Build

This is the third chapter of Kommon: A Startup Story, a set of key lessons for first-time founders told through the story of the successes and failures of my business.  

‍I have been told that putting these lessons within the full narrative of an early-stage startup, including real customer data and product feedback, has meant they really resonate for first-time-founders in helping them navigate their own startup journeys. The introduction to the series with further details on why I wrote it can be found here.

Introduction

By July, I felt like I had enough evidence to pursue building an MVP.   The next items on the agenda were:

1. Find a technical co-founder
2. Recruit a waitlist of other managers to trial the product.

I imagined that a) would take at least 6 months, if I was lucky.  Recruiting is hard at the best of times, and I have a high bar.  Recruiting someone for just equity compensation would be even harder.  I also knew that ideally I wanted a full-time cofounder - someone completely invested in this who I could share the journey with. 

I didn’t see that timeframe as a hindrance at this stage because I had agenda item 2 to do.  My interviews had convinced me that there were managers who wanted my product, I just had to go out and find them.  I wanted enough time to grow a product waitlist, have further interviews, and deepen my knowledge of the product area before starting to build with a co-founder.

Of course, this isn’t how it turned out. 

I found the perfect co-founder, Gareth, almost immediately. It took two months from our first meeting in August to start formally working together in early October.

The first six months working with Gareth were some of the most intense of my career.  We were building the first version of our product, all while trying to establish our marketing, grow awareness of Kommon, and figure out the best way of working together.

Finding a Technical Co-Founder

From the moment I started working on Kommon, I knew that one of the biggest hurdles was going to be finding the technical resource to build the product.   Either I figured this out, and the company could proceed.  Or I couldn’t, and I would fail. 

For the first several months, I put this problem out of my mind. I didn’t even know if I had a product yet, so worrying about who was going to build it was a secondary issue.  However as customer interviews became more encouraging, it became clear that I would be moving onto this next phase. 

My Approach

I approached finding a technical co-founder with these principles:

1. I wanted someone brilliant and I didn’t have the money to pay them so if I ever was lucky enough to meet this person, I wanted to be ready with the best pitch I’d ever given. If they were as good as I wanted them to be, they would have numerous other offers, and the burden would be on me to demonstrate why they should devote their precious time to my idea.

2. I put myself in their shoes to think about what would be compelling. I knew I would want evidence that customers wanted the product, were ready to buy, and a story about what the future growth of the company might look like. I got all this ready.

3. I was looking first and foremost for a co-founder rather than a consultant or freelancer.  I was open to exploring other options to get the MVP built if I had to, but this was the priority.  Whenever I met someone, I would be clear about my goals, just in case they were the one, or knew someone who could be.

In hindsight, all this worked (with a big slice of luck in there too). 

How we Met

By August, I felt I had a validated prototype and a compelling pitch for a potential co-founder.  I was ready to start meeting people.  

Unfortunately at this point, ‘meeting people’ wasn’t in fashion.  The vast majority of personal interactions had moved online so I knew I would be limited to online networking events, warm introductions from my network and cold approaches over LinkedIn etc.

I also had my brother-in-law's wedding to attend. He had managed to arrange it in a small window when gatherings were permitted.  However, as attending involved inter-provincial travel in Canada, my partner and I had to arrive more than 2 weeks early in order to quarantine for a fortnight beforehand.  So I began my search for a co-founder quarantined in a small airbnb in the Winnipeg suburbs waiting for the days to pass.

I mention all this because as this quarantine period was coming to an end, I spotted an online event - ‘Hackernest Canada Tech Co-founder Matching’ at 6pm on a Tuesday night.  

I did not want to join this call.  

Our aircon had been patchy, and I’d spent a sweaty day hunched over a small desk in the corner of our bedroom.  It was a glorious evening, and all I wanted to do was get outside and enjoy some fresh air and sunshine.  But I also knew that it was exactly these kinds of events that I needed to start dialling into.  I had to take all the shots I could.  

So I logged on, and in the first co-founder speed-dating event I ever dialled into, I found the perfect person to work with for the next 3 years.

How we Decided to Work Together

No doubt meeting Gareth that evening was an enormous stroke of luck. But there were still a lot of hurdles to get over from ‘I’m interested in your idea’ to ‘let’s build a company together’.  

