Pulse Marketplace Product Update January 2021

Product Prototype 

The first six months of the Pulse Marketplace journey has certainly flown by. Since September, the founding team and vision has now been enhanced through the addition of new team members, clients, advisors, product priorities and lots of discussion! Armed with a clear initial vision, we began a series of over 50 one-to-one interviews with senior executives from Asset Management, FinTech, Digital Marketing & IT Services. There was very loud agreement from these sessions that the current way of doing B2B procurement is highly inefficient resulting in lengthy buying cycles and huge costs.  

And there was also general positivity for our vision of how to resolve this problem. Indeed over 20 companies have so far signed up to become members of our inaugural Pulse User Group to help guide & support our product evolution. In November, we took their feedback onboard and put pen to paper to produce a set of early product wireframes. We workshopped these with 13 of our User Group members in a series of four 1.5-hour sessions (2 buyer & 2 vendor). These provided some very powerful insights which have driven the immediate product roadmap priorities.

Our Product Development Queue

In particular, 3 key core areas have jumped to the top of the Product Queue:  

• Basic standard, end-to-end procurement process & templates. For the benefit of mid-sized financial firms with limited procurement resources, tools & processes to manage an RFP selection process.
  
• Vendor search capability, providing up-to-date information & insights into relevant offerings from potential partners, including especially newer & innovative firms. Both Tier One & mid-tier clients highlighted the potential value for them of this functionality.
   
• Bid Management Console, providing vendors a “one-stop-shop” to organise their responses to tenders or pitches, with version control & distributed, permissioned curation. Nearly all of the vendors we spoke with saw the value of this. 

The Future’s Bright

Since the start of 2021, we have been engaged in our first, “seed” funding round & flush from early successes, we have now begun to build out the team, adding UI/UX designers, developers, QA, marketing & client service resources. By March, we’ll be eleven employees and can see the good folks at Coupa & SAP Ariba already quaking in their boots!! We have also now turned the sod of our new product, and our developers are building out the first version. In February, we will be inviting the User Group members to engage with our first product prototype, with a view to getting early feedback.  

Our goal is to have an Alpha version of the product available in Q1 and then in Q2, we hope to generate the first little bit of early revenue. In so doing we will finally put paid to our Four-Pre’s – “pre-product, pre-client, pre-revenue & pre-investment”, and begin in earnest the next chapter!