Let the Market Decide

Scott here! I’m one of the other co-founders of Prompt, taking over to discuss our adventures in Toronto over the last week.

One thing we've realized about startups is that we need to unlearn our trained instinct to seek approval for our ideas. After many years of school and work, where you are expected to meet the criteria set for you by a teacher or manager, it's natural to find the high-status equivalent for startups—mentors and investors—and ask for their approval. There's an obvious problem with this, however. As a start-up, we succeed when people buy our product, regardless of what people say about the idea.

For Prompt Cards, some early feedback made us question its viability. "Who even uses paper business cards anymore?" Although our cards use a mix of physical and digital technology (they have QR codes that can be uniquely tracked and personalized on the fly), many people have already switched to fully-digital cards.

However, while exploring a few different ideas (written below), we began to receive orders for Prompt Cards, which intrigued us enough to determine if there is a real customer need that we are solving (or if we just have a solution in search of a problem).

In addition to exploring the city, the past week in Toronto has been full of what we like to call ”side-quests” — brainstorming sessions for tangential ideas.

Prompt Referrals. One such idea was Prompt Referrals, which we shared in our previous blog post. The notion of facilitating referral partnerships between small businesses to help them acquire customers struck a chord with us. We envisioned a marketplace where businesses in complementary industries could collaborate and refer customers to one another, creating a win-win situation for everyone involved.

Marketing an Online Course. Next, we met a learning scientist whose mission is to change the way that people learn and recently launched an online course to reach a larger audience. As she is a busy solopreneur and researcher, we hoped to find a more time-efficient way for her to find customers. Our time with her highlighted the need for innovative solutions in this space.

AI for Small Businesses. This obviously led us to explore the realm of automating work in the web browser using AI. We imagined a future where mundane, time-consuming activities that small businesses do every day could be handled effortlessly through AI agents, freeing up valuable resources for businesses to focus on more critical endeavours.

Harrison, Kai, and I were drawn back to Prompt Cards as demand picked up for the product. Now armed with a broader perspective and an eagerness to truly understand our customers' needs, we are determined to explore its viability. Our next week is full of understanding the problems of existing business card customers while determining how much our new customers value our product.