How to be successful before the market is ready

March 2020 is officially B Corp Month. Our theme for the month is how B Corps are building trust in business. B Corps aren’t perfect, but they meet high environmental and social standards and are committed to transparency, continuous improvement and legal accountability.

To help us spread this message during B Corp Month, we’re asking B Corp CEOs and founders to talk about failures and share their greatest mistakes in business and the learnings from these experiences. What better way to kick this off than with Jessi Baker, founder of Provenance.org, a software enabling businesses to be transparent.

Jessi, thanks for taking part in this interview and agreeing to face your failure and share this with our readers. To get us started, can you tell us a bit about Provenance?

The Provenance software service officially came to market in early 2017, having been an internal project as part of our consulting work for a couple of years before. It is a digital platform enabling businesses to make their supply chain and impact transparent to the public. It’s for citizens — like me and you — who want to know more about products, where they come from, their social good and sustainability credentials. We enable businesses to do that simply, digitally and in a way that has integrity.

You certified as a B Corp in August 2019 which is a huge achievement, congratulations! In contrast, what has been your biggest failure to date?

Timing. We thought the market was ready; businesses were all talking about being more open, the “conscious consumer” trend looked like it was on fire! But we were wrong.

Unbelievably, the most significant factor for startup success when studied is not the idea, or the team, or business model or funding — it is timing (Bill Gross, 2015), and this has been our greatest challenge at Provenance.

So it sounds like you aren’t alone in finding timing a challenge… What did you learn from this experience?

We can spot when it’s “talk” and when it’s “walk” — from conversations in meetings, analysis of data and speaking with market experts. We found when assessing a brand’s readiness for transparency they had to have already engaged on sustainability, and were looking to take that ongoing investment and engage customers around it. This meant being committed to more than surface-level CSR. The return on investment from supply chain and impact transparency is large, but it does touch many different teams in a business. This means that for a brand to use transparency to grow sales and brand trust — you must have a company-united belief in purpose along with profit. Having been through the B Corp process, I think brands on that journey will have laid a lot of the groundwork to enable impact transparency. It doesn’t surprise me that our growth in the UK has been around the same time as B Corp has been flourishing here.

Do you have any other learnings from launching the product before the market was ready?

We’ve learnt “speed” is a vital metric in business success — when do you invest? When do you bootstrap? When do you pause on a product? We learnt how to deliver something to the market using a strict agile process, testing with simplified versions and only building on those versions once we had signals of market traction. Constantly iterating and changing the speed of delivery to match our market predictions.

If you’re an entrepreneur, you’re all about making bets. Bets that your product is better than what’s already out there or the market is ready for something totally new. You’ll never know before you try whether you are right or not, or whether the timing is right, although reading marketing trends does help. However, there are ways you can approach taking a product to market that increases the odds of your bet. This for me is a vital discipline to successful entrepreneurship across any product or service. Don’t build it and think they will come. Shuffle cautiously into the market initially, testing and refining, in order to select the appropriate speed for your business.

Do you think this proves more of a challenge for a purpose-driven business?

Absolutely. Because it isn’t just about market adoption, it’s about changing the status quo for the better. And that needs to happen. Now! But without adoption and correct speed calibration you’ll run out of cash before the market is ready or miss the market with slowness.

Any words of wisdom for businesses preparing to launch forward-thinking products or services?

It’s vital that you find the customers that understand the vision and are willing to come in on the bet. Gather those early adopters together and keep them as close as your employees. If it wasn’t for the pioneering SMEs from Tideford’s Organics to fellow B Corp Rebel Kitchen and the brave enterprises from Unilever to Coop that took bets on us in the early days when opening your supply chain and impact up was still novel –we would never have built the right tools to help so many other businesses.

Would you do it again because the learning was worth it?

I don’t regret launching Provenance before the market was ready. We pushed a lot of businesses to be transparent about their supply chain and impact before it was demanded, and we learnt a huge amount. But if I had my time again, I would have moved slower. One small dinghy can’t move all the Titanics overnight, and we would have thrown away less product prototypes, and stored more energy along the way!

Jessi thank you for being so honest, we’ve really enjoyed hearing your insights - from your failure to what you’ve learnt since. Do you have any final thoughts?

Ultimately, everything we do at Provenance is helping businesses bring more transparency to their businesses to build trust. We encourage vulnerability, a brand trait that is still so new to marketeers, but essential to a sustainable future. Brands for years have been portraying themselves in a light of perfection, but being a brand tackling sustainability seriously means you are likely far from perfect. By being vulnerable ourselves, I hope we will accelerate this trend to support more impact-led commerce.

A first step for businesses interested in measuring their social and environmental impact is by using the free B Impact Assessment tool. Any company wishing to certify as a B Corp has its performance assessed by B Lab across all dimensions of its business. These companies are on a journey of continuous improvement to ensure business leverages its power to be a positive force in the world.