First, AlhamduliLlaah.
TLDR; I later ended up not demonstrating anything, rather, through ALlaah's mercies, demonstrated what was needed. Add Nigerian factor to the equation.
The Prep
I was fortunate, by ALlaah's mercies, to come accross this article by Linear's Tuomas. That gave me a great insight on how to prepare, especially the waitlist part. I created a Google Docs for interested schools to fill in some details and added that to the landing page. In hindsight, that was probably the most important decision I made leading up to the demo because as you'll later know, the network went off, I mean, I literally could not load eduhisab.com in the browser.
The actual demo
To cut the long story short, I ended up just talking and scribbling eduhisab.com on a whiteboard. I couldn't present the power point I made due to time constraint and couldn't demonstrate an entire setup for a demo school. Fortunately, one of the two active users tagged along, in the person of my mom. She simply started showing her dashboard on her phone, and I took over from there, explaining, answering questions. Even before answering questions, they were already interested, after the unexpected real user display, they became really excited.
The numbers
I estimated about 30 to 45 heads in the room, most of them school owners and a sizeable number had accountants and bursars.
- From the Google form, I got 24 responses as of the time of writing this. Two people responded twice, so, that makes 22.
- 70% of the responders are the actual proprietors of the school
- 83% still handle school finances manually, that is pen and paper. This was surprising to me because, I opened the presentation with a question; asking a show of hands for those that still handle their bills manually, no one did, only one person said "semi-manually".
- 10 responders explicitly answered, "no" when asked if they were satisfied with their current method. Only one responder said "somehow", the rest indicated a dissastisfaction.
- 46% had students between 80 and 150, then 16% for students between 50 and 80, while the rest was evenly split.
Takeways
- I know this is just the easy part. Converting this excitement into retained and paying users is where the work is.
- I'm not sure yet how to handle the number of schools to onboard. I mentioned previously, that I'd just want 20 new schools after both demos. This is just the first, and I potentially have 20 new schools.
- A live version demo works probably better than a powerpoint presentation.
- Having someone to vouch for the product and is willing to speak on your behalf really goes a long way.
- Another thing is, I gave this presentation amongst familiar faces. I presented to schools that I knew and attended while growing up. I think having that also helped in giving the composure needed to abandon my original plan and to just start talking.
- I plan to add the selected few (I'm not sure if I should still go this route) to a WhatsApp group, record some videos and give them access.
- The two major feature requests, or better still, those were the only features requested were: role management and exporting reports.
- This network issue underscores greatly the importance of local-first apps in the Nigerian ecosystem. That was the initial plan when I started building EduHisab. Reading and looking more into Linear re-invigorated that and that's the major thing we'll add before the public launch.
- One mistake I think I made, was to say that this batch of schools onboarded will be given a free year. Right now, I think I've over committed, it might not seem like that in the future, but, I don't think I can afford to make that promise in the next demo. The workaround might be: I said a free year, I could start counting from when they get onboarded, which is this week, latest and continue that when I add pricing. I don't know.
Conclusion
I still have another one tomorrow, in a different state, amongst entirely unfamiliar faces. ALlaah is with me, armed with the lessons from today, and fortunately, the other active user resides in that state, so, I'm going along with them, I believe it will be wayyy better than today. Again, AlhamduliLlaah.
Thank you!!!