Update #14 – Forever Learning

As we begin to make our way out of isolation and into the start light of our new reality, its difficult to comprehend what the heck just happened! Our country has been incredibly lucky considering the plight others have and continue to endure. However,  the road to recovery is crucial for everyone.

So, what does “COVID Recovery” look like, exactly?

For us it’s business as usual as we jump into working with others to pave their own recovery pathway. From healthcare to start ups and many in between, we’ve all got one thing in common:

It’s time to learn from our old normal to create our new one.

The Learnings From a Pricing Model.

The thing about building a start up is everything is a priority, with a deadline of yesterday and nothing waits for you to figure out what you know and don’t know.

When we started out, the TANDM Suite had a few major features on offer and was aimed at large healthcare facilities and consulting firms. Our pricing structure was designed around research and industry experience and it all fit nicely with our goals at the time.

However over the last six or so months our development pipeline exploded off the back of introductions to new industries, customer validation research, and pilot study feedback. Our feature offerings doubled, access to different types and size business increased and the opportunity to tailor TANDM Suite access packages depending on need was introduced. It was a series of mini pivots that could have landed us a spot in the Australian Ballet. However, one challenge continuously remained…

Pricing.

From customer feedback, we realised we hadn’t adjusted our pricing model to suit the rapid additions in our offerings. As a result, confusion led to a less-that-ideal sales encounter. The “on the job” learnings can be brutal, but hindsight is a wonderful teacher. It was a solid reminder that we have many adjustments and experiments left ahead of us. Luckily, the team is one of the most resilient I’ve encountered and they never back down from a lesson. Coming together as a team to reflect on the true value of our software and rebuild that structure from the ground up has been a needed experience. Removing all preconceptions allowed us to go back to the data experiments at our core and adopt a new mindset to our sales process.   Treating everything as an experiment to prove or disprove has ensured our path forward is much smoother.

Welcome to #startuplife!

Start Ups Helping Start Ups.

It’s no secret that we are passionate about giving back to our start up community, especially with our roles in mentoring and teaching with accelerator programs over the last 12 months.

When it came time to do our own research what better tool to use than the one we just poured our blood sweat and tears into? Now, we’re putting the TANDM Suite to use with other start ups as they go about their own research and validation projects:

Client Validation | With a customer validation calculator and a ranking system from the book “Sell More Faster”, we ranked every conversation and discovered some industries (like University research) wouldn’t be a viable customer base during COVID-19.  Prioritising the customer segments with the greatest need and budget allowed us to quickly discover our new direction and industries to focus on.

Assumptions Register | Combining a register of our assumptions with a new framework of questions from “The Mom Book” allowed us to ask questions that not even our Moms could lie about.  This helped us sift through well-meaning compliments and narrow in on where our potential customers were hiding in plain sight.

That Time We Wrote an Ebook.

Luckily through this entire process, I took a LOT of notes! On the back of our start up navigation through COVID-19, we wrote our very first ebook! What started as an exercise to record my thoughts, turned into a ‘why don’t we share it with others’ exercise and escalated quickly into what will become an entire series.

We’ve already set up several meetings and consulting sessions from other startups who have downloaded the book and are starting their validation journeys with the TANDM Suite.

In just under a week of it’s release we’ve already had three start ups signed up to implement our studies to track the success of pilot studies, validate customer segments and document customer pain points. These conversations have continued to grow and we can’t wait for their results to start filtering through.

The next chapter of the Lightbulb Playbook is due for release in the coming weeks. Click here to check it out!

The TANDM Suite – Fully Featured

You know the story, the TANDM Suite came from a desire to NOT have to use paper to conduct a time and motion study. We started with a regular timer, a counter and a wish and a prayer. We’ve spent the last 6-8 months going back to our clients and customer segments in full research mode and listening to all of those “It would be cool if t did this!“

We listened, we agreed and now as we lift our heads to catch our breath and move towards the most crucial time of our journey to date, we’re a little blown away at what we’ve achieved.

You can check out of software release notes here but here is a snippet:

• A growing library of available Study Templates for download
• Customisable studies converting data collection to insights in minutes
• New study abilities including surveys, audits, and demographic data
• Fully featured data analytics suite showing live updates
• Instant reporting with new cost-benefit economic analysis
• In house web based Report Builder
• FSI capabilities to capture historical and third party records
• TANDM Lite allowing large group of data collectors to begin with just a link

Applicable to multiple industries and methods including Lean Six Sigma, Safety-II, and Design Thinking projects.

Welcome to the Cogniom Family.

Peter Hewett has been part of the Cogniom family for a little while as an investor. We met Peter through our ‘Med Tech’s Got Talent’ adventure last year and he has been an avid supporter ever since. A surgeon himself, he can see the positive impact a tool like the TANDM Suite will have, especially in healthcare as we navigate out of the global pandemic. It is our absolute pleasure to now also welcome him to our Advisory Board as we work through our COVID-19 Recovery and Future Proofing projects.

Emma Herbert joins the team as our Sales Specialist consulting with us on tightening our sales structure and scripts as we move into a highly sales and marketing focused stage. We place a lot of importance on team culture and when we started looking for a sales mentor and consultant we found that most people were cut from the same cloth and only offered all the cold sales tactics we hate receiving. So when Emma left her incredibly successful real estate career to start her own consulting business, it was as if fate planned it all along.

Emma, a long term friend and colleague of Zoe’s is full of heart and is as passionate about people and helping hem achieve their goals as we are. She brings to the table a wealth of knowledge, skill and passion and is pumped to help us unleash our best inner sales personas!

Our Ask.

We are incredibly grateful for your ongoing support of our journey. Zoe still has news she is desperate to tell you all but we’re not quite allowed to share it just yet. Seriously, I think she may explode! Until then, there are still ways for you to get involved!

1. Help us close our pre seed round. The global pandemic put a spanner in the works for many, and we still have a couple of spots left to finish this investment round. We’re on the brink of a business surge post pandemic and we’d love to have you along for the ride!
2. Make an Introduction to a Start Up.With so many tertiary institutions turning their backs on their innovation programs, now more that ever our start up community needs all the support we can give them. For those who are starting and need to validate or have already started and need to pivot, we’d love to hear from them and help them on their journey.
3. Do you know a Healthcare professional?A Surgeon, a CFO, a CIO, a nursing or department head? It’s falling on their shoulders to not only recover from COVID-19 impacts but to manage the increasing pressures to the healthcare system. We’d love to chat and help them plan the most effective path forward.
4. The same goes for business owners.COVID-19 certainly hasn’t discriminated and there are plenty of business owners who are trying to understand where changes in their business needs to be made in order to survive. Having a technology roadmap and automating costly, manual tasks will become a massive priority with an economic downturn.  Those that innovate will be able to pull ahead of their competitors.

Thank you again for following our journey. Until next time, stay safe and healthy and enjoy your post isolation adventures!

 – Robert

 (Don’t forget, you can check out previous updates by clicking here!)