The one-city wonder
A dashboard for a fictional venture. Where is it stuck? Read the numbers and the notes, pick the stage it's really stuck at, then see our read and why.
Fictional Every name and number here is made up for the puzzle.
The venture
An ordering assistant for independent cafés: it suggests the week's order from each supplier and places it on the café's say-so.
What the founders thinkSales outside our home city are slow. Maybe the product isn't good enough there.
Paying cafés, home city
66 from 48
Paying cafés, two new cities
6 from 0
Home-city cafés renewing
93% from 95%
Weeks from first call to paid
3 · 11
Also on the desk
- Every café in the new cities was signed by one of the founders, in person.
- New-city cafés that did sign use it as much as home-city cafés.
- Most home-city cafés came through the founders' own network or a referral.
Stuck at Market.
The product works wherever it lands. Reaching cafés without the founders doesn't work yet.
What the dashboard shows
- Home-city cafés renew month after month, and new-city cafés use it just as much once they sign. That is the product doing its job.
- Every new-city café needed a founder in the room, and took nearly four times as long to close.
- Most home-city growth came through the founders' network and referrals, which don't travel to a new city.
Why not PMF?
It looks like a PMF problem because the new cities are slow. But the cafés that sign behave exactly like the home ones. Fit isn't what's missing. A repeatable way to reach cafés, without the founders, is.
What we'd do next
Write down how each home-city café actually found the product. Then test one channel in one new city that doesn't need a founder in the room, with the result that would make you stop written down before it starts.
The method: Reachable Market Sizing and Graduated Launch. The stage, in the Journal: Market stage: can we reach them repeatably?.