I Want Product-Market Fit
Julia Vidal, co-founder of Badge, began with a simple problem: remote workers often roam the city searching for a workplace that won’t shoo them away.
What if partnered cafés allowed the reservation of a laptop spot, but just with a minimum spend, so everybody is happy? Basically, AirBnB, for café-based workspaces with proper WiFi.
To test whether more people shared that pain, she made a simple prototype using a Google Maps layer with hand-curated laptop-friendly places.
Just some icons, but quite rapidly, people kept using the map without much advertising. She tells me on the phone: “I was actually a bit surprised and still am, we are still getting visits on that thing”.
She knew most tables at restaurants or cafés were empty after the lunch peak. She imagined a win-win. Backed by the promising prototype data, she marched into nearly fifty cafés, with a simple pitch:
Yet owner after owner shook their heads or offered vague maybes. After months of pulling, she managed to convert only two cafés. Over that period, her morale visibly dropped a little, as I recall in one of my talks with her.
