Puroon Shahada

And this is sort of, you know, you have to be that clear with your team.

The first one is we want to make sure that we build everything within the platform, everything that a board needs to do, not just the board book delivery, the board assessment.

the dno questionnaire you know ceo review um you know all approvals everything should be right there minutes routing should be within the platform so that's the first big heuristic that we are clear about the second heuristic is you want to make sure that the first i call this f tux first time user experience is an absolute uh amazing one which means when a new director gets your product

They should be wowed.

We can implement our product within the same day.

So if you had a board meeting this evening and you called us in the morning, we'll be able to implement that and your director should be able to run with it and your first meeting itself will go off seamlessly.

That focus is extremely important when you're building the product in the early stages.

Once you do that, and that comes about only if you built

amazing relationship with customers other speakers have talked about this in my case my first customer was also somebody who gave us infrastructure we used their office they also advised a lot on operations side how do you get compliance certifications and such and eventually they became my date partner when i talked about buying back my co-founder my first customer since this was a financial institution

They helped me figure out a loan which allowed me to buy back my partner.

So you can get a lot out of your early customers.

They're emotionally invested just like early employees.

The question really comes down to what are you gonna solve for with them?

They're your early board, if you will.

In our case, lots of things came out of this.

So for example,

all our early customers became advocates for us to go sign up these partnerships so what you're seeing here is partnerships we signed up in different sectors there's one in credit union industry there's one in the banking industry there's one in the university space and so on so we've used a lot of customer credibility

to sign up partnerships, which actually then give you more credibility in the market.

And that's how you go about doing this cycle.

So nail the product, gets the partnerships, at least in our case, it's a very vertical sales cycle that we have.