If you have a product in market with active users and you’re raising funding, you’re probably thinking: how can I improve my product without slowing down business? At this stage, companies are moving upstream and often across verticals. There’s no time to stop and evaluate. Or so it may seem.
In reality, this is a great time to throw gas on the fire with product and product marketing improvements that can be a catalyst for funding. While investing in your product can help attract funding, it’s also an impactful way to use funding once secured.
Allocate Resources for Speed
Once your company has a steady revenue stream of cash (and with few exceptions, Series A will typically demand a minimum of $1M ARR), you can’t slow down. In fact, you often have to speed up.
To keep your product running seamlessly for existing customers, you’ll need to allocate more resources while making improvements and adjustments. Don’t have a full product team in-house? I don’t blame you — most startups don’t and you probably shouldn’t yet. You need a product partner to build your solution without disrupting the product core. By integrating with what’s already in place, a product partner will offer improvements without detrimental slow-downs that deviate from your growth trajectory.
Add Product Knowledge
When raising series A or beyond, you’ll need more product support. In the digital product space, hiring difficulties can handcuff companies looking to expand or improve.
There are two key product challenges that startups will have to overcome at this stage:
- Manage the growing list of feature improvements and user requests. Communicating with customers and prioritizing features with product teams gets monumentally more taxing at this stage.
- Continue to innovate. Bugs, features, tech debt — they all hold products back. Amidst this flurry, a founders original vision evolves beyond something they can adequately focus on. When this happens, it’s even more critical to hire product experts that can translate your vision into a market-ready product.
It might not be possible, based on budget or the talent pool, to bring a product leader in-house at this point. But that doesn’t mean you need to sacrifice product knowledge. Hiring an outside partner like Innovatemap can bring stability in a volatile job market.
We think of ourselves as an extension of your team, often teaching your junior employees as we go. As a result, your internal team will be better equipped to manage the digital product’s evolution. We’re like an accelerator model for building product leaders, which benefits you greatly and is as a major benefit to investors who understand the lack of product knowledge in the market.
Improve Product Marketing
By working with a product partner, tech companies can not only identify and resolve issues related to their product, but they can better market the product, too. Product marketing is an entirely different beast than marketing. I often say product marketing is the architecture that great marketing is built upon. It’s critical that the digital product is branded memorably and meaningfully, and its features are accurately described and promoted to the right audiences.
Investors know the value of product marketing because most of them have seen how it makes or breaks a company. Because of this, investors may favor growth stage companies that have already invested in their own product marketing efforts before seeking additional funding.
At Innovatemap, we translate your features and functionalities into benefits that customers want and understand. Our product marketing experts helped Authenticx, a healthcare platform that helps companies listen to customers, increase revenue by 350% and secure Series A funding.
Whether a company is seeking Series A funding and beyond, or is looking for ways to spend that funding appropriately, Innovatemap can help you make your product one that buyers buy and users use.
Find out how our product experts can help equip you to raise your Series A or beyond.
