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You’ll sometimes hear me say things like “more founders should think about founder-market fit and whether they really are uniquely suited to build their business” or “founders should try to build an unfair advantage well before they launch their product”… well, ManyRequests, from Robin Vander Heyden and Gabriel Lecointere is a case study in both of these. We’re super happy to be backing them at Calm Company Fund.
Productizing a service is one of the best ways to move from selling your time online for hourly services, to building a product and a business. It’s one of the main on-ramps to internet entrepreneurship and the current global environment will accelerate that trend more than ever. But whether we’re talking about large agencies or solo freelancers, most of these businesses are hacked together with a mishmash of different tools for handling recurring invoices, service requests, allocating jobs across the team or outside contractors, and managing the job review. ManyRequests is the Shopify of productized services, a single full-stack app that you can run your entire business on.
But what about that founder-market-fit? Many of might have already followed Robin from his journey, shared on Indie Hackers, of building a productized design services business ManyPixels and growing it to a mid six-figures in recurring revenue business, then stepping back to allow his co-founders to continue running it. From there he has kept a break neck pace launching ProductizedStartups.com as a resource hubs for aspiring entrepreneurs, 3,000+ Facebook Community, and joined forces with Gabriel to launch the first version of ManyRequests in just about six months.
That’s what I’m talking about when I say founder-market-fit and unfair advantages
The platform itself is exactly what you would expect from entrepreneurs who have literally run the exact business they are now building for: everything you need and nothing you don’t. A side benefit of founders who deeply understand the underlying business is over time you’ll start to see the product go from less of a blank slate, to one already infused with best practices that sets up new entrepreneurs for success. To be clear, there’s still a lot of work to be done and the product is still in its early stages, but I’m super excited to see what the team can do and all the businesses they can help create.
