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Case Study

My First Business

Most kids spend their free time playing video games, hanging with friends or just taking it easy.

Not Daniel..

Daniel Kyne and his friend grew up in rural Ireland. At 11, they spotted an opportunity. His friends Grandad owned a small farm.

The two boys got an idea to start a petting farm. How hard could it be? Buy a couple animals and charge an entry fee.

Easy 💰

Before they knew it, the petting farm was one of Irelands top petting farms with some very cool llamas.

That started Daniels journey in entrepreneurship

Meeting with UK Government 🇬🇧

Years later, after studying Marketing and Technology in University and volunteering at many startup hackathons - Daniel felt ready to launch his own startup.

While looking for an idea, he noticed that Brexit (the exit of the UK from the European Union) was all over the news. It seemed no one knew what to do. Was this a good move? Should we be asking the public? Is this all a waste of time?

Daniel was curious and decided to get in contact with the UK government.

So he cold emailed the Prime Minister.

…And he managed to get a meeting 💼

Someone saw the email and organised for Daniel to meet with an advisor to the PM, Lord Michael Willis.

At the time, Daniel was living in London and so he set off on his way to the meeting.

Only one thing.. he didn’t have a product or a concrete business plan. His core idea was that there must be a better way to collect feedback and rank it in importance.

With this inspiration to build a startup that could solve huge problems, Daniel and his co-founder who he met in college got started on the idea that would become Opinion X.

Time to start coding..

Getting Opinion X Started 📍

In 2020, the team managed to raise a pre-seed round of €130,000 to get working on the problem.

Eventually Opinion X merged into a survey tool for measuring which problems, features or ideas matter most to your key customer segments.

They’re now used by research and design teams at Google, Spotify and AWS.

Why I think it’s worked so far 🔮

1. Freemium Model with Unlimited Access: OpinionX's decision to offer a freemium model with unlimited access to their ranking surveys is a significant growth lever.
   
   By removing the barrier of entry for users to access their platform, they can attract a large user base quickly. It’s also smart because it means word of mouth marketing is far more successful.
   
   They haven’t run paid marketing yet so something is working. However on very niche solutions, I would suggest a lifetime access charge for the first 1,000 users who you would grandfather at that price and then adapt to a freemium model then.
   

2. Stay Lean: Daniel and Darragh only raised the minimal amount needed to get this off the ground. They’re taking a long term approach and not overspending on growth such as marketing while the startup is still growing.
   

3. Try Government Programs or Startup Accelerators: Being involved in Enterprise Ireland (Government VC in Ireland) and NDRC (startup accelerator in Ireland), the founders were able to quickly raise money rather than spending the 6-9 months to raise a seed VC round.

Wrapping Up ✌️

If you could learn anything from todays email, send that cold email. You never know what opportunity could come from it.

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