It went something like this: 

• 18 August - Hackernest Canada Tech co-founder matching.  We met online for the first time and had 5 mins to size each other up in a virtual speed dating evening.  I said I was looking for a co-founder for my business. He didn’t even say he was looking for a new opportunity, just looking to meet interesting people.  We liked each other enough to swap details.  He subsequently followed up over email and said he was interested in learning more about my business.  This felt like validation for all my preparation, my pitch must have been pretty good. 

• 24 August - first Zoom Call. We discussed Kommon in more detail and the progress I’d made so far. He disclosed he was potentially interested in joining something if it was the right project.  He asked to see some screenshots of the prototype, and sent over a list of probing questions on customers and my future plans for the company.  I was reassured by his questions.  They were what I would have been asking if I was in his position. I replied to each one over e-mail and we agreed to talk again.  

• 7 Sept - second Zoom call.  We discussed his questions in more detail, and satisfied with the discussion, agreed to meet in person for the first time.

• 16 Sept - Gareth visits Ottawa.  Even in an age of remote work, I still find meeting in person to be revealing. There are so many cues which it’s hard to pick up on through a camera.  I knew I didn’t want to give a significant amount of equity to someone without meeting them first, which was one of the reasons I focussed on finding a Canadian co-founder.  Our initial meeting went well. Conversation flowed, it was fun, and we managed to discuss some of the thornier topics like equity splits in a positive and sensible way.  I felt like this was going to work.   

• 24 Sept - third Zoom call.  By now we had built enough trust and rapport that discussions just worked (in itself a good sign).  This was largely an administrative call where we finalized roles, responsibilities, and equity splits, and agreed to begin working together.

• 1 Oct - we begin. We began working full-time together on Kommon.

Why did this go so well

Finding a co-founder went better than I ever thought it would.  I had a very high bar and it took two months from beginning a search to finding someone I wanted to build a company with.

So besides an enormous slice of luck, how did this happen?  

• We both knew what we wanted: I was after a co-founder, he was looking for a new project.  We’d both had previous careers and knew the people and work we liked. We both had clarity on our financial situations.  This helped us both move fast when the right opportunity came along.

• I was prepared: my hunch that having a lot to bring to a conversation with a potential cofounder paid off. The prototype, potential customers, and a strategy all helped advance the conversation and build conviction that this was a project worth investing in. 

• We had a lot in common: despite Gareth living in Montreal, via Paris and Beirut, and me living in Ottawa, via London and Cape Town, we both grew up a 20 minute drive from one another in small villages in the North of England.  This touchpoint helped build rapport faster, as did our mutual interest in the middle east, and a range of other subjects.

• The process built confidence: I don’t think either of us had a specific co-founder interview playbook we were running but I think the way we both approached those initial stages of our relationship built confidence in each others’ abilities.  We had good discussions on difficult topics, asked insightful questions, responded promptly, communicated well, and made each other laugh.  It all built confidence for what it would be like to work together.

I had a co-founder, it was time to build the product.

Product Build

Although it was an enormous amount of work, with various technical challenges along the way (don’t build calendars), my recollection of our initial product build was that it progressed relatively smoothly.

Gareth and I settled into a good working rhythm and set out to build the prototype which our initial customers had been so excited about. 

From October through to January we steadily built out the core features of our product which would enable our users to set goals with their teams, hold more productive 1:1 meetings, and gather feedback.  

By February we were at a stage where we could set up ourselves as a team within the app and start using it as our customers would.   We spent the following two months thoroughly testing it, building an onboarding flow and planning our launch. 

By June 2021  we were ready to go. 

Too many features

We built an MVP with a lot of features.  In hindsight, this was not the correct approach.  Most start-up lore will tell you to build the simplest MVP which delivers genuine value to your users, so you can launch and get feedback.  We knew this.  And yet, here we were taking a different (wrong) approach. 

I want to take you through how this came to be so you can spot the red flags earlier than we did.

So why did we do it: 

• Evidence from customer discovery: my interviews had identified a multitude of different problems that managers had.  No one of these was critical, but grouped together, they made it challenging to be a manager, and particularly to keep track of team members’ development.  I believed we needed to solve multiple problems at once to deliver value by consolidating disparate information in one place.

• Enthusiasm for the prototype: we came up with a prototype which users really liked.  This validation persuaded me that we were on the right track and should build a relatively feature-heavy MVP. 

