Uncovering a strategy for stages of growth, funding, and customer needs…in a week
Profit Impact had a vision but needed a path forward. Atomic helped them prototype their way towards a fundraising, development, and customer acquisition plan.
Due to investor demand, consumer demand, and a strong desire to make up for limited government action, Profit Impact's founder, Sarah Whale, believes that we are nearing a future where all organisations will need to include sustainability metrics in their quarterly reports alongside financial metrics.
Sarah chose to partner with Atomic Innovation to answer this question: how can Profit Impact invent and scale digital solutions that will prepare as many organisations as possible for this challenging future?
Profit Impact was already an industry leader in helping SMEs take bold action to reach their sustainability goals through their ‘Path to Net Zero’ and ‘Becoming a BCorp’ programmes, but they wanted their impact to reach further.
Profit Impact needed a development roadmap that mapped each stage of growth for the company with an evolution of the product that would support and create that growth. And so our partnership began by facilitating a strategic discovery process to map Sarah’s vision of the future to the path to building the business.
Through workshops, research, and prototyping, we uncovered the key value proposition for the target market, appropriate business models for the new offerings, and assessed build-buy-borrow trade-offs for the needed technical capabilities.
This resulted in a product roadmap anchored by the truly innovative features that would reap the greatest ROI and set Profit Impact up for successful, subsequent funding rounds.
An MVP for Customer and Investor Acquisition
With a shared vision of the path ahead, focus immediately shifted to how to take the first steps: the product needed customers and the company needed investment.
The strategic discussions had identified that a major gap in the conversion funnel was awareness. To fill this gap, we collaboratively built a rapid MVP of an educational platform to educate target customers on ESG.
In keeping with Atomic’s Build-Measure-Learn mindset, the platform was designed to create new customer touch points, giving the team another source for understanding customer pain points and discovering potential design opportunities.
These activities helped form the foundations of the investment pitch and cost model used in later fundraising rounds. And the new platform strengthened the marketing funnel, as it was used in awareness campaigns on LinkedIn and was an immediate activation and retention tool for new customers.
By the end of the week, we had set up the business to:
- pursue the strategy in parallel with the demands of their day-to-day operations;
- begin the process of preparing for a round of fundraising;
- and ensured ongoing learning about customers to support decisions and direct efforts.
We demonstrated how to align that strategy to the customer acquisition funnel for each of the key stages of growth, yielding a map of the territory and possible futures, and we gave them hands-on experience of using that map to identify gaps.
Through rapidly launching an MVP, we showed how to effectively put into action a lean-startup style build-measure-learn feedback loop which maximises learning at minimal cost. Plus, launching a prototype in week one helped build confidence around the decision to proceed.
The strategy balanced two important goals competing for attention: building the product and raising the funds to build the product.
It was important to not jump too quickly into costly development. But successful investment rounds also relied on demonstrating the in-house technical capabilities were ready once funding came through.
And so our collaborative process was designed to teach Profit Impact the techniques they could use going forward to evolve and implement their new digital product strategy.
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