The Job They Already Did
At a 13-person public health data startup, our pitch went nowhere until a prospect's operations team mentioned a job they were already doing by hand. Running the pilot that turned it into a product.
When the pilot started, a couple of people on a food-delivery platform’s operations team were using our product. By the time it was done, it ran on every restaurant that onboarded onto their platform.
I was the first and only product hire at Hazel Analytics, a 13-person public health data analytics startup. We had built compliance analytics on restaurants’ public health records, and for months we tried to sell that data to platform companies that work with restaurants. The pitch was compliance monitoring, and it went nowhere. The platforms saw themselves as intermediaries, and monitoring cast them as enforcers.
What changed it was an offhand comment. Someone on a prospect’s operations team mentioned that they’d used our data to look into a restaurant they’d just onboarded, and that seeing the compliance history earlier would have saved them days of manual validation. Their team verified every new restaurant’s credentials and health certificates by hand during onboarding, and we had the data that made it faster.
The sale
Our CEO, our CTO, and I made the sale together, and we talked through the pivot with the platform’s team in the room: the same public health data, offered as partner verification at the point a restaurant onboards. We dropped the compliance monitoring pitch.
Then I ran the pilot. I wrote the spec, trained their team, and worked the product into the onboarding workflow they already had. I drove it from a couple of people using it to a product their team used and that we could sell.
Moving the verification across the line
This series is about the temper line. On a blade, it’s the boundary between the hard edge and the soft spine. In an organization, it’s the boundary between what’s written down and what people know from doing the work.
Our compliance data was the hard side: structured, documented, checkable. The ops team’s manual verification process was the soft side. It lived in how their team worked, and it reached us only because one person mentioned it in passing. The pilot was the work of moving that verification across the line, writing down what their team checked by hand closely enough that our product could do it inside their onboarding flow.
After the pilot
Partner verification became part of the platform’s onboarding workflow, which meant it ran every time a restaurant onboarded. It became Hazel’s second product, and we signed a contract for it.
Then COVID hit and food delivery boomed, and the product took off with it. Some of that growth was the market. More restaurants were onboarding onto delivery platforms, and every one of them went through the check, including the fake restaurants it caught trying to get on.
This is the fourth in a series about the boundary between soft and hard knowledge in product development: what your gut has learned, and what you can write down and check.