Melissa the Customer Expert Founder
This article is a part of the book, “How to Build University Start-up Ecosystems: Five Information Patterns for Success.”
The funeral industry today is massively exploitive to people in some of the worst moments of their lives. Many funeral directors will claim that embalming and concrete slabs over caskets are legally mandatory (they’re not) for loved ones to be buried in a cemetery (Archer). While funeral homes are legally mandated to show consumers all of their available casket options, many funeral directors will push the more expensive options first and not disclose that people legally must be allowed to use caskets purchased elsewhere at no charge (Crawford). In an issue of Funeral Services Insider a funeral director encouraged their peers to reach out to generic casket makers to provide them with private labelling for the same caskets to sell in-house, writing “It will have a different model number, and the family won’t know it’s the exact same option available at another firm” (Mangla).
Part of the reason why funeral directors can get away with these tactics is because there is no central database of costs across different funeral homes. In one study of ten major cities across the U.S. it was found funeral homes might differ 164% in price within a 5 mile radius for the same services (Mangla). At the University of Michigan I spoke with Melissa (name changed for privacy), who started a company we will call Thistle & Rose. Thistle & Rose sought to bring transparency to the funeral industry through a centralized catalogue of offerings with the ability for people to write reviews. This “Yelp for Funeral Homes” could go a long way to bring transparency to the funeral industry.
The Customer Expert Founder
I met Melissa as she went through the TechArb accelerator, a twelve week program run by the university that takes students with demonstrated commitment to their start-ups through a crash-course in the start-up world. The accelerator included weekly meet-ups with the dozen companies that participated to share progress and areas where they needed help, along with structured classes on such topics as marketing, team management, legal basics, fundraising, and other start-up basics. The accelerator cumulates in a “demo day” where founders pitch their start-ups to friends, family, and outside investors.
Melissa was a woman whereas seventy percent of the other accelerator participants were men, a business major where most participants were in tech. She was a solo founder, and the only person accepted into the accelerator without a fully built minimum viable product (MVP). Technically Melissa was not supposed to be in the accelerator without an MVP, however within five minutes of speaking with Melissa, it was impossible not to see what the accelerator’s director saw — if given a shot, Melissa could be one of the great founders to come out of the university.
Where Melissa excelled was in her understanding and connections with potential customers. Whereas most of the incubator participants glossed over user research, Melissa knew the pain points of every person she spoke with. She had a deep sense of empathy with her customers that translated into a strong understanding of how they made purchasing decisions.
However, both the investment ecosystem outside of the university and the infrastructure within the university was made for technical founders.
Outside of the university Melissa found that the funeral industry was decidedly “uncool” to investors. There was no blockchain that needed to be created, and not a single NFT to purchase. Without a website and revenue, Melissa was a non-technical, solo, first-time female founder. She was a non-starter for pre-seed investors. She was stuck in a Catch-22: without investment she could not build her product and without a product she could not gain investment.
Within the university’s accelerator program Melissa also had a hard time as the infrastructure was set up to help technical founders find product-market fit. All of the programming was geared towards founders who already had an MVP developed. Over the duration of the accelerator, Melissa was able to develop mock-ups of her website and connect with even more customers. But Melissa did not know how to move past this point. Her story is important for Community Managers to understand because of how common her experience was. I found in my interviews several founders that reached this point, but were largely given the advice to go to networking events to find an investor or a technical co-founder.
Breaking the Catch-22
There are two key ways Community Information Designers (CIDs) can help Melissa and Customer Expert founders like her break out of the Catch-22 of having no product without investment, and no investment without a product.
One way is to help Customer Expert Founders reorient themselves on what their first product will look like. “The Start-up as Process” focuses on the use of a schema called the Start-up Loop that orients the start-up as an evolving process rather than a product. This mental structure can better help individual non-technical founders stay in motion towards an eventual tech product and better showcase their progress to investors in comparison with technical founders.
The second chapter “Designing an Accelerator for Non-technical Entrepreneurs” provides guidelines for CIDs to design programming to help non-technical founders make the transition from high-touch process to technical product. The current advice for non-technical founders is to find a technical founder, but waiting to connect with a co-founder creates a chokepoint for a large demographic of founders within a university’s ecosystem. It is also often highly inequitable for people who do not have the time or money to continually access networking events. Building infrastructure that can help Customer Expert, Non-technical founders bridge this process to product gap can drastically widen the number and types of founders that can create successful companies at the university.
