Strategy on Afroleft

Stakeholders. What are we optimising for?

Wed, 21 Aug 2019 10:39:27 +0000

One of the things I’m piss poor at is stakeholder engagement—enabling everyone see tradeoffs the way I can. Sadly the problem exacerbates as your company scales.

Helpful to see Chris Thewell speaking at the UX Crunch last night.

On the dial ask

What are we optimising for?

Unpack the tradeoffs.
Involve the right people.
Optimise for the right thing.
Make your informed decision.

We used Intercom to add £100,000s of marketplace investments at Fruitful—here’s how

Fri, 20 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Onboarding customers to your new product is tricky.

Onboarding customers to a new financial product is really tricky.

For a mountain of security and regulatory reasons you’re required to collect and validate a towering number of data points.

Of course, for each additional data point that we had to collect = additional cost to the customer = increased risk that they might drop-off and watch videos of otters eating lettuce instead.

Fruitful’s onboarding steps

In Fruitful 1.0 (more about the pivot here ) these were the steps for onboarding new users:

The Other Side of the Sunset

Mon, 09 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Admittedly it’s taken us longer than it should have, but here’s the story behind Fruitful and how we raised over £500,000 of venture funding, built and shipped a marketplace that attracted £1.8million of lending, captured the minds of recognised experts in the field as well as pitching some of the world’s leading venture capital firms, all before running — quite quicky — into a brick wall.

We spent 10 months building product…

We ran in to a trademark battle, so we went through two changes to our brand name.

We settled on Fruitful and drew it out on the beach just to make sure.

We worked all hours under the sun and probably contributed a fair bit in helping Pact Coffee secure their series A.

Founders: Avoid Death by Assumption

Fri, 08 Jan 2016 21:17:46 +0000

“Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won’t come in.” — Isaac Asimov

When you’re building a company, your ability to make good assumptions can be the difference between skyrocketing or skydiving. A few bad calls in a larger business can be damaging, but in an early stage startup it can be — and often is — fatal.

A roadmap to better

At Fruitful we’ve made a conscious effort to get better at making assumptions. We do this by mapping out the following on what we call an assumption roadmap™