early on during what we call the discovery call.

Market: Environmental Consultants Are The Ideal Customer Profile

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?

We follow a process early on during the prequalifying stage. During this stage, it takes a form of a 30-minute discovery call. We typically like to keep it short and use the first 15 minutes to identify three things. First, I would ask how many projects you’re currently managing to see if map-based visualization would be a good fit for you. Next, we would ask if you are currently using any tools in place; I typically assume they’re using spreadsheets or other PM software at this point based on previous customer interviews. Finally, we would ask if there are any gaps or challenges currently faced by you using your current software or systems.

We can map out their persona and what pain points they would have regarding managing projects, coordinating their team members, and reporting to external stakeholders. Typically, consultants would need to generate status reports for their clients regarding invoices, work done, etc. We would only emphasize the platform’s value to address their hurdle. For example, if you mention to me you have trouble tracking people in the field, we would focus on the map-based component where you can visualize where your team is working and what is being done. Suppose time permits, and there is enough interest. In that case, we take the last 5-10 minutes to run a quick demo, only focusing on addressing the problems discussed before and not overly promoting features that do not resonate with their pain point.

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?

Reaching out to consultants and field service providers in the natural resource space, mainly on environmental cleanup, has been a recurring problem where sharing data is cumbersome. Still, for many companies, managing field projects with many moving parts is a challenge: accessing tabular and spatial information requires too many steps. It involves too many people, making it frustrating, slow, and costly.

The field service industry has been overwhelmed by the amount of information flowing between stakeholders: Correspondence, reports, field data, photos, financials, and the list goes on. Spreadsheets and paper-based systems are still in use, and their lack of practicality cannot be overstated. Meanwhile, outdated and hard-to-use legacy software does not offer much help: they’re complex, siloed, often impractical and brittle, and therefore unloved by the people who need them most. This leads to lost, incomplete, or erroneous data, team member frustrations, duplication of effort, and poor time management.

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?

The problem initially was we assumed a lot of things about what people need for better collaboration when they were in the field and ended up again having a solution before identifying the pain point. After trying to get some POC going in the construction and planning space, we decided to look elsewhere. That’s when Vincent started calling his old contacts in the environmental consulting space from his previous companies. After sitting down with some environmental consultants working in the oil and gas space, we quickly realized they all have the same problems as described earlier. We decided consultants would be great beachhead customers since they spend most of their time in the field juggling reports and doing a lot of admin work, followed by managing their client’s data. Since consultants have to juggle between time in the field and reporting, it quickly became clear that they would be the ideal user on the platform.

After the initial interviews with energy operators and consultants leveraging Vincent’s previous connection, we went onto Linkedin sales navigator. We took our interview and collective customer response to see which niche within our targetted industry (i.e., environmental services and oil & energy) we found the most success. We broke it down into two personas: environmental services companies (the consultants) and their end clients (the energy operators who serve as the economic buyer). The former of the two acted as the primary user on the platform. Through their relationship with different customers, we were able to see an initial network effect.

From these two segments, we broke down what role and position would be ideal for us to talk to in terms of who is the right internal champion to nurture and what the buying cycle for each side looks like. We formalized a strategy into a “product marketing playbook” that was the foundation for building our sales process. We have a living document that constantly validates findings and hypotheses based on new customer engagement.

Solution: Maintain Focus On One Use-Case For One Type Of Customer

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?

We set up weekly meetings with our early customers to gather ongoing feedback. All of them appreciate the fact that we treat their request seriously - the fact that we deliver updates every two weeks make it even more real for them. Many software companies ask their users for feedback but never deliver, but we are different. We have created a product organization where all customer feedback goes through rapid validation, design, and development process so our customers can enjoy the evolution of the product that is tailored to their needs. PMF is therefore achieved through a product management process that requires patience and active listening.

The biggest PMF blocker is to split ourselves too thin by tackling too many use cases/industries simultaneously. We learned that every industry has its own workflow, terminologies, and use cases through time. Trying to build a product that accommodates everyone is almost impossible at our stage of the company. Therefore, it is important to define our Ideal Customer Profiles and stay focused on them.

