- Aren’t you afraid to bet solely on one product in your startup? One that’s supposed to take off… but could also fail ☹️ It’s better to choose a whole direction from the start, within which you can create multiple products!
- And no, it won’t be “spraying” if you define a target audience and the scope of problems to solve. And ideally — even one major competitor.
- The trick is also that one key change has happened now, which has made this business model possible.
- Here’s a specific example of a startup that chose to go down this path. You can replicate it or even venture into another field — but following the same principle:
Project Essence
The Mobile-First Company plans to release mobile applications “for every need.”
The startup’s name itself, “mobile-first,” implies that the main principle that should unite all their applications is that they should be developed initially for convenient use on a phone. And not be a “crooked,” “cut-down,” or less functional version of the same application for a computer with a larger screen.
If we’re talking about regular user applications like TikTok or Instagram, that’s how it happens now. Their desktop versions are a truncated version of the mobile application, if they exist at all.
But with business applications, it’s the opposite. Their desktop versions are full-featured, while the mobile versions are either functionally limited, inconvenient to use, or both.
So, today’s startup plans to release “mobile-first” applications for businesses. Not for just any business, but for small businesses that don’t have the resources to create their own mobile solutions.
The startup doesn’t intend to limit itself to specific business sectors. It wants to cover retail, healthcare, fast food, repair, and all other areas. There, it plans to implement its applications for convenient updating of customer data in CRM after a meeting or purchase, for quick invoicing, for easy online ordering in restaurants, for monitoring construction and repair work, and other tasks.
In total, the startup plans to develop no less than 20 such applications. They are expected to have the ability to integrate with each other to create a unified ecosystem for mobile management of any type of small business.
The startup names Excel as its main competitor, which is still used by the vast majority of small businesses.
The Mobile-First Company was founded only in December of last year. However, this French startup has already raised its first 3.5 million euros in investments by launching its first application.
It’s called Amoa and is designed for inventory management. The application includes a barcode scanner, allowing the user to track goods received and sold on the warehouse, so that they can check the real status of their warehouse at any time.
What’s Interesting
To my surprise, the Amoa website describes the application’s uses not only for business inventory management.
The startup says that this application is suitable for meticulous people who want to have “order in the house.” With the help of the application, they can keep track of all existing and newly purchased household items such as TVs, microwaves, chairs, etc. — keeping descriptions, photos, storage locations, purchase dates, and photos of receipts, warranties, and similar documents in one place.
Another application of the same application is for collectors. They can similarly keep track of all items in their collections — coins, stamps, model cars, and anything else.
At first, I thought this was a very dangerous dilution of the startup’s initial focus on creating applications for businesses. And then I thought…
A small business owner or sole proprietor is an ordinary person whose business and regular life are intricately intertwined and mixed in a whimsical way.
This is not the owner of a large company, whose business and life are more clearly separated. This includes the separation between corporate systems, platforms, and applications and the applications they use personally — because these are programs of completely different scales and functionalities. It’s unlikely that the owner of a retail chain can conveniently use the warehouse management program used in his company to catalog his stamp collection — it’s like using a microscope to drive in nails 😉
But the owner of a small shop can very well use a simple mobile application to track goods in his store and to catalog his collection or keep track of purchases of parts for his personal car and/or tools hanging on the walls of his garage.
He might even want to use such an application precisely because he can use it for both work and life! Especially if he’s currently keeping track of both in the same Excel. And remember, Excel is precisely the main competitor named by The Mobile-First Company? 😉
It turns out quite amusing, in general. If we’re targeting individual entrepreneurs and small business owners, the possibility of using a business application in everyday life may not be a dilution of the focus but an additional value! Apparently, this is the hypothesis being tested by today’s startup.
Where to Run
Another important point is that the startup’s concept is not limited to the idea of a single product that should improve one specific thing. At the same time, it is not a dispersion type like “we will do many things for many people.”
Firstly, the target audience of all products is clearly defined — small business owners.
And this means that the same marketing and sales channels will be used to sell each new product, with the experience of working with them improving over time. Moreover, a satisfied customer of the previous product is the shortest and most effective channel for selling a new product. And the more previous products they have already bought, the easier it will be for them to sell a new one.
Secondly, in fact, the startup has one product — but not in the usual sense of the word.
The startup’s product is a factory for producing products 😉 After all, all applications this factory will produce according to the same principle within the same business processes. We take small business owners, see what they often do in Excel, find out what’s inconvenient about it — and churn out another small mobile application for this purpose, using examples of similar applications and the results of our own research by the same development team.
Staytuned, which I wrote about a year ago, decided to develop in a similar way. They create a set of applications for online store owners created on the Shopify platform. However, they chose not even the development as a repeatable business process — but the purchase of ready-made applications that meet their criteria. They raised $46.5 million in investments for this.
Another startup, Unaric, which I wrote about last summer, is also involved in buying ready-made applications, but within the framework of creating an ecosystem of applications for businesses using Salesforce. It raised $35 million in investments for this.
Against the backdrop of these examples, the desire of today’s The Mobile-First Company to develop applications itself seems like a significant limitation that could seriously slow down the development process of the idea.
However, in my opinion, they are betting that now creating an application with the help of AI has become much faster and cheaper. And this won’t lag much behind in speed compared to buying ready-made applications but will turn out to be significantly cheaper. Moreover, this way, you can develop exactly what is needed — which is very important for a company that has decided to prioritize not even functionality, but the mobile user experience.
It turns out that the emergence of AI capable of helping to program is the key change that can contribute to the popularity of models similar to product factories. For which it is necessary to fix a) the target audience and b) the process of searching for application ideas for this target audience, and ideally c) one competitor that we will fight against.
Thus, the possible direction of movement is the creation of a product factory that meets these criteria.
What and for whom can you start churning out like this? Is there one big competitor with whom you can fight in this way?
Answers to this question can lead to the creation of a fairly large business, the success of which, among other things, will not depend on the fate of just one product released — which will allow testing different hypotheses and releasing different products while staying within the same original concept.
About the Company
The Mobile-First Company
Website: themobilefirstcompany.com
Last round: €3.5M, 28.03.2024
Total investments: €3.5M, rounds: 1