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enMarch 30, 2023
How Dawn Verbrigghe, CEO of Jottful, gave up a Lucrative CMO Startup Position to start SMB CMS
enJanuary 26, 2022
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About this Episode
Dawn Verbrigghe, CEO of Jottful, talks about coming up with the idea, funding the MVP, gaining first customers, and navigating the zero to product fit journey. Listen and learn.
Jottful is a SaaS company that allows small and medium-sized businesses to create and manage affordable, professional, and easy to navigate websites to eliminate the need to hire an agency. The company encourages small businesses to market themselves better online. Dawn Verbrigghe, the CEO, and founder, tells Geordie about her entrepreneurship journey.
What You’ll Learn
- How working in a family business inspired Dawn to build the MVP
- How Dawn reached out to potential businesses
- Why the Jottful niche is horizontal-based
- Why people were afraid of referring Jottful to their friends
- How a mentor can help you make the best decision
- The perks of being an entrepreneur
- How early-stage business funding has evolved over the last few years
- Why Dawn and her team don’t use their product on their website
- What is the difference between direct response and brand advertising?
In This Episode
Online marketing plays a core role in the success of businesses. With a robust online marketing strategy, small and medium-sized businesses can accelerate their growth, attract more customers, and increase revenue.
Jottful understands the importance of marketing which is why they collaborate with small businesses to help them increase their presence online through their websites. Hiring an agency to build your website can be costly, especially if you are a small business entrepreneur.
With technological advancements today and the availability of easy-to-use tools, small businesses can quickly build their websites. However, to leverage some of the available tools, you need technical skills that many small business entrepreneurs do not have. This is where Jottful comes in through their “do it together” initiative.
The company gets content from their customers, creates, launches their websites, and helps them maintain the site on an ongoing basis. Listen to the podcast for extensive details on how the company works. Dawn also explains how their pricing model works.
While Dawn is a qualified graphic designer, a business background played a significant role in carving her entrepreneurship journey. She gained tremendous experience and insight from working in a family business.
Listen to her story to understand how she came up with her MVP. Dawn signed up her first few customers in unlikely circumstances. She explains how a national bridal event paved the way for her to exhibit her website development skills. Get the details from the podcast.
Dawn says her core focus at the event was to determine whether or not her idea had a viable value proposition. After that, she would focus on building the MVP and ensuring that it worked before figuring out their initial target market.
At first, Dawn and her team focused on bridal shops. They would later enroll in an accelerator program linked to the University of Michigan, which was accepted. Dawn says the University is among their most prominent investors.
The accelerator program helped them realize that their niche is not industry-based but company size-based. She explains this concept in the podcast. How did Dawn fund her MVP? Even though she was in between jobs, she was looking forward to assuming a powerful CMO position in a full-time company that was planning to go public.
She was torn between joining full-time employment and becoming an entrepreneur at some point. She shared her dilemma with her mentor, who advised her that entrepreneurship was her calling. Dawn has no regrets for giving up employment for entrepreneurship. Having a qualified engineer during the MVP development stage is critical.
Dawn explains how she met, what she considered when hiring her engineer, and how they collaborated to build a powerful platform. She also talks about funding the MVP. According to Dawn, their product is easy to use, and customers can easily make necessary changes on their websites in record time.
Many entrepreneurs struggle with identifying and defining their niche. Dawn gives comprehensive details on how they went about the process. Listen to the podcast to understand how they struggled trying to get their product to their target audience. If you are a new entrepreneur or aspiring to become one, you cannot afford to miss this section of the podcast. Dawn concludes the podcast with some words of advice for aspiring SaaS entrepreneurs:
- Start building an audience as early. Many entrepreneurs focus on product development before determining how to sell it, derailing their growth.
- Social media channels can help you reach your target audience better than an email list. Dawn says LinkedIn is a great audience funnel.
Resources
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How Tammy Developed a Security Application that Adults and Teenagers can use to Seek Assistance in an Emergency
Tammy Haldeman, CEO of Your Shield, talks about coming up with the idea, developing it, their pricing plan, and why the application is ideal for adults and teenagers.
You Shield is a safety application that users install on their phones. Tammy Haldeman, the developer, tells Geordie about it.
What You’ll Learn
- How Tammy came up with the idea
- Lessons Tammy learned along the way
- Challenges Tammy and her team faced during the development process
In This Episode
Tammy Haldeman believes the You Shield app can protect users from sexual harassment, sex trafficking, kidnapping, bullying, and domestic violence. After activating it, users need to program a secret word they can remember easily, which comes in handy in an emergency.
If you ever experience an attack, your attackers will never know about the app. All you need to pre-program your secret word on the app is shout your preferred term. The app will notify everybody you have programmed, begin tracking your location, and record audio. Tammy gives out an example in the podcast to better understand how the app works.
Tammy describes, coming up with the idea as a gift. She narrates how a bullying incident where the victim, a 10-year-old girl, committed suicide affected her. Suddenly the thought of a security application hit her brain. She says aspects of designing and improving her idea kept flooding her mind, and that’s when she decided to actualize it.
Investing in application development can be a costly practice. However, Tammy mentions that her heart was ready to go over and above to catch attackers or prevent them from violating other people’s rights.
With zero experience in software, Tammy admits that venturing into the industry was intimidating. She struggled with finding the right people to trust with her idea and reputable professionals she could work with.
Tammy narrates how she met Geordie, with whom they had an easy conversation. She says Geordie made her comfortable even though she was not conversant with software-related terms. Find out how Tammy and Geordie’s development team collaborated to build the app.
Geordie highlights how they struggled with finding the ideal sequence because they needed to configure the iOS operating system. At some point, they encountered particular regulations that barred changes on iOS. How did Tammy navigate that phase?
She remembers one specific week when accessing her account on App Store was impossible for two weeks. However, despite the challenges, Tammy says everything worked satisfactorily because it allowed their developers to focus on the complexities of the application. That phase gave them sufficient time to prepare the app for launch.
Every entrepreneur struggles with the fear of the unknown, and Tammy was not an exception. Sometimes she feared that the app would never go live. However, she was certain she could keep pushing until her dreams actualized.
Tammy quickly mentions that developing an application is a long, tedious, and time-consuming process. When it comes to app development, a celebration of the last day never comes because you are always thinking about what to improve to enhance the user experience. What’s more, customers keep demanding new features. Still, Tammy describes two moments when her persistence seemed to be bearing fruits. Listen to the podcast to learn about it.
When Tammy started developing the You Shield idea, she had not emphasized sexual harassment. However, her niece was recently harassed sexually at school, which made her regret for not activating her niece’s Shield activated.
In today’s world, where insecurity is rising exponentially, every teenager can benefit from using the You Shield app. Do you have privacy concerns regarding this app? Tammy says only app users can playback recordings from their devices.
Further, they don’t collect the user’s information. Such data is only necessary for activating the app. She also discussed their payment plans in the podcast. If you are interested in the app, do not miss this podcast section.
This app is meant for both teenagers and adults as well. Tammy says you can never predict when something happens to you and insists that having the app can rescue you from risky situations. One of the most interesting features of this application is that victims can call out for help without their attackers knowing.
If you are an aspiring app developer, Tammy says documenting your dreams about the project is crucial. She says potential app developers should create recordings, draw their plans, and write down their expectations. Collaborating with trustworthy people with whom you can easily communicate is also crucial during the development process.
Your Shield app is only available on iOS, but Tammy says they are working on availing it for Android users soon.
Resources
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