Lauren Dunford participated in Launchpad in 2018, graduating from Launchpad simultaneously with getting her MBA from Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. The Launchpad course at Stanford d.school is an action-based program that takes new ventures through prototyping and launching business ideas over the course of 10 weeks. Lauren reflects here on how learnings from the course have come in handy - especially when the COVID-19 pandemic struck. 

A year after graduating from Launchpad, Safi was now a team of nine, including three Launchpad teammates. In line with team values informed by Launchpad - including data-driven decisions (prototype/test) and growth mindset (fail fast, fail forward) - we were constantly seeking customer feedback on the initial version of our first product, a real-time platform using data from sensors on machines to help factories dramatically improve efficiency.

Customer Need Finding

Our initial group of factory customers was in Nairobi, where my husband grew up surrounded by friends and family in manufacturing. Seeing the challenges they faced had initially motivated me to work on Safi. Managing their factories primarily with Excel or pen-and-paper, they were frustrated by finding out about problems late, wondering why targets were missed, and lacking good data to plan and make decisions. The Safi team and I wanted to help these factories and others leverage technology to solve these challenges and become dramatically more efficient.

We were spending day after day out in Nairobi’s Industrial Area, seeing the frustration of managers using pen-and-paper and Excel to track key metrics on the factory floor. We saw the factory managers starting the day suspicious and resentful, wondering why the night shift failed to deliver production for a customer. Their frustration only built throughout the day as they wondered why certain machines kept missing targets, or failed to catch a problem in time to avoid a breakdown.

Safi’s CTO Weston and I also felt frustrated. We had worked hard to build the first version of the Safi platform with a focus on energy management, in line with what factory engineers said they wanted. Factory managers told us saving energy was a top priority for them. They bought the app. But then they didn’t use the system to consistently save energy. In factory after factory, we kept seeing that saving energy was much lower priority than hitting production targets. An engineer might focus on energy for a few days, but the second the factory missed its production targets, thoughts of energy efficiency went out the window: Everyone in the factory shifted their entire focus to production. Even the engineers and managers that logged into Safi every day weren’t actually using the app for energy savings! Instead, they were using it to see when their machines were idle during the night shift. No matter how much they said they cared about saving energy, production was always the priority.

Drawing from Launchpad Lessons

We thought back to Launchpad. Launchpad’s instructors, Perry and Jeremy, constantly pushed us to have a bias towards action - to keep running experiments to eliminate risk. Over and over throughout the course, we also practiced prototyping, testing with real users, failing, and learning - then repeating that cycle. Now out in the real world, we pushed ourselves to see this new set of information as part of that same cycle of learning. We had listened to what our customers told us, but their behavior showed different priorities. With a bias towards action, was there something else we could prototype?

Looking at the users that were logging in to Safi every day, to see when their machines were idle, we realized the same real-time data they had been using for energy efficiency could be used to help the factory hit their production targets. The power use of every machine showed clearly and in real-time the exact thing the factory team could use to stay on top of production: what their machines were doing at all times. What if we redesigned Safi to focus on production?

Now, it was time to prototype in the most low-resolution way possible. We started by using pen and paper to sketch rough mock-ups to get feedback from current and potential customers. Once we had a sense of which rough direction to take, we got even more feedback by using design software to create detailed wireframes and flows. We iterated and improved, and tested with the Launchpad approach: selling the new system and seeing if factories would buy. Soon, we had an updated system - still accessible from a smartphone - focused on driving improvements in production.

Customer Breakthroughs and Increased Impact of Safi

Factories’ excitement for the new system was of a very different level than for the energy management app. This new system would be *much* more helpful! And compared to other systems geared to help factories manage production, it was friendly and easily to use on a smartphone. We started to see the system take off especially among factories making medicines, containers, packaging, soaps, and paper products, a subset of the types of manufacturers we had targeted previously. They started using Safi daily, making it their main system for production management, and recommending Safi to other factories in Kenya.

Ironically, the approach of designing the tool for the factory’s top priority - production - also meant more people using Safi to make decisions. When energy had been the only focus on the app, Safi was only used by a few engineers in the factory. Now, with more people using Safi, the energy efficiency metrics were being used to inform much larger decisions around operations and purchasing - which we believed would help us eventually have a much greater impact towards our mission of driving clean, smart growth for factories.

We hired Getrude Okoth to lead the market in Kenya and Tania Siska to start exploring a second market in Mexico, a major industrial hub. We were excited about the potential of Safi’s technology for mid-size factories globally, and gearing up to be in 100 factories by the end of 2020.

Resilience and Growth

Then, the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Suddenly, in-person sales and trainings were no longer possible. Many of our factory customers were under lockdown. Growth in Africa and Mexico slowed under the pandemic uncertainty, and all our previously in-person sales meetings and support was no longer possible.

We faced an important question: Was it still possible for us to sell remotely, rather than in-person? Answering this question would shape how we approached sales moving forward.

To answer that question, we revisited one of the most memorable Launchpad exercises: the challenge to “10X Sales” in one week. In this exercise, the instructors informed us that in one week, we had to increase sales not by 2X, not 3X, but 10X! When I first heard their announcement during class, I remember feeling exasperated.

As the primary person leading customer outreach for our team, I had been working hard to grow sales for months prior to Launchpad, as well as during the first few weeks of the course. Did they think I wasn’t already working as hard as I could? That I wasn’t already exhausted? After a few deep breaths, though, I embraced the pressure. No amount of hard work would result in a 10X increase, so this was a push to think different. Rather than just working harder at the same things, this extreme pressure pushed us to get extremely entrepreneurial and try completely new things. We searched our networks and found connections to new factories in surprising places, experimented with dramatic changes to pricing, and tested partnerships to reach many manufacturers at once.

Two years later, as COVID-19 hit, we thought back to that “10X Sales” mindset shift. In the context of massive global changes, working harder at the same things was clearly not the answer. Now was the moment to skip the incremental changes and try completely different things.

We ran a “10X Sales” push across the entire team. With the pandemic restrictions, our prior in-person approach to sales was no longer possible, so we removed constraints of geography. In addition to leading by example - I dived full-time into sales into the US region myself, embracing the Launchpad principle of “sell first” - we encouraged the team to think as entrepreneurially and creatively as possible.

The pressure of the challenge pushed us to test a range of new approaches. At the end of the two weeks, we hadn’t hit 10x. However, we had proven that we could close customers through purely remote sales - which had dramatically positive implications for the economics of our business. Even more importantly, we had a surprising new insight: mid-sized US factories also saw great value in the Safi system! In just a few months, well over a dozen factories in the US were already launching with Safi, and the US is quickly becoming Safi’s fastest-growing market - an opportunity we never would have realized without revisiting the Launchpad exercise.

We continue to use other Launchpad exercises - low-resolution prototyping, “how might we” ideation, and deep empathy interviews with customers are favorites - on a regular basis throughout the team, and are so grateful for the ways insights from Launchpad continue to help us learn, iterate, and continuously improve moving forward.