Design Partners — Who Are They and How To Find Them
A Series for Early Stage SaaS Founders — Part 1
I’ve been meaning to start a series of posts for early stage founders starting their journeys of building B2B SaaS products out of India and focused on global audiences.
The learnings come from my day job where I work with Indian SaaS founders. Although I will refrain from offering advice, I did want to provide my perspective on some of these topics.
One thing that we come across again and again is that as a founder of a seed stage company there’s nothing more crucial, other than recruiting, than getting to a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) quickly.
One of the levers that help get to this phase is strategically selecting and collaborating with the right design partners to refine the edges of your product.
What are design partners, you ask?
Design partners are early adopters of your product who help in defining your problem statement and shaping solutions as you develop your product. They offer valuable input on your product, such as UI/UX, Features, Pricing, etc.
A common misconception I would like to clarify is that design partners and pilot customers are interchangeable, whereas they are not.
When you do pilots, they are usually post-product POCs. What you are trying to find is whether your product solves the pilot customer’s use cases successfully, not whether your product is useful. A subtle but important difference.
The way we look at it is, the outcome you are looking for from a pilot customer, is validating the value and converting to a recurring revenue customer. Whereas, the outcomes you look for with design partnerships is effective feedback that helps you validate the product value and get to an MVP quicker.
While design partners transitioning to customers is an added bonus, a design partner is selected with an intention to provide feedback and not necessarily as a future source of revenue
Does every scenario require design partnerships? No.
Now if you are a product focused on SMBs or Individuals, you can get away with launching the product and iterate quickly based on user dropoffs and customer reviews. But when you have a mid-market/enterprise product, you can’t really go through the entire sales process before seeking product validation. In such cases, working with a few design partners helps you go to market with a product close to what your end user needs.
💡 Design partners help you put the finishing touches to your product.
One key point to emphasize before getting to the Checklist is the importance of working with design partners who closely align with your defined Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).
Why?
Working with the right design partners can help you add those additional features that makes your product enterprise ready or help you narrow down your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) based on actual usage rather than just customer discovery.
If these partners are located in the US, it's crucial to explore all possible strategies to secure these partnerships, as they can help to accelerate the development of a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). While it may be challenging to establish these partnerships, the time and resources saved in the long run can be significant. If, on the other hand, you are limited to working with partners in India, it's crucial to ensure that they closely align with your ICP in terms of workflow and experimentation on the edges.
Here is a checklist of things to keep in mind to identify the right partners for you.
Impact — One thing that would set your product on the right path is if a company is using your product as a competitive edge. These are generally customers who drive innovation through their needs, and preferences. You are more likely to stay ahead of the curve when you engage with forward-thinking customers.
Agility — Time is a crucial factor for startups, as market opportunities are often time sensitive and funding is limited. As a time and money constrained organization, speed is your greatest asset. That’s the same thing you should look for in a design partner.
Size — Very early stage companies have other existential challenges, and collaborating on your product may not be a very high priority for them. While established market leaders may not always be exploring experimenting on the edges. Finding high growth companies aiming to displace/disrupt market leaders would be ideal design partners.
Target Market Match — The first step is to ensure that the design partner represents the target market. The needs and systems of the design partner should be similar to those of the companies you interviewed during your customer research journey and to the overall market. It's essential to avoid becoming too specialized for one particular customer, or worse, creating custom software that only serves one client.
Product Market Portability — This is particularly relevant for SaaS founders in India: how closely does the ideal customer workflow align with the workflow used by Indian customers. In many cases, the workflow may differ significantly, requiring significant adjustments to the product to accommodate the workflow of customers in different regions. However, this may not be an issue in sectors where the Indian market is significant in size. But it's not the case for all segments.
Okay, so we have answered the who. Let’s get to the when.
It is important to not start off too early. It is you who had the vision for the product. You have done all the customer discovery, identified a need and visualized a solution. Post building out this vision is when you should work with design partners to iron off the edges.
💡 This checklist would help avoid the critical misstep of working with users who don't fit the ideal mold of your ICP.
I also wanted to highlight a few challenges that you might come across.
Knowing a good customer from a bad — There would be times where you’ll have a customer who fits your ICP but has some peculiarity that makes you spend more time with them on feature requests, or the variable expenses are too high, etc. This would be a bad design partner at this point of your journey. Letting them go might be a prudent option even when they are good partners to have.
A similar challenge is when you will encounter a group of customers who are using your product for a drastically different use case than what you envisioned. If your sales pitch is based on this group's usage, it may not resonate with your target customer, making it difficult to sell the product. This can again result in wasting valuable time. Cutting them loose would not be a bad decision in these cases.
Another challenging area is building features that your customers tell you to build. Slightly counterintuitive but I’ll use a quote by Shailesh Lakhani (heard on one of the podcasts, you can find it here), “Customers don’t know exactly what they want, but they can give you clues and hints that can lead you to figure out what is the real opportunity that is in front of them.“ Customers may think they know what they want until they see something better.
This is one from an investors point of view, and while this could just be me nitpicking, sometimes founders or investors mistake design partnerships as "traction," assuming that these users will generate future revenue or that a high number of users on a platform is a sign of actual demand for the product. This can lead to unrealistic expectations on both sides of the table about what progress should look like. It's crucial for both parties to have a clear understanding of what the outcome from these customers is expected to be.
Your most important focus at this stage should be to swiftly iterate towards an MVP. The goal is to gather feedback, in its most candid and authentic form, from users on the problem they are facing, the current solution, and whether your product is a superior alternative to the status quo.
If you have gone through this process and would like to share your experience, I would love to chat with you and learn more about it! If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to reach out to us.
If you're building B2B SaaS or enterprise technology products for global markets, we would absolutely love to connect with you! We're excited to hear about what you're working on and how we can help.