gust launch engagement strategy: founder financial tools
As we were trying to grow Gust Launch from a transactional incorporation service into the go-to platform for founders running high-growth startups, we realized we needed to form relationships with our customers that would deliver recurring value and help them skill up as CEOs. As anyone who's ever run a business knows, the key to success is to keep an eye on your cash—so we built some simple, startup-founder-focused cash accounting tools on top of an expense tracker.
From a three-month, psychology-style market research project I'd led the previous quarter, we knew that startup founders wouldn't pay for accounting until they felt like they couldn't do it themselves, and that they were usually surprised at how much it cost to start late. But instead of paying accountants, they weren't using Quickbooks themselves—they were using spreadsheets or, more often than not, just ignoring their expenses completely. We could kill two birds with one stone by offering a simple way to track expenses and also help founders understand why they should pay a pro as soon as they can.
I spent some time with our accountants, learned a bunch about accounting on my own, and poked around the expense-tracking world to identify the features and functionality we could offer to customers: simple expense tracking, basic cash accounting stats, and as a bonus, tips about which startup costs and other expenses might be deductible from their corporate income taxes. Now we help founders avoid expensive accounting onboarding fees, pass them to our accounting partners sooner, and (most importantly) keep them coming back to Gust Launch.