Despite these factors, I should have noted the following: 

• Feature creep was a red flag: if there’s no single critical problem to be solved, that suggests one of two things.  Either there’s not a compelling business to be built for that customer (you’ll be building a nice-to-have rather than an essential service) or the range of features that need to be built to make it essential means significant capital will be required to compete in that market.  Both of these things ended up being true for managers.  In hindsight, I don’t think there is a compelling software product that many individual managers want to purchase, and if HR/People teams are buying it for them, they expect a range of features which only a well-funded startup will be able to deliver. 

• Length of time to show value to customers can be a red flag: a proxy for the feature creep above is time to value. If it was going to take us that long to build a set of features which we felt delivered meaningful value to customers, then maybe we had the customer or the solution wrong.

As we would discover, we did have the customer wrong, but we’ll get onto that later. For now, we had a product to launch.

Marketing and Waitlists

Overview

Although we had some commitments from managers involved in customer discovery to try the product, we were going to need a lot more by the time we launched.  So at the same time as building the product, we set about establishing our nascent marketing operation to drive sign-ups to a product waitlist. 

Building and marketing the product simultaneously between the two of us was draining.  Particularly given our ambitions. 

In August 2020 as part of convincing Gareth to work with me, I produced a financial projection for Kommon which rested on us having 5000 managers on our waitlist by the time we launched.  

I’d identified content as the main lever for this.  My thesis was that most advice out there for managers wasn’t very good.  I was a decent enough writer and was confident that we could make practical, insightful content which would raise awareness of our app and drive sign-ups to our waitlist. 

Did it work?  Yes, and no. 

This section is the story of how we created a blog and newsletter which users loved, but not a waitlist.

Focus on Earlyvangelists

Before we started building the product, we interrogated our definition of the core user who was likely to get most value from it. 

We used the ‘earlyvangelist’ definition from Steve Blank’s Four Steps to the Epiphany.  According to Blank our most enthusiastic users would be those who fit the following criteria:

• The customer has a problem 
• The customer understands he or she has a problem 
• The customer is actively searching for a solution and has a timetable for finding it 
• The problem is painful enough the customer has cobbled together an interim solution 
• The customer has committed, or can quickly acquire, budget dollars to solve the problem

We went back through our customer discovery interviews and identified several of these individuals.  They had the following things in common:

• Experience: The majority had less than 2.5 years experience in the role (i.e. recently-promoted managers).

• Company Size: They all worked for companies less than 2000 people, the majority less than 250

• Team Size: the majority had 3-4 direct reports (one had two). 

• Motivation: the majority believed people management was primarily important because of the opportunity to develop their team’s careers.  On a scale of 1-10 for how important people management is to the success of their companies, their answers averaged 8. 

• Search for help:  the majority had looked for help online in the form of online content

• Support: the majority had had no support from their organisations in learning how to be a people manager.  Some had training which they regarded as unsatisfactory.

In terms of the specific challenges these individuals faced, they all wanted to be better managers and develop their team but they had: 

• No guidance around people management and how to do it
• No efficient structure or system to manage it, or the information relevant to it 
• No time to put these systems in place because they were very busy with their other responsibilities at work. 

These were the folks we decided needed the most help.  

On this, we were right. We were wrong about the product they needed and who would pay for it but we were right on who felt the most pressing need.

This was a dangerous way to be right.  Because although the people we’d identified weren’t good future customers for our SaaS, we had nailed a very receptive audience for our content. 

Over the following months we would launch our website, a blog, and a newsletter, all enjoyed by an audience who couldn’t buy our product.

The Kommon Website

We launched the website in late 2020.  I knew we wanted something more flexible and advanced than a Squarespace, but not so complicated that we were going to pay someone to do it for us. Webflow seemed like a great middle ground and served us well for the four years we worked on the company.  

I taught myself some basic Webflow skills and through adapting the right template, we had a decent site up in short order. We parsed through our customer discovery interviews so our language reflected how our users described their problems.

It seemed to work well.  We sought some quick initial feedback from our customer discovery users about it, and it got a positive reaction. 

‘This is impressive, this looks like the website of a Series A company’

Job done.    

Our Content

Introduction

Content was a key pillar in our customer acquisition strategy over the lifetime of the company.  

Like many other parts of this story, we started by thinking we knew what we were doing, achieved some modest early wins, had fundamental mistakes crushingly exposed, and only then sharpened our approach into true success.

