We are starting a new series! Well, actually, we are renaming one. “Unfair Advantage” is now “The First 100”.
I started the Unfair Advantage series to sit down with solo founders and hear how they built and sold something people actually wanted. And the question I kept coming back to was how they got to their first hundred.
First hundred sales, customers, boxes, whatever their hundred happens to look like. So it seemed only fair to name the series after it.
My hope is that somewhere in these stories you find something you can use. A strategy, a tactic, something. So, if you are an early-stage founder, help me sharpen what I ask. When you get to the end of this, if there is something you still want to know from the founder I interviewed, drop it in the comments.
Let’s goo!
For ten years, Nomiki Petrolla, was the go to person for startups when they wanted to turn their idea into a real product. And in all that time, she never once worked for a woman.
She ran a fractional product practice out of Columbus, Ohio, sitting between the founder and the engineers and making sure that the thing actually shipped. She helped these startups make millions of dollars, close hundreds of raises, get exits, and get acquisitions.
The closest thing she saw a woman in charge was a cofounder married to the male founder.
“She was brilliant! And she still wasn’t the one leading.”
Nomiki has four kids, three of them daughters. And she wasn’t going to spend another decade helping men build products while the women stayed out of the picture.
So she built Theanna to fix that. Theanna is a platform built to help non-technical women founders go from an idea to a million dollars in revenue.
As of today, Theanna has 300+ female founders on the platform, building something they are proud of.
Selling The Idea
When word travelled that Nomiki had stopped taking client work, women founders FLOODED her linkedin DMs wanting to hire her.
But she didn’t want that.
“I’m expensive. You shouldn’t be hiring me to do the work for you, because at that stage you actually need to know how to do it. And if you hire me to do that for you, you’re actually going to put yourself in a compromising position as the company grows.”
She decided to teach them instead.
PDS Lab, launched in August 2023, was a six-month accelerator that charged $6,500. 43 women went through this program where Nomiki taught the 6-step framework that she had created from her experience of building products.
And it worked wonders!
One founder built and launched her MVP on no-code tools, won $10,000 at a pitch competition, and hired her first employee. Another, landed corporate partnership with a firm that had 400 stores. Someone else built a cybersecurity platform while holding down a full-time job.
Nomiki didn’t have to teach the framework. She could have just built the platform first and sold access to it.
But she chose to test the theory with the least complicated version of the product that still delivered the expected outcome.
Most founders building a tech product assume that the MVP has to be a technical platform. Something people can “play around” with. But that’s not always true.
The question you need to ask is what’s the fastest way to get somebody to pay you for the outcome you are promising. A platform is one way you deliver that outcome. But there are other ways. You could have a service, a cohort, a training, a newsletter, or something else entirely.
Teaching forced her into a mandatory conversation with her buyer. She saw exactly which step confused people, which questions came up, and where somebody was about to give up.
We think that the goal is downloads. But that means nothing. A thousand people can download something. Whether they will use it depends on how much you already know about their process.
Selling a service or a consultation is a very cheap way to find that out. Because by the time you build a product, you already know where the churn lives, and what you need to do to avoid it.
Soon, PDS Labs stopped working though. In a good way.
“It was exhausting, because I was coaching all the time. There’s a cognitive load that comes with one on one that software doesn’t have.”
And it was time for the next phase.
She only had 43 customers and barely any distribution.
“I believed that women do best building companies together. That was the core thesis. And I had to prove that I could build a community before I built the software.”
But she knew who she was targeting: women, non-technical, building tech products they want to sell.
Building A Waitlist
The best way, at least today, to build a waitlist for a consumer tech product is content. But our attention is divided. People literally scroll a video in less than 3 seconds.
So how do you go about it?
Nomiki’s answer was volume. Volume and consistency.
She started posting about her journey of building Theanna. What she was shipping, who she was working with, the mistakes, and the lessons.
The thing about founders posting content is that “the founder content” sells. Everyone wants a day in your life. They want to know what you have learned. They want to know how you’re doing it.
But for most founders, that’s not the right content to start with.
For Nomiki, however, it was PERFECT. Her buyers were women founders interested in learning how Nomiki was building her business. So every time she posted, she was talking to her buyer.
“If you’re a woman building software…”, “If you’re a woman with a tech idea…”, “If you have an idea and you don’t know how to get started…”
So her content strategy didn’t work only because of volume. It worked because:
She was customer 0 who was just a little ahead of others
She knew who she was talking to
Every single video was directed at her buyer
By launch day, she had roughly 950 women waiting to subscribe to Theanna.
On launch day, 500 of them created a profile. This happened only because the waitlist was made of her exact buyers. And 60 days later, 100 of them were paying customers.
So if content is how you plan to build distribution, remember:
A hundred interested buyers are worth more than a thousand followers who are never going to buy anything.
Patchwork Products
I have been following Nomiki since she started posting videos. So I went into this interview, very much a fan girl, already knowing most of her story. The one thing I have learned from her is that she validates fast and ships before she’s ready.
PDS Labs existed to test whether her idea has any legs.
The first version of her product was her framework taught to an LLM. A very informed wrapper. But a wrapper that was running on her knowledge and tools and prompts.
And it worked in orders of magnitude beyond any of the polished products I have seen.
And now Theanna 2.0 is the product she wanted to build all along.
But had she started with this fancy version, she would have maybe built the wrong thing or would take longer to get to $230k+ in ARR.
So if I had to boil this whole thing down to one nugget, it would be this.
Start with the most patchworked version of your solution that you can stand and get it in front of your users. Don’t spend months or even days making it look polished. And don’t try to build the thing that exists in your head.
“The mental hurdle people need to get over is from ‘I have this idea’ to ‘I believe I can do it’ and actually doing the thing they say they could do. Most people do not cross that hump. They stay in this, ‘Oh, what if, let me tinker a bit..” phase and then they stop because they couldn’t find the users.”
If you’re a non-technical woman building in tech, I genuinely recommend Theanna.
And if you like founder content, follow Nomiki on Instagram. She shares candid details about everything she’s building and everything she’s learning.
If you have a question for Nomiki that I didn’t ask or answer here, drop it in the comments. If I don’t know the answer, I’ll go and ask her and come back to you.
P.S. Next Tuesday I am sharing the playbook and strategies used by 11 consumer tech startups to get their first 100 customers. Some come directly from founders and some from my research. So make sure you are on the list!
Non-technical solo founder' + 'tech product' is the combo that makes me actually want to click, way more than another engineer-builds-thing story. Reading this now.
The most useful line is the one you almost buried: founder content worked for Nomiki because her buyer was a founder one step behind her. For most of us that isn't true, and "post your journey" turns into performing for other builders who will never pay. I ran that experiment for six months on a B2B tool. Lots of nods from peers, near-zero customers. What I'd ask her: how did she decide what to post each week? Volume is the visible part. The invisible part is knowing which questions her 950 women were already asking each other, and answering those instead of narrating her Tuesday. I ended up building a small thing to run exactly that check before I write (that's what snapfast.ai is for: https://snapfast.ai). Also, teaching before building is the cheapest churn research there is.