Product Case Study

Tacholife

Software to manage and archive defect cards to improve daily vehicle inspection — built for fleets of any type.

Market: United Kingdom
Model: Subscription — per vehicle
Team: Developer & coach driver
Status: Suspended

What it was

Tacholife was software to manage and archive defect cards to improve daily vehicle inspection.

Customize defect categories

Customize defect categories to the client's needs no matter what type of fleet it has.

Keep the team in the loop

Improve communication in the client's team by push notifications which will notify it about new defects, comments, and fixes.

Case study

Cold outreach: ~1,000 emails, 1 meeting, 0 sales. A paid ad in the Tarmac newsletter: 2 signups. The only paying customer came from an offline conversation.

I treated my first customer as revenue, not as leverage

I had a partner prepared to run the product on real vehicles: a live deployment, a real user, full access to his process. We wanted to make money from the first client instead of turning that partnership into a case study and build trust, we went straight for the revenue. Every conversation after that started from a blank page and a thousand cold emails without a testimonial did not convert.

I never followed up on the only warm leads I had

The newsletter ad brought two signups. I contacted neither of them. After a run of rejections my morale was low enough that the one warm signal I got walked straight past me.

What I do differently now

The first customers are the foundation for the next. Build trust first based on a reference, a case study, and story. Warm leads have to get handled the same day, whatever the rest of the funnel looks like and the one sale that came from offline was a signal that we should try it more.