Although this chapter covers October 2020 to July 2021, I’m going to extrapolate out and tell the full story of our content here as it helps surface what we learned. 

The Kommon Blog

This was quick to get started. We had a clear persona we were writing for, knew the problems they found most challenging, and the language they used to describe those.  But more than that, both Gareth and I were our readers.  

We had both been first-time managers before and had a keen sense of what would be useful and the format we wanted to see it in.  There is so much generic leadership content in the world.  We felt that if we published informed, practical advice in opinionated, decisive language, it could get some traction. 

I started keeping a Notion board of topics that I thought would resonate with our audience.  It didn’t take long to build up a queue of blog post candidates.  We published our first piece on 30 November 2020 and kept up a weekly schedule until June 2021.  

As anyone who’s run a content program will know, creating the content is just the start.  Distribution is king, and we had none of it. We put in place the straightforward stuff - starting a newsletter list, and distributing on personal/company socials - but that was never going to be enough. 

What worked for us was figuring out how to meet our readers where they already were.  We did this in three principal ways:

• Slack communities: we found online communities with folks who were interested in people management - whether for people managers, or for role-focussed communities (CTOs, Product Managers etc), which were also likely to include managers.  We engaged with these communities and offered our content where we thought it would be valuable to a conversation.  On a related point, some of these communities were fantastic and undoubtedly made me a better leader.  I would recommend the Rands Leadership Slack to any manager of any seniority.

• Twitter/X: posting directly on twitter was not a valuable strategy.  However, including ourselves in conversations on twitter about leadership topics and posting our own content in response did drive users to our website.  We even used this tactic to get meetings with People teams who could be potential customers.

• Newsletter/Author engagement: if we saw a leadership newsletter or article that we liked, we reached out to the author to show our appreciation and make them aware of our work.  This often resulted in features in subsequent newsletters which helped spread the word about our content. 

These channels often resulted in additional sharing/reposting/word of mouth engagement which drove views to our blog.

This distribution strategy only worked because of the quality of our content (he says humbly, as the guy who wrote it).  We knew that the relative dross out there created an opportunity, but we were still a corporate startup blog - it was clear we weren’t writing for altruistic reasons.  Our stuff would have to be really good for others to take notice and be prepared to reshare it. 

Here’s a couple of example comments from our readers:

• ‘This is a "cut the Gordian knot" kind of insight’
• ‘This really is an outstanding read.’ 

It seemed we were on the right track. 

Kommon People

Given we were blogging anyway, it made sense to build a newsletter list for distribution - both for our content, and for our product.  We allowed ourselves an obvious play on words, and the first issue of Kommon People was published in December 2020 to 31 people.

We published weekly, and included the most recent blog post alongside three shorter pieces of management advice.  By the time we launched the product in July 2021, we had almost 250 people on our newsletter list, with a regular 35-40% open rate at 3-7% clickrates.   

We had managers from esteemed companies on our list (Meta, Peloton) and had great feedback: 

• “I opened this in a new tab, later went to read the article, and scrolled all the way back up to tell you that I loved it!”
• “Your newsletter is incredible.”
• ‘I wish this content were available online and linkable - it's fantastic and I'd share it all the time”

It was also proving a useful tool for meeting potential customers.  For example, this reply from the Head of Research at a post Series A startup when I followed up about why they subscribed to the newsletter.

‘Congrats again on the new start up. Partly wanted to see what some of the output looked like, but I am also very interested in new ways to manage/engage with teams - either for myself directly or for other members of the group.’

This type of feedback encouraged us to keep publishing.

The Manager Guide

You might be wondering why we haven’t mentioned SEO yet. 

For a company that was just starting out and trying to acquire its initial customers, creating content for SEO seemed like too much of a speculative bet which wouldn’t offer fast enough results.  Our content topics were also competitive categories where it would be hard to acquire meaningful keywords. 

We decided to focus on our strengths and produce quality content that was likely to spread through word of mouth with our target customers.  If we did manage to get a side benefit from some SEO, we would optimise our approach if it started to show up in our analytics.

However as 2021 progressed, and we had kept up the rhythm of a weekly newsletter with three stories, plus a blog post, we were starting to amass a meaningful bank of content. This presented two opportunities:

1. We hadn’t organised our content in a way that was most useful for our readers.
2. We hadn’t formally optimised for SEO at all.

