Referocket
Client Info
- Business Type: Startup
- Product: B2B SaaS
- Industry: Workflow automation
- Stage: Pre-seed
- Funding: Bootstrapped
- Tech stach: bubble.io
Background
Running his own recruitment agency, Rob experienced the challenges of making and receiving professional introductions firsthand. With no effective tools available, he saw an opportunity to solve a problem he faced everyday. Teaming up with James from DQ Ventures, Rob turned his idea into Referocket, a practical solution that allows businesses to streamline and incentivise professional referrals.
The Problem
Introductions and warm referrals are a great source of high quality leads. Tracking inbound leads from previous clients, partners and your wide network is an important step to ensuring these introducers feel that their work is valued, and these referrals keep coming.
Manual processes to track these introductions didnt work for a business of Rob's complexity, so he started to ideate how a dedicated tool could solve his problem and for businesses with similar challenges as well.
Referocket’s Priorities
- Smooth User Experience: It was crucial to make Referocket easy to use. Recognizing that users had their own habits and processes for referrals, it was important to fit into existing communication platforms and minimize the number of steps required to make an intro.
- Hands-on Product Development Guidance: Balancing his recruitment career and Referocket, Rob needed support and a sounding board to guide the evolution of the product to launch.
- Cost-Effective Approach: As a bootstrapped project, it was important to develop Referocket in a budget-friendly way, and fund development through sales as quickly as possible.
The Approach
- Mobile-first Responsive Design: Referocket was built as a mobile-first web app. A mobile app is on the roadmap, but a web application was launched first to accelerate time to market and reduce costs.
- Messenger Integration: We leveraged the user's current communication channels (WhatsApp, Gmail, etc.) within Referocket, instead of replicating messenger features on the platform itself. Despite the technical challenge of implementing this within a web app, it was the right decision for the business and the product.
- Demo-ready Front End: Referocket needed to generate revenue pre-launch. To do this, we developed a demo-ready version of the platform that Rob could demo to clients and fund the rest of the build.
The Results
- Early Sales Momentum & Client Feedback: We generated thousands of dollars in pre-sales, in addition to gathering critical user feedback to guide the final phases of development. These sales helped fund further development and start to build a beta-tester community for the product.
- Executed a Low-cost Pivot: The Bubble.io architecture of the platform was highly flexible, facilitating a low-cost pivot mid-build from a B2C to a B2B solution in a matter of weeks.
- Continued Involvement of Blue Mongoose: Blue Mongoose remains closely involved in the product post-launch, acting as a fractional CTO to the project. Together with Rob & James, we interpret user data and feedback to co-create a product roadmap, which Blue Mongoose executes to ensure Referocket keeps growing.