Challenges

The problem with building a B2B product, especially one whose goal is to replace the whole workflow of a corporation, is that the acceptance standard from the users’ side is much higher than that of a B2C product.

The problem with building a B2B product, especially one whose goal is to replace the whole workflow of a corporation, is that the acceptance standard from the users’ side is much higher than that of a B2C product.

You need to squeeze in every functionality that the business uses from multiple tools (pen & paper, Excel, email, etc.) and condense it into a single product. Outside of that, one business might have a completely different workflow  from another, meaning extra use cases that need to be taken care of. Doing all of that in itself is a difficult ask, doing it within a limited budget  and a 3 month timeframe is near impossible.

However, we are very bullish when it comes to the emerging African market, we believed in Munya’s vision and we wanted to be involved in the project, so we took up the challenge.

Munya came to us with a real market problem and a great product idea, however the product was far from conceptualised. On our first discovery session, Munya had a janky low-fidelity wireframes made in Excel (I know right... :D) and a mile-long feature list that would take a full engineering team an year to produce.

The only problem was that he was self-funded and only had a development budget of $30K.

Solution

The first thing we did was get familiar with the industry, the needs of the users (Real Estate Investment Funds) and defining the core functionalities necessary for acquiring early adopters.

Based on that we went to town on the initial feature list provided by Munya, and basically cut out 90% of the features he had defined. All that remained were core features that were must-have for the product to launch and be used by early adopters.

Once that was done, we took the janky low-fidelity wireframes and turned them into a high-fidelity designs based on the core functionalities that served as an MVP feature list.

Lastly we onboarded a single Startup Engineer that was able to deliver a complex, commercial-ready MVP version of LakeStream within just 3 months.

Value Delivered

Instead of quoting Munya hundreds of thousands of dollars for the initial version of the product he came to us, we were able to build a lean, market ready version of the product within his budget.

The best thing was that, as a result, he was able to launch his product and start selling it within 3 months instead of a year or more.

Within a week of launching LakeStream onboarded two Investment Funds, validating the value proposition of the product.

Team Structure