In September we reworked all our content into the ‘Manager Guide’.  This involved categorising our content into topics we knew were appealing for first-time managers, and improving the UX to make it a one-stop destination for leadership advice. As part of the same process, we also reviewed all our content for SEO best-practice, and optimised where we felt we could without compromising the quality of the articles.

You can browse a historical version of the Manager Guide here.

By the time we stopped working on Kommon, the Manager Guide had 7,500+ users.

Did our content work? 

Yes and No. 

Our original thesis that there was an opportunity to stand out in this space with original, opinionated, practical content was correct.  Our pageviews bear this out and it helped raise awareness of our work and establish us as a credible company in this space.

However, we never cracked converting all these views into users of our product. Over one period in 2021, we tracked 1040 new users to our content.  Of those, only 21% went to what we defined as ‘core pages’ describing the product.  Of those, only 5 new users looked at our product page, and 2 at our pricing page. 

In hindsight, getting lots of views of our content but few conversions from that to our product waitlist was a strong sign that our content consumers (managers) were not the right customer for our software.  They were potentially very good customers for a leadership content business, but we decided that wasn’t an avenue we wanted to go down.  It’s interesting to note that during the time period we were building Kommon, others did build Substack content businesses on these topics - for example Gergely Orosz’s The Pragmatic Engineer and Luca Rossi’s Refactoring.

It took too long for us to adjust but eventually a lack of conversions to our waitlist drove us to adapt our approach.  We tightened our focus in two ways:

1. We recognised that getting a user to jump from viewing a piece of management content to signing up for a product waitlist was too big a leap.  In many cases we hadn’t either educated viewers enough on our value proposition, or convinced them of our credibility, to convince them to enter an email address.  We needed to be more sophisticated about how we nurtured viewers of our content down a funnel into waitlisters. 

2. It wasn’t enough to create content which was useful to managers, it had to be tied to a specific problem our product solved.  This meant those reading the content were likely to be further down the funnel and more likely to convert.

 Two articles we wrote around the same time are a useful case study:

1. ‘The Best Thing a Manager Has Ever Done for Your Career’: we did an original analysis of replies to a tweet thread on this topic from an influencer.  This went semi-viral in leadership communities/newsletters and we got 783 views from 584 users, of which 560 were new, with an average engagement of over 66 seconds.  None of these visitors even viewed our sign-up page, and 88% just read the article and left.

2. ‘How to Nail Your First 1:1 Meeting’: this post generated much less engagement -  87 views from 55 users and 38 new users, with an average engagement of nearly a minute and a half - but did convert to a highly-engaged product trial.  

By early 2022, we’d learned our lesson and started writing content which was:

1. More tightly focussed on the problems our product solved for our users, and 
2. Included lead magnets which nurtured viewers through our funnel rather than asking them to make the immediate leap to our waitlist. 

For example, in that 1:1 article referenced above we included a lead magnet where users could enter their email to receive a list of the top 1:1 meeting questions.  It got us their email address and was a smaller leap on the part of the viewer which delivered immediate value.

These learnings would ultimately lead to the creation of our most successful piece of content - our New Manager Playbook - which would form the foundation of our manager training business.

So was our content program a success? 

We used an enormous amount of time and effort to create a modest reputation in the market and convert a small number of waitlisters, but learned the lessons which would underpin a business that was acquired. You decide.

Our Waitlist

This brings us neatly back to the details of that waitlist.

We opened it up in mid-November 2020 and closed it the following July when we launched.  By that time, we had 67 people on it.  To us, this seemed ok as a wedge into gaining some initial users and then to hopefully spread from there into their companies.  In hindsight, this number was far too low, and represented a datapoint that customers weren’t that interested in our product.

Moreover, when we dug into the numbers, we could exclude some of those as friends trying the product who were unlikely to be buyers.  Of the remaining ones, 34 (51%) filled out a typeform we included as part of the waitlist process. If we take that as a reasonable indicator of interest, it meant we only had 34 users when we launched who had shown a strong interest in trialling our product. 

