In the month of December 2016, I was invited to be one of Mutual.Life's early adopters. I knew the entrepreneurial career of Fabrício Vargas and Jó Beduschi well, and knowing and understanding the project proposal, I was delighted. What struck me most was the challenge they were willing to face: complex algorithms, machine learning, blockchain, applications, mutualism, insurance, and a gigantic market known for its extremely consolidated and closed modus operandi.
Obviously, I wanted to be a part of that. I did not think twice and I joined the first PoC that was based on a protection group for smartphones. At that time, all technology was based on a form in SurveyMonkey, a spreadsheet in Excel, and a WhatsApp group. It was easy to see that the validation started the right way, by the books.
In the following months, I was able to follow up and participate in the discussions about the product, paths, etc., until I had the honor of being invited to join the team. And it was from July 2017 that I assumed the official responsibility of contributing to Mutual.Life's development. My focus is product thinking, growth and user base retention. The experience has been incredible. Each of us has different experiences that complement each other in an unlikely way.
Mutual.Life's culture, the 'how to move forward' and purpose are very clear. We consider Mutual.Life's simultaneous dedication to product quality and public perception to be essential. We know that until we achieve Product Market Fit, we must work strategically on building brand authority and value, leveraging our organic reach and our future go-to-market actions.
“Until you build great products, almost nothing else matters. Raising money, getting more press, hiring, business development, etc, are significantly easier when you have a great product. Step one is to build something that users love. At YC, we tell founders to work on their product, talk to user, exercise, eat and sleep, and very little else. All the other stuff I mentioned, PR conferences, recruiting advisers, doing partnerships, you should ignore all of that and just build a product, and get it as good as possible by talking to your users. Build something that a small number of users love. It is much easier to expand from something that small number of people love, to something that a lot of people love, then from something that a lot of people like to a lot of people love. And that it’s so much easier to expand, once you’ve got something that some people love, you can expand that into something that a lot of other people love. So the advice is: find a small group of users, and make them love what you’re doing.” - Sam Altman, YC
Regardless of the Product Market Fit vs. Market Product Fit discussion, given the challenges ahead, we believe in the importance of developing an excellent product and then working on identifying opportunities and developing solutions for user growth (and retention).With an excellent product, the scale happens and sustains itself.
Disruptive products have the ability to transform markets. On the other hand, it is notorious that many initiatives die before they are recognized. This is because, in addition to product development that should minimally improve processes or people's lives, disruptive products run into market timing, stakeholder skepticism, regulatory issues, and other challenges. We know that.
That is why we are developing Mutual.Life with enough prudence, testing hypotheses at all times and always "thinking" in a process of co-creation with our early adopters .That is, of course, without losing sight of the current moment of Insurtechs. As we anticipated, that momentum was fast approaching and it is time to move forward faster, which is why we are accelerating the development of our platform to test new PoCs from protection groups.
As the saying goes: "Go big or go home!"
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