118: Does Your Business Solve Your Customer’s Needs?

Does Your Business Solve Your Customer’s Needs?

Welcome to Innovation City—powered by Venture Cafe—where Tyler Kelley and Michael Johnson, Co-Founders of SLAM! Agency, interview innovators, creators, and disruptors to discover how business is changing in the modern world.

Created and produced by SLAM! Agency in cooperation with Venture Cafe St. Louis and Venture Cafe Miami, Innovation City gives you an inside look at how rapidly business and culture are changing thanks to increasing diversity and inclusion, heightened creativity, and a stronger and better-connected business community. Venture Cafe is the largest combined gathering of entrepreneurs and innovators anywhere in the world. Events are held every Thursday in St. Louis, Miami, and other leading innovation cities around the globe.

Today’s episode is the first of 3 special shows where we are taking a look back at some of the most prominent themes from our 2019 guest interviews and highlighting them in 3 different episodes. In this episode, we are discussing product-market fit with 3 incredibly passionate entrepreneurs who know the importance of market fit all too well. Today’s featured guests include:

• Mark Young, CTO & Head of Product at The Climate Corporation
• Elizabeth De Zulueta, CEO of Zulubots, Inc.
• Matthew Haber, Co-Founder at CivicPro

Some key points from Mark at The Climate Corporation:

• At the end of the day it’s about the value you create for your customers
• The importance of having your customers identified before you start building your product/service
  • Being able to answer: What are your customer’s pain points?
• The importance of putting yourself in the shoes of your customer to understand their pain points
• Understanding the solution your customers need can allow you to make better decisions and investments for your company
• Listen or watch Mark’s full episode here

Some key points from Elizabeth at Zulubots, Inc.:

• Learning how to pivot your business in order to keep it viable
• Even if you have to change products/services, you can always go back later and pick it up again
• Wanting to help local businesses and communities regardless of what she is selling
• How to know when it’s time to pivot your business:
  • Not hitting your product milestones
  • Everything is costing more than expected
  • Compliance issues
• The decision to pivot is made up of many small things not going according to plan
• Knowing when to take off the engineer hat and put on the CEO hat
• Listen or watch Elizabeth’s full episode here

Some key points from Matthew at CivicPro:

• CivicPro makes it easy for residents to attend government meetings and voice their opinions on local issues
• Helping residents show up to the right meeting at the right time in the process, understand the most important items in the meeting, & understand the issues at hand
• The importance of speaking up at the local government level to influence bigger change
• Simplifying the government – resident interaction process
• Government spends a lot of time on things that are generally low on residents’ priority list and less time on things that they actually care about
• Providing context to complex government issues will ultimately allow for more resident involvement
• Listen or watch Matthew’s full episode here