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Tom Charman Show Notes Tom started his first technology company at the age of 18 and gave a TEDx talk on the Future of Technology aged 23. He’s represented the UK at four startup world finals, and currently mentors for Startup Weekend and Virgin Startup. He’s advised the UK government on entrepreneurship, was shortlisted for Future Business Leader of the Year and was named one of 20 young entrepreneurs to watch 2017. Most passionate about  Today I’m a co-founder and CEO of COMPAS, it’s a mobile app that uses artificial intelligence to learn users’ interests and needs, and present you with travel recommendations based on your personal interests. We’re currently active in a few cities across Europe and are about to expand to other cities in Europe, and in the rest of the world. What is your next step? We’ve been working on this product for two years. We started the company on April 2015, after I sold my last company. We launched officially on January this year (2017). We are currently raising funds of around Million Pounds to implement some new technologies, expand to more European cities and looking to engage users around the world, once we have presence in these cities. Who your Customers are? It’s best to start with how we learned who our consumers are, so when we started the company, two years ago, we got a blog in order to understand if there is a market. In about six months, we actually had 10000 people who were actively reading our blog every single day. When we looked at the demographic and the total data of those people, we realized that generally speaking, our target market are aged 18 to 34 years old, who live in a city, and want to find things that are different from what they usually find. Differentiation When we decided to go from a blog to a mobile application, we really needed to work out what would make us different from many other applications in this field. The two USPs for us, the first is the fact that we learned so much about the individual making sure that everything that you see is based on who you are and what you would like to do so it’s completely personal to each individual person.  That second USP is the content itself. We make sure that the content we deliver to you… is personal, it’s handpicked, it’s accurate. You won’t find Starbucks or chains, what you find is a unique hidden local place. We really want to support the local businesses. To make sure the places you visit are different, unique, and more enjoyable than the same places that you visit every day. Tom’s best advice about approaching your customer The most important thing is that you understand who your market is, and that you build something that they will use. Too many times I see…entrepreneurs and people who want to start a new business think that because they have the problem, everyone has the problem. So the biggest piece of advice I can give to people, is that before you go out with a product, do everything you can to test it. Go with the minimum viable product, get the product out there, and see what people say about it ,and only then if people really love what you are doing build it and go out with the product. Which is exactly what we did with the blog before we started to build the mobile application. Biggest failure with a customer For me, it was over estimating what I thought people needed. I saw people struggling with particular problem but it was actually a problem that I needed to solve not a problem really needed solving.  So that was about when I realized that instead of spending so much time focusing on what I believe is a problem, I should go out and learn about the bigger problems. Look at the big ideas that can change the world in the future and then use my expertise and my understanding to work towards finding a solution. We built a basic product, we took it out to the market… it was doing OK but it just wasn’t going fast enough, and then we realized that we...