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Jonathan Gan Show Notes Jonathan Gan has over 15 years of leadership, military experience as an Anti-Aircraft Company Commander, business and technology experience, as a Senior Project Manager at IBM, and is an entrepreneur. Jonathan led large scale, multi million dollar, technology modernization and innovation projects for public sector clients, leading IBM, subcontractors and clients’ staff, ensuring on-time and under budget delivery. In 2013, Jonathan founded Whichit for the mobile and SaaS application development. Jonathan holds an MBA of the Recanati Executive MBA program at Tel-Aviv University. Most passionate about Everything that I’m doing today is Whichit. My company, my startup, my love… It’s something I’ve been doing for the last five years, 24/7. I’m originally from Israel and for the last four years, I’ve been located in London. I started Whichit five years ago, six months later Whichit won an award from the UK government; the Sirius Program which is an International competition that relocates high growth potential start-ups to the UK. Since then, Whichit has won several awards, like Startup of the year 2015 by Facebook, The Peoples’ Choice award by the Duke of York, and most importantly the Innovate UK grant worth a quarter of a million pounds by the UK government, to develop one of our algorithms for our unique Machine Learning technology. Whichit is ICC (Interactive Commercial Content) a domain in the Marketing Advertising technologies. We developed a SaaS platform and an app for ICC which leads to up to 800% growth of engagement rates. Who are Jonathan’s customers? We are relevant to all the verticals in three main groups: Any entity that wants to advertise or promote their services or products. The big brands and agencies. The Small/Medium Businesses. But we are focusing on our early adopters, which are direct to larger brands and the big media agencies. We have developed added value services for them and we are seeing significant successes with that. Jonathan’s best advice to entrepreneurs about approaching customers I recommend doing two things: First, is comprehensive market research. Spend at least a month investigating the market from any perspective you can think of, and then, give it to a third party to do it again and challenge everything you did. Once you have all the market elements, like who your market is, who the early adopters are, etc., use a very simple methodology, which I call 1,2,3: Choose your potential customer, Go to them with the message you planed specifically based on the company’s message Measure the results for this specific customer, and then act accordingly. The other, very important thing, that is helping me to succeed is a powerful and dedicated Advisory Board that are on the end of the phone when I need them. Biggest failure with a customer The major failure was about finding the right people to sell our product to. We struggled with the product market fit for almost two years. First, we had some product barriers, then the product didn’t sell – we couldn’t understand why. We tried different methodologies but only when we switched the sales’ people, things started to move. The failure was putting the wrong people in the sales positions. I made a mistake; I used my personal intuition before the professional. It almost killed the company, I must admit. Fortunately, we overcame it, and we are in a growth position today. The sales people are those who bring the money, it’s crucial. The mistake was with the messengers I chose. There wasn’t a problem with the product, with the market, or with the message – it was a problem with the messengers. It’s best to have local sales people who understand the market and the culture. Biggest success due to the right customer approach I have a great story of a very big international retail client. I met with the UK’s branch manager, and we were well prepared...