FAI Weekly Gokhan #2

was asking the following question on behalf of the team: Should we focus all our efforts on doing the user research and talking to as many people / companies as possible (1) or should be focus on getting a customer signed and start working with them (2)? Maybe we offer consulting services in the beginning to hand-hold clients in their journey to understand their needs better, then put in some hours to set a plan and start sourcing engineers. This will shortcut the needs for the clients to do all this work, because they often don’t know where to start? suggest a few examples of marketplaces he has worked in previously. Sallis was a legaltech startup building a recommendation engine for people who wanted to set-up a legal entity in United Arab Emirates. Sallis’s GTM was to use the recommendation engine to attract customer and then do all the paperwork manually, until we understood what part of this long and complex process as setting up a company, we would bet on optimizing / digitizing first. also suggested to have a look at houzz.com, who pioneered the SaaS + marketplace approach for home renovations industry. The problem they tackled was the clients had a dream, but did not have detailed plan of how to execute this. Contractors wanted to find clients, but often spent so much time and resources to put clients dream into a structured plan they could execute. Houzz built SaaS tools that would enable both the client and contractor to plan and execute the work, while taking a % of the project value. The conclusion was that just having a marketplace and expecting the two sides of the market find each other was not a viable option. That FairAI needs to build something that can unblock the clients in expressing their needs and expected outcomes, so that supply side providers can deliver a project that meet expectations.