When I began building York IE, what I was trying to figure out was, how do I build a company that enables us to be both operators and investors?
One of the ways we’re doing that is with Fuel, our SaaS platform for market and competitive intelligence. Fuel is not only the foundation for our investments and advisory services practices, but it also helps founders and operators use data to inform their own startup growth strategies.
What we’ve realized from working with so many tech founders is that they tend to take a product-out approach to entering a market and building new features. Product-out solutions end up being very technical and in the weeds because they’re built by developers, engineers and data scientists. And these people are so close to the product because they work with it every day.
But founders and operators aren’t doing enough research on the market itself: their competitors, the pricing and packaging, the positioning and messaging — all the things that go into differentiating a brand. We call this a market-in approach to company building. With Fuel, we’re giving fellow founders and operators a better snapshot of their markets and opportunities for startup growth.
I spoke more about this topic on Episode 31 of The Corporate Data Show podcast, which you can listen to here.
