My client, WhipSnap, wants to serve the niche of 3D car scanning - applications range from enabling car showrooms to conduct virtual sales and marketing to letting petrol-heads scan and share their own cars, with annotations in 3D.
I designed and developed an MVP for them. I also visited high-end car showrooms with my client to scan cars. I was also the "tech guy" in calls with investors (I rarely spoke, TBH).
Here's everything that led to this moment:
[-2]. Pitched to a different client.
[-1]. Got rejected.
[ 0]. Lesson learned: needed to dramatically increase the quality of my proposal.
[ 1]. Heard from a former colleague about another project
[ 2]. We setup the initial call for intros
[ 3]. Before the call, I worked the weekend to research their niche and the technologies they could use.
[ 4]. During the intro call I impressed them with my research, my understanding of their niche and suggestions on how we'd build their app idea.
[ 5]. They signed.
[ 6]. During the project, I sent weekly video updates via Youtube (unlisted). I'm a fan of async comms.
[ 7]. We spoke regularly, via a WhatsApp group chat!
[ 8]. Within 4 weeks we had a useable MVP. Real customers could scan their cars!
[ 9]. Then some chaos: I personally helped scan a $4.5M Koenigsegg.. and the scan failed
[10]. More chaos: Runpod (the GPU cloud provider) became unreliable. I ended up buying an RTX 5090 to run our 3D pipeline on.
[11]. The weekly videos and regular comms kept my client informed and calm. Together, we worked around issues.
[12]. I delivered and hosted the solution. Did some extra bits to increase the quality of car scans (like manual cleanup).
[13]. We onboard early adopters.
[14]. Investors understand and are excited by the solution.
[15]. Investment money arrives in my client's bank account.
I appreciate some of the above doesn't sound scalable. I also appreciate that it sounds unconventional (like using WhatsApp group chat with clients). But they worked for me.
Thanks for reading!
p.s, my company is https://llume.co, you can find a more in-depth case study there - see "Carvatar"