The typeform asked some typical product questions about their role, how long they’d been managing, their number of direct reports, their interest in Kommon, the problems they were having and what existing support they had.  We also had a question about how they would pay for Kommon.  The breakdown in response to that question was:

• I would pay - 20.5%
• My boss would pay -  3%
• My HR dept would pay -  6%
• I’m not sure - 32%
• I’m just interested in the free version - 15%
• Did not answer - 23.5%

There’s a few different ways of reading this data, including:

1. 30% of our waitlisters said they’re willing to pay, that’s a good enough sign we should keep building.
2. Only 20.5% of our waitlisters support our initial hypothesis about managers being able to pay for this stuff.  Shouldn’t we pause and interrogate this?

In hindsight, at this stage we could have better handled:

• Signal strength: we didn’t know what ‘good’ looked like in terms of the pull towards a product.  We saw the fact we were getting waitlist signups from the persona we’d identified as a positive sign to keep going.  In hindsight, and having launched more successful products, this was a weak signal that we weren’t onto a powerful enough idea.

• Re-interrogating hypotheses vs launching product: I think at this stage we knew that the signals weren’t as strong as we hoped but we thought we had enough to keep building, knowing that the strongest signals would come once we got a product in people’s hands.  I think this is a hard trade-off to judge.  When do you pause to do more customer discovery vs investing the effort in a product which will give you even stronger signals. Ultimately we chose the latter.

• Waitlist engagement: We didn’t engage closely enough with our waitlist.  We were excited enough to get people on the waitlist that were filling out the typeform, and that seemed good enough.  We also had a million other things to do. We didn’t appreciate that these people were gold-dust. From the moment they showed interest in the product, we should have been seeking to understand more about them and how to bring them along with us for the journey.

Nevertheless, come June 2021, we were ready to launch.

Key Lessons

Product

• Engage with waitlists: other than gathering typeform survey responses from our waitlist, we let it sit there and just took it for granted that a proportion of them would be interested in our product.  They were just email addresses, they didn’t feel like customers, and we had a product to build and content to write.  This was the wrong way to look at it. We should have got to know every single person on that list. If we had, we might have avoided some of our mistakes and learned what we needed to build a better product. 

Sales & Marketing

• Content engagement might just mean great content: we got a great response to our content and that made us hope that our audience wanted our underlying product.  But one doesn’t equal the other.  We were actually just making great content. We only really had success in the context of our business when we moved to judging how our content served Kommon’s objectives.

• Interrogate missed targets: startups are wildly uncertain but setting targets is still helpful because they codify a state of mind and a hypothesis at a given point in time.  Missing a target forces you to interrogate the attached hypothesis. This is the hard part because it can involve challenging foundational ideas about your business.  We badly undershot our waitlist target but chose not to interrogate why that was and instead focussed on the customers we did have. We should have done both.     

• Quality always resonates: there’s always value in hitting or exceeding your customers expectations of quality.  We deliberately created content and a website which we knew was the equal of better-funded competitors and it paid off in the spaces we were able to compete. 

• Assess content effort vs impact: content analytics make it easy to find something to get excited about.  Everyone loves a graph that goes up and to the right.  However, that graph might not track the key output that’s material to the business, or the resources that are being consumed to make it happen.  Particularly if you like content creation, it can be easy to keep producing for a receptive audience without facing up to whether it’s having the necessary impact. All content should have a defined impact for the effort that is being expended on it, and if that target isn’t hit, then the rationale for it should be questioned.

• Meet readers where they are: if you’re starting content from scratch, don’t just throw it out into the ether.  Find where your readers already are and make sure your work is in front of them.  That may mean joining Slack groups, Discords, LinkedIn groups, or it may mean approaching readers directly.  

• Look at the steepness of funnels: if you’re struggling to convert viewers of your content into product signups, consider how big a leap you’re asking your viewers to make.  Your funnel might just be too steep and if you include some interim steps - additional content/interactions - it may improve conversions.

• Align content with customer problems and your solutions: we had most success when our content was tightly aligned with the problems we were solving for.  This may mean writing more niche content which doesn’t get as many views, but those who do engage with it are more likely to be the right audience for your underlying product.

Operations

• You make your own luck finding co-founders: chancing upon a stranger you’re happy to work with for years is lucky.  However, if you’re looking for a co-founder, you can maximise the chance of working together if you’re ready to seize the moment when you come across that person.  Be ready to give them the best pitch they’ve ever heard.  If you’re a non-technical co-founder, having existing customers lined up to try your product is a powerful statement that will distinguish you as a potential partner in a competitive market when you’re searching for collaborators.