Furze Product Update: April 26

‍It’s quite amazing just how quickly these updates come around and like with any tech-start up it’s very easy to be living hand to mouth. Existing somewhere between your strategic plan, your roadmap, your specs and deliverables. It’s quite the feast.

I’ve realised how easy it can be to spend too much time in any one of these domains and as a result there will be some unintended consequences. Either you need to refocus on your goals (more often than you think) or you need to adjust your roadmap based on every moving conversation. As feedback is extremely valuable but often limited in terms of volume.

Does this sound familiar?

It also reminds me of my old corporate white-collar life. Where your focus and role shifts just because you find a better way to do something. Or because the management team changed their strategy, again.

What’s the point of sharing this?

Namely, it’s because it’s just the way the world is today. In tech, our world shifts every week and there is a new way to achieve your goals. (Claude Design is a good example of this). But when these events happen coming back regularly to refocus on your goals, targets and ensuring accountability is absolutely critical. As a Firehills team we did this together last week at Plexal and it made me feel connected and aligned.

Mapping the world’s organisations against their market is hard

Mikey and I have been reflecting back on our work to date on how we build our market data sets. We’ve successfully got this delivering but ensuring quality and accuracy is quite tricky. No doubt we all have to interact and work with CRMs like Salesforce / Hubspot perhaps or we use tools like web searches on a daily basis. But trusting and qualifying the outcomes on systems relies on many changing factors. Such as when was it last updated or how good was the quality of the last time it was updated.

Namely, where is the best source of truth and how to include quality rubrics which guide LLMs towards a consistent set of patterns and responses.

This is our current challenge, one which no doubt is not unsolvable. As there are many other companies which categorise organisations around the world. But can you do this on user-defined criteria which is highly tailored. For example finding all the battery manufacturers in China or all of the Scottish Football clubs? (The last one is actually one of our test cases as we have a resident expert in FH).

The answer to this will all be played out in the coming few weeks, between having a reliable MVP and then how we continue to make this robust and capable of mapping any market our clients might need to define.

Defining who Furze is for

This is not a trivial question.

After spending a week at Plexal as part of their open co-working week and spending time with their team it helped me reflect on some of the known questions in building a new go-to-market. But often they don’t get the attention they need as start-ups are off building new assets, creating content to tell the world they are here. But to define who you serve is critical.

With Furze we see so many applications of its potential for several different customer segments. But starting with a specific target customer profile is most critical so you do not confuse the market with what you are here to do and for whom. Therefore attracting no one. But also which pains you are solving for of which these can be shared across targets but not always.

This reflection has supported our efforts on focusing on deal transactions. When organisations are bought and sold and where creating the strongest narratives for investment, backed by data, yields better decision-making. Furze enables the ability to understand a specific organisation’s capability and what/how it works. Backed by market data which uncovers its health, position and future potential.

This crystallisation is part of our work today to define who it is for, the value it creates and why it’s different to PitchBook and CrunchBase.

MVP to arrive in May

We are just 4 weeks away from announcing our MVP and starting our first customer panel to shape the future of Furze. If this is piquing your interest then we’d love to hear from you.

You can reach us via our contact forms @ firehills.io

Another update coming in May.

All the best, Rob

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