What are some of the things you did that “didn’t scale” to shape your solution today?

Instead of relying on email automation to run campaigns on leads, we decided each account needed a lot of penetrative approaches where we needed to identify specific projects they’re working on for us to better get on a call with them. I remember we used to do a lot of cold calling and mixed with Linkedin messaging instead of emailing, which allowed us to get as much conversation as we could to shape our product through each call. Each call allowed us to understand better what the common pain point was between different sides, including clients of the environmental consultants.

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?

As mentioned above, typically, we set up weekly meetings with our early customers to gather feedback on an ongoing basis. All of them appreciate that we treat their request seriously - the fact that we deliver updates every two weeks. With this, we built a great rapport with our existing clients, and in turn, they would give us more and more use cases that could be built on a case study for similar clients in the industry. At times earlier on during the sales process, even when the prospect changes their mind last minute or shows no interest after a certain timeframe of engagement, we would still ask them what they didn’t like about the platform or what they would like to see for them to buy-in. Sometimes, negative feedback is more essential to improving our solutions to their problems.

Walk me through how you landed your first few customers as you were building your product or service.

In the beginning, we created wireframes and had a working prototype ready as we continuously interviewed and sat down with different consultants who would potentially sign on as a customer. After getting enough feedback on the product, we decided to attend tradeshows and events to get our brand out there while securing early leads. For our industry, joining specific associations was helpful as we leveraged as much as possible, including publishing case studies, newsletters, and, more recently, amidst the pandemic: online webinars. From there, we got a lot of interest in booking a call with us to demonstrate the software. We always try to treat them as if we are onboarding them after the initial discovery call so they would be able to think, “Ok, this is what I’m going to get into after signing on, and it’s that easy.”

Besides customer interviews and validating some common problems we’ve understood from customers during the early stages of sales discovery calls, we also asked why people chose not to sign up with us. We tend to get a bunch of different objections; whether it’s lack of product features, timing, or not a good fit, we always try to identify a pattern to go back to our playbook. We compare objections and feedback and decide whether to iterate parts of the features to appeal to more customers or identify it to be a channel problem where we are not talking to the right person in the organization. I think a pitfall is building features that only cater to individuals who are not primary users within an organization.

Team: Focus On Improving The Group’s Efficiency And Learning Rate

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?

Vincent and I compliment each other pretty well, and we rarely have conflicts. When we first started working together, it was more of getting used to each other’s work style and how we, later on, defined our company’s culture. I think it’s important that founders are aligned on the same goal, and therefore, any debates or conflicts are just talking points for us to hash out the best way to move forward as a team. How do we learn and become more efficient as a team? That is the number one priority.

As our company grew after being funded and bringing on new team members, we always ensured everyone treated everyone as peers and had as many open conversations as possible. We always leverage the best of each other; what that means is we recognize everyone has a special niche they’re great at, and we empower them to build upon that. If someone is better than us in sales, then we rely on that person to provide us with guidance and structure. The same goes for marketing, product, and industry knowledge.

Leveraging the best of each other and learning to step back from areas where you are not great will allow the team to flow and move faster while getting things done. Our company headcount was able to grow without ever having a physical office space. By building a remote-first culture where everyone can work at their own pace as long as no one is blocking anyone from getting things completed, we allowed everyone to own their work and take control. On top of this, we try to be as hands-off as possible since we want to groom early hires into potential leaders in the company moving forward.

Professionally and personally, I learned to develop patience and not react to things as quickly as I used to. Being an impulsive person, I think you always have knee-jerk reactions, whether to an email or sending proposals over, but a lot of times, I learned it’s better to pace yourself and process things through logic before doing things. That’s the difference between doing things and reacting to things.

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?

