I am not sure what I am writing this here, as I think I know what I need to do but thought I might just as well see if some redditors have come across a similar situation and what happened.
We are a start up with a corporate product.
We piloted our product with a large company in the UK in a sort of concierge mode. The results based on their own numbers and metric showed we were 97X (that's 97 times) better than their incumbent product.
That felt good.
What didn't feel good is when we found out that they had just renewed a contract with their incumbent as our pilot is still at pilot stage.
What they want us to do is essentially integrate our product with their incumbent platform. The reason given is that they have spent a lot of money on the incumbent and need to show results.
Slight problem: one of the reason why our product worked better than the incumbent is pretty much because of the process/user journey of our product. Users seems to be completely rejecting the use of the incumbent platform.
We are in a weird situation that in order for us to move forward we need to integrate with another platform that people don't want to use.
Worse, if we integrate with them, our product t will be forced to integrate with their very process/user journey which, as we established, is no good.
If we were to integrate with this platform the performance of our product would probably reduce significantly because people will not use this incumbent platform. Making our product irrelevant.
If we don't integrate, well thats the end of the adventure.
The choice is pretty obvious, but I'm not sure I'm grasping all the consequences yet.
I am wondering if some of you in the corporate space had similar issue, what decision did yiu make? Knowing what you know what how would have approached this better?
Our MVP customer want us to integrate our pilot with their incumbent to make their incumbent with their initial investment
byu/Ffilib inEntrepreneur
Posted by Ffilib
4 Comments
I’d tell them no. It sounds like you have a great product. You just need to find new customers.
I don’t know how much you need this sale, but I would suggest that you politely decline – “we are confident in our product and don’t want to dilute the value that it would bring you by integrating with incumbent. We would be happy to speak again in the future when you are ready to consider leveraging our product to its fullest extent”.
If you can, walk away and find a customer that really wants your product.
Been there twice, actually. Both times our startup was asked to “just integrate” with the old system so the client could justify sunk costs.
The first time we said yes. It killed the magic of what made our product great. Performance tanked and the client later blamed us for it. The second time we drew a line and reframed it like “If we integrate we’ll lose what made the MVP succeed. Want us to help you prove that instead?” That turned into a joint internal case study that eventually got us the full contract.
So my takeaway… don’t trade your core value for access. If they need to save face help them tell the story of your success instead of watering it down.
You’ve already proven value 97x and that’s rare. Hold that line.
Can you provide a steep discount year one to lock them in and feel less bad about the sunk cost of their contract?