Ron Spreeuwenberg says he called ten daycares from the yellow pages without selling anything, and 70 to 80 percent were intrigued, validating HiMama's idea before building.
Ron Spreeuwenberg approached early research as a researcher rather than an entrepreneur, using in-person visits and surveys to decide whether the idea was worth a decade of his life.
Ron Spreeuwenberg argues founders should focus less on total addressable market and more on delivering real value to a few daycares, noting HiMama grew by expanding into adjacent products.
Listen to Customers Before Pitching, and Product-Market Fit Follows
Proper customer discovery means acting as a researcher before acting as a founder. Ron Spreeuwenberg tested HiMama's idea by listening to daycares for months without pitching, so he learned which problems were real before building anything. That approach let a small bootstrapped team ship a simple product that solved a clear pain, and the market grew as the product expanded.
Takeaways
Start discovery as a researcher, not a seller. Ron opened the yellow pages in 2013, called ten daycares and sold nothing. About 70 to 80 percent were intrigued. He approached it as an objective scientist deciding whether the idea deserved ten years of his life.
Narrow problems through staged, open-ended research. Ron visited 10 to 20 programmes in person with an open-ended survey. Documentation and parent communication ranked highest. He then interviewed 50 programmes on those two problems before exploring whether a solution could be a business.
Meet customers in person and treat them as experts. In-person visits build trust and show the working environment, and those details shape product design. Daycare operators open up to people who want to learn from them. Treating customers as experts makes them give more time.
Mockups and a fast MVP kept the build lean. Ron moved from interviews to design with seven to eight PowerPoint screenshots shown on an iPad. Research took three to four months and the MVP two to three more. HiMama was bootstrapped, and educators' lack of time demanded simplicity.
Do not obsess over market size early. HiMama grew from parent communication into administrative tools, tuition payments and a curriculum acquisition, each of which Ron says doubled or tripled the market. Pablo says founders should focus on delivering real value to one or ten daycares.
Early customers are slow but teach the most. The first pilot daycare got two or three iPads and the product free. Real use exposed issues with process, Wi-Fi, lost iPads, training and teacher age. Sales were a slow burn because directors resisted technology, yet early adopters were easy to spot.
Workarounds and rivals signal product-market fit. Ron saw fit when daycares built heavy workarounds like parent email lists and Facebook groups, when some began building their own software, and when a young, entrepreneurial first customer loved the launch. He says a product should be ten times better than the workaround.
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