I missed posting last week, and I'm not proud of it. However, I've been preparing for my move to Australia and taking some time off to enjoy the summer. While progress has been slower than usual, there has still been progress.

On the Marketing Side

The mascot is nearly finished, and I'm very pleased with the result so far. The process has been both exciting and educational. We've had to learn the basics of 3D modeling in order to communicate effectively and precisely with the contractor. Communication has been key throughout this process, as we've gone through several iterations. To keep things moving quickly while maintaining a good relationship, feedback had to be direct but carefully worded. I can’t wait to show you the final result and the steps behind creating our mascot, Rebot (oops, I’ve spoiled the name already, so I’ll stop talking about it for now).

On the Business Side

We’ve had more discussions with providers and now have a much clearer understanding of the open banking landscape. This coming week, we’ll make a decision on which provider(s) will be our main partner(s). It's one of the biggest decisions we’ve faced so far, as this will significantly impact our costs and how we’ll need to monetize the platform. Once we make the decision, I'll dedicate a post to comparing the more than 15 providers we contacted and explaining our choice and how it affects the platform.

Our go-to-market strategy also shifted this week. Strategy is one of the biggest challenges in a startup. With no users yet and very little data, it’s impossible to make decisions that are strongly backed by data. Early on, choices are mainly driven by best practices, vision, and gut instinct. Initially, our plan was to conduct a "shadow test." This involves advertising a non-functional prototype of the product to gauge interest and assess demand before investing time, money, and energy into building it.

While this is generally considered a good practice in entrepreneurship, we ultimately decided it’s not the right approach for us. Even though no money would change hands and no harm would be done, it still feels like we’d be selling smoke and mirrors instead of offering real value. Though it would help reduce risk and attract early interest, it's not aligned with our mission. We want to provide tangible value to our users.

Instead, we’ve chosen to build a minimum viable product (MVP). This will be the smallest, most essential version of our vision that still delivers value to users. Even if it's not perfect or fully polished, it will solve a real problem and be genuinely useful. Our starting point is the most critical feature: automating the tenant payment verification process.

Now, we enter a new phase of executing our product strategy. It's time to shift back to Build Mode 🚀.