Sometimes you need more than one smart person — we needed a team of the right people ready to dive in quickly. These senior engineers didn’t just tackle technical issues, they opened up a whole new way of looking at problems. It was fast, it was intense, and it totally changed the game for Knect.
We’re approaching the end of our third session in the thoughtbot Incubator, and we are here to report to you about the final weeks with the founder of Knect! Curious how we got here? Check out the previous update to learn all about how this season of the Incubator went.
Final weeks at the Incubator with Knect
Throughout the past weeks, we have been working together with our startup founder Joshua Herzig-Marx. Josh came to the Incubator looking to validate his product idea, Knect, which addresses the difficulties we encounter in maintaining connections with people, especially the weak social ties that can slip through the cracks.
As we come to the end of our time together, Josh’s idea has been shaped and evolved by a lot of discovery work. Let’s dig into the learnings and challenges of our final weeks in the Incubator, and don’t forget to check out Josh’s insights in the Founder’s Journal below!
Gaining confidence about our target market
A challenge we faced throughout this Incubator session has been feeling like we lacked a strong, consistent message from the people we were interviewing in different market segments. After all, we often got the feeling that “everyone experiences this problem in one way or another”.
However, after our discovery sprint on journalists failed to provide us with a target audience we felt confident about, we began to see the dynamics that mattered the most for Knect. Everyone may experience this problem in one way or another, but their role, circumstances and approach was determining whether they found value in Knect and had the potential of becoming a paid user.
This is how, as we realized these dynamics kept showing up in our conversations with a certain segment, we knew this was the “strong message” we had been looking for, even though it hadn’t felt like a lightning bolt moment at first.
This is also when we went back to the whiteboard, and decided to refine our “founders” segment. We conducted another market segmentation exercise, and this time we listed subsegments under the broad category of “startup enthusiasts”. Second-time founders and Chiefs of Staff ended up scoring the highest on our market segmentation matrix. These were the people we wanted to talk to.
Rapid prototyping, two-way discovery
After we started prototyping the first concepts on week 4, our understanding of Knect’s value proposition improved rapidly, and so did our pace of iteration and refinement.
Showing the prototype in our interviews with potential users prompted so many valuable insights! Did they see themselves using this product? Which parts of it resonated with them? Which parts generated any negative reactions? Every bit of feedback and insight can be used as a stepping stone to ask the right questions.
As we validated or invalidated our ideas and assumptions, we entered a phase of rapid iteration that was leading to daily discoveries.
Soon we realized that our prototypes weren’t only a way to show our ideas to potential users, but to each other. Our daily syncs during this phase have turned into brainstorming and concept refinement exercises, getting to understand where our proposals diverged and converged, the mental models and interaction patterns that we wanted to employ, and the evolution of Knect’s value proposition.
Feasibility spikes and de-risking
As we moved towards a more fully featured product concept, our engineers in the team have been digging into the technical feasibility questions.
Josh had a hunch that a series of open source connectors could well constitute the technical foundation for what Knect needed to do, but this potential had to be researched and validated, as well as compared with other alternatives.
While working towards a technical recommendations doc, we have been diving into API documentation, experimenting with connectors, and building prototypes to help Josh de-risk his product idea.
Founder’s Journal
I asked Josh for his perspective on the last weeks of the Incubator experience:
Reflecting on the last eight weeks with thoughtbot’s Incubator program, there’s a big takeaway: it’s a total team game. When we kicked off, one of the main goals was to figure out if our idea was technically feasible. And after a few weeks, we realized this wasn’t a job for just one engineer — it was way larger. But here’s the cool part: once thoughtbot’s leadership saw the challenge, they didn’t just observe from the sidelines. They jumped in with a squad of their best engineers, going all in on a deep-dive to help us out.
This move from thoughtbot was a game-changer. Sometimes you need more than one smart person — we needed a team of the right people ready to dive in quickly. These senior engineers didn’t just tackle technical issues, they opened up a whole new way of looking at problems. It was fast, it was intense, and it totally changed the game for Knect.
As this chapter of the program wraps up, it’s clear that the big wins came from teamwork, quick thinking, and not being afraid to shake things up. This experience wasn’t just about building tech — it was a masterclass in how to bring people together to make something awesome happen. And that’s something we’ll carry with us way beyond this program.
Next steps
We’re wrapping up this session! As we come to the end of our time together, we’ll be putting together a plan of action going forward, making sure some initiatives have been started to keep the momentum going for Josh, as well as talking about next steps for the product in general.
As for the deliverables, Josh will be leaving the Incubator with our discovery insights and technical recommendations, as well as the prototype, that will play a big role in the incoming conversations. This is only the start of Knect!
If you are going through a business validation process, or hope to in the future, this programming can be a resource for you as well. We have recently launched the Customer Discovery section of our playbook, so that you can tap into our customer discovery exercises to help your team find (or regain) customer, product, and strategic focus.
We have also been doing livestream broadcasts with the Incubator team to dig even deeper into what’s being uncovered as it happens on LinkedIn, YouTube and Twitch. Follow along!
