From PowerPoint to 270M Square Feet: How Prophia’s Design Partner Program Built Their First Customer Base
What if your first paying customer could still be with you four years later? In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Cameron Steele revealed how Prophia’s methodical approach to customer development helped them build lasting relationships before writing a single line of code.
Starting with the Problem, Not the Solution
When Prophia incorporated in March 2018, they faced a fundamental challenge. As Cameron explains, “Commercial real estate is the world’s largest asset class… [but] investors and asset allocators in this category have some of the worst quality data and some of the worst tools for helping them make decisions.”
Instead of jumping straight into development, they took a different approach: “We did what was called the design partner program,” Cameron shares. “Some entrepreneurs have a great vision of what they want to build, and they build it, and then they go find a problem to address. We sort of did the opposite.”
The PowerPoint-First Approach
Their methodology was refreshingly practical. “We fake built it into PowerPoint, and we found about a dozen prospective customers… pitched them a few different ideas and they gave us very direct feedback on what they thought they would buy. And then went and built that thing,” Cameron recalls.
This approach achieved several crucial objectives:
- It validated market demand before significant investment
- It created a pool of potential customers invested in the product’s success
- It reduced development risk by confirming exactly what customers would pay for
From Mockups to Market
The timeline tells the story of their methodical approach:
- March 2018: Company incorporation
- May 2018: Raised friends and family funding
- Summer 2018: Customer interviews and PowerPoint development
- November 2018: First product shipped
- February 2019: First paying customer (who remains a customer today)
The Power of Patient Development
This careful approach has paid off dramatically. Today, Prophia manages “about 270 million rentable square feet hosted on our platform. And the way to think about that, just to put that in context, if you think about downtown Chicago, there’s about 250 million sqft in downtown Chicago,” Cameron explains.
Even more impressively, “We’ve had one customer leave us since we have launched commercially, and that was due to an acquisition where they couldn’t stay with us.” This exceptional retention rate suggests their early focus on customer needs created a foundation for lasting relationships.
Keys to an Effective Design Partner Program
Based on Prophia’s experience, here are the crucial elements of a successful design partner program:
- Find the Right Partners Cameron emphasizes the importance of selective outreach: “We scrounged around and leveraged resources to get in front of people that would be good prospective customers.” They weren’t just looking for any feedback – they wanted input from potential buyers.
- Focus on Buying Intent Instead of general feedback, they specifically sought “direct feedback on what they thought they would buy.” This focus on purchase intent helped ensure they were building something the market would actually pay for.
- Build Trust Through Involvement By involving potential customers in the development process, they created champions for their product. As Cameron notes: “Find a cohort of forward thinking customers that believe in you and believe in your vision and they want to invest behind you.”
- Stay Focused on Core Needs They maintained a clear focus on the fundamental problem: “99% of a commercial building’s revenue comes from leasing. But the complexity of that relationship between the tenant and the owner of that building is, it’s very complex.”
The Long-Term Impact
For Prophia, the design partner program wasn’t just about initial product validation – it created a foundation for sustainable growth. As Cameron puts it: “Every day, if we do just make a little incremental progress every day that compounds… Compounding is a beautiful thing investing and for companies.”
Their experience suggests that in B2B markets, especially conservative ones, taking time to build relationships and validate assumptions before development can create a stronger foundation than moving quickly to code. While PowerPoint mockups might seem low-tech, they can be the fastest path to understanding what customers will actually pay for.