In terms of early hires, we look for self-motivated individuals regardless of which departments they’re in. We also like to keep things simple and focus on building the best product for our customers; I know that’s being said repeatedly. Still, we typically spot talents and hires that prioritize customer experience over everything else. We also look for certain qualities in each hire early that would serve as a foundation for building the team around them.

A red flag for us is noticing if someone in the company has self-fulfilling plan rather than focusing on how we move ahead in sync as a company. On the business development side, we recently hired our key salesperson who has a lot of experience working in our client’s industry. I think it’s important to shape the product more and more to speak to the industry we are pursuing, so having someone with industry and domain expertise helps set the stage for structuring our sales machine and marketing plans.

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?

We are a fast-moving team delivering an innovative solution to a growing market in the natural resource space. Our solution is to solve the lack of collaboration and visibility for people working in the field by simplifying how projects are visualized and managed. Without any benchmark competitors to date in this field, we are tackling an unsaturated space while helping companies be more sustainable and efficient with cleaning up the environment. Joining our team means helping us build a better tomorrow for people working tirelessly to clean up environmental waste and contamination and for development purposes. Since we are a young company, there is high growth potential.

Fundraising: Raise Enough To Get To The Next Stage

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?

When we came out of Y Combinator last year, we didn’t raise too much since we felt we just needed to raise enough to get to the next milestone before raising our series A. In this round, investors who invested understood our market and product potential, so setting expectations was not that hard. I think raising our seed was pretty efficient coming out of the program because we did not have to go through too much expectation setting since the investors were all very supportive and understood the stage where our company is at. The main difference as we move from seed to series A is being able to hit our ARR milestone as a B2B company. I think that’s the only metric that would be more expected moving forward.

How does dilution work as you go from seed to Series A?

We have not thought through this yet since we are still a year away from raising our Series A. We do have some general idea, but because our first round was not priced, we still need to see where the priced round is raised for the Series A.

Takeaway: User Feedback Is Important, But Keep The Market As The Biggest Picture In Mind

What are the key lessons have you learned so far from your journey to achieve product-market fit?

I think listening to the customer’s feedback is important but what’s more important is learning how to prioritize what you are building is actually for the market rather than fulfilling the demands of a single customer. Making friends in the industry will also help you learn many critical things about the industry and attend as many conferences and tradeshows; even joining technical sessions during these events will help you understand your customer and their problems.

Another lesson learned is that it’s better to stay focused on a particular use case and dissect it down to precisely who would benefit from the solution. Avoid spreading yourselves too thin to try to cater to a wider range of audience, as it’s hard to get a consistent answer on what to prioritize to build for the product. When you try to please and build towards every individual customer’s ad box demand is when it becomes more of a distraction than anything.

What’s the hardest problem you’re facing now after solving the prior one(s)?

I would say the longevity of the sales cycle in this industry is a challenge, followed by the industry itself being very cyclical. Typically field season happens twice every year and in those periods getting hold of key stakeholders or decision-makers is challenging. For the deal size of each subscription, it would take multiple buy-ins at different levels with not just the decision-maker but the consultants who would be implementing the solution in the field. The sales cycle would get delayed because getting everyone in the same room is challenging enough due to folks being in and out of the field. In contrast, getting folks to commit to a pilot and dedicate time is also a hurdle towards the end of the sales cycle.

Finally, there is always the chicken-egg problem in a very conventional industry. On the one hand, people realize they need better tools to stay afloat or save time from doing a lot of tedious data management through spreadsheets. Still, because they’re so constrained by the amount of admin work in front of them, they tend to look at new solutions on the back burner.

Click Here for Matidor’s Founder File:

Matidor’s Founder File Description:

Huang: “The challenge for companies in the B2B domain has always been getting revenue in the door in a timely manner. If I can think of the most common thing that keeps all founders up at night is looking at your stagnant revenue due to a prolonged sales cycle, sudden change management, or various factors that would kill your chances to penetrate an account or talk to the right stakeholder to move things forward in a timely manner which ultimately impacts your ability to get contracts signed and inked.”

Matidor's Founder FIle

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