Why find customers when you can find “early adopters?” That’s the take of Lauren McCullough, an entrepreneurial activist and founder of two startups currently operating in the Triangle.
McCullough was among the speakers at Raleigh-Durham Startup Week, which ran April 18-20.
Prior to her talk, McCullough chatted with Triangle Inno about her companies, what’s next and her advice for startups looking for their first customers.
Too often, she said, entrepreneurs "look at who they could serve instead of who they should serve.”
Instead of running a giant ad campaign, founders need to be more creative about how they target their first 10 customers, she said.
At Tromml, the Chapel Hill startup she cofounded that aims to help automotive aftermarket part sellers by sifting out useful insights from their own data, she tailored her strategy toward firms with the biggest problems. She asked herself, who is the ideal customer? A seller experiencing a lot of problems relating to their data. To find them, she tried to put herself in their heads – “I tried to say, if someone was experiencing those types of problems, who would they be going to?”
Those sellers were complaining to service providers, those who ran their automation software, provided their product catalogues and distributed their parts.
So that gave Tromml a place to start.
By finding people “who have gone so far to solve this problem that they’re complaining ... and even posting jobs to hire data analysts,” she found adopters, not customers.
And so far it’s working. It’s early – the firm was founded just last year. But already it has about $4,500 in monthly recurring revenue, she said.
Her advice is to tailor your early customer acquisition efforts to find the people with the most need.
“As an early-stage company, your product is not ready for the general market,” she said. But those in most need of what you are selling will work with you as you build, and hopefully become cheerleaders of your technology.
The origin story
McCullough has long worked with startups. Her first job out of college was at a business incubator in her home state of Ohio. When she moved to the Triangle seven years ago, she clicked with the culture, joining ArchiveSocial, a Durham startup that would go on to secure a $53 million deal with private equity firm Level Equity in 2019.
McCullough followed it up with a career at NC Idea, running an accelerator for the entrepreneurial support organization.
But she wanted to deeper into the sector, which led her to try her hand at consulting.
In the meantime, her wife, too, had entrepreneurial ambition. Castle Frame, who McCullough had met in her college town of Athens, Ohio, was a massage therapist. While McCullough had been attracted to the Triangle’s entrepreneurial sector when the pair were discussing moving here, Frame was interested in the area’s prowess in the health and wellness space.
After running a massage therapy business from home, Frame decided to open a standalone, inclusive massage therapy service, Auroraflow.
And McCullough became her cofounder.
McCullough said they realized during the pandemic that there was an opportunity to create a massage business “for everyone.” Its target was the LGBTQ space – but really “anyone who feels like those traditional services don’t like them because of who they are, how they identify.”
Auroraflow launched last year.
And in the meantime McCullough, whose focus has long been on tech, was formulating her own idea. With a former colleague, Harry Park, she saw an opportunity in the automotive space.
Automotive aftermarket sellers were using antiquated tools to monitor their performance, and analysis errors were costly.
“They were one dash away from making a $10,000, $100,000 mistake,” she said. “What we wanted to do was provide a little protection to those sellers and enable them to be successful.”
Earlier this year, Tromml started its pilot program with three clients.