When I left my job in early 2022 to start Tetheros I was ready to start the world on fire.
š¢ Huge clients!
š Massive growth!
šŖ Dynamic competition!
I unknowingly began treading toward a dangerous warpath to serve all companies in every industry. After all, who doesnāt need to improve their collaboration tools?
My entire script flipped a few months in when I started studying sales and marketing. This time from a different angle with some fresh voices (hello, Seth Godin). Turns out that business lessons hit differently when youāre actually running a business.
Hereās what I learned.
I didnāt have the manpower or resources to sell to larger companies right away, and I definitely didnāt have time, either. Corporations and their bureaucracy come with a multi-month lead-time price tag - and thatās only if youāre successful at navigating a hierarchy from the outside.
I was not equipped for that.
Even though I felt Tetheros could benefit every team, I wouldnāt have any clients if I spent most of my time fighting above my weight class. The existing champions of the collaboration space were already serving the large enterprises with their (seemingly unlimited) time, budgets, staff, and skills that I frankly lacked.
Fortunately, I had one enormous advantage over all of them: speed.
Decision making and product development move ridiculously fast when the buck stops with one person. Being a solo founder also meant I could overhaul my entire strategy overnight, which I did.
I humbly accepted I couldnāt compete for the same customers as my competition, but my speed meant I could shift my entire approach to focus on small, under-served customer bases.
After some industry research, customer calls, and a pinch of networking, I decided to grow Tetheros by focusing on specific industries over a series of phases.
Phase 1: MVP
Primary customer segment: Small to medium-sized non-profits
Product cost: Free
Purpose: Feedback
Iām not entirely sold on The Lean Startup model as the universal solution to starting a business, because it limits the potential for novelty in the market, but I do believe in iteration.
I want to shape the early version of Tetheros to serve non-profits for free in exchange for feedback. My first goal is to test my thesis of collaboration, and iterate the product design to help teams achieve their mission clarity more effectively.
Phase 2: Early Expansion
Primary customer segments: Startups, and Engineering
Product cost: Free for non-profits, paid for others
Purpose: Traction
Phase 2 will publicly introduce the paid version of Tetheros: a licensed model that scales the core concepts of the platform for larger teams, or teams of teams. The standard version of the product is available for free to smaller teams, with all the features.
The main difference between them are the available levers for team management, which you only need once youāve grown as an organization (āteamsā, roles, and connected workspaces). Besides non-profits, the product cost depends on how many active users you have under your license - payment based on real use instead of paying for basic features or seat-based guesswork.
I want to take everything I learned so far and serve two industries I know a lot about: startups and engineering. Even though my ābigā competitors on the market have products that can help, they lack the differentiating factors Tetheros enables in teams: alignment.
Most of them help teams ādo things rightā, but they donāt make it any easier to ādo the right thingsā. You need both to succeed .
Startups and engineering teams need context to make the best decisions about their work. Many have to collaborate and communicate with stakeholders outside their team to effectively move forward, and Tetheros is here for it.
Iām suited to help startups and engineering teams because they are my professional heritage. I understand the struggles and desires of these groups which means I can speak their language and serve them more specifically.
Unfortunately, I canāt do that for free for very long so I eventually have to make money.
Helping these segments will generate the revenue necessary to allow me to build a proper team and expand Tetherosā capabilitie. The ātractionā also proves to the market that my theory of work resonates with teams - a requirement of any successful company.
Phase 3: Slow Growth
After Iāve established Tetheros as a viable new SaaS in the marketplace of work management, Iāll continue to grow the company. My aim is to stay small for as long as possible and make considerable investments into my team and product.
Iād rather grow quality before quantity and position Tetheros for rapid growth later.
Iām lucky to be where I am right now. Many companies sought investments in 2021, grew too fast and ended up laying off hundreds of workers they had just hired.
I desire stable, calculated growth - which is a critical reason Iām bootstrapping until I have real traction led by a tremendous product. If I do this well, investors will likely be far more agreeable to my terms.
That being said, all of these plans could shift overnight if a more viable strategy is needed, but youāll be the first to know!
Questions? Comments? Haiku? Send me a DM on LinkedIn.