0:00 Introduction

James, thank you so much for being on Give It A Nudge today. We’re so excited to share your story but more so because this is one of our first ones in the UK. James started his career at Just2.com and the mobile world exploded from there. His whole career has been around digital and mobile, from the product side through to strategic partnerships and business development. Caroline started in development, then moved into UX, marketing, and design, before exploring her own ideas and running her own businesses. They met at Nokia.

8:00 The founding story of Lunos

For a long time my list of ideas was constantly growing. The classic thing: you have an idea, you build it, you build more, and very quickly it spirals out of control. Lunos grew from asking: how can I systematically test these ideas? These same themes kept coming up in consulting work with early and growth stage startups. People have ideas and classically think: I need to build something digital to test it. But there’s so much you should arguably be doing first. Building tech is costly and you can layer in multiple assumptions very quickly. So the question became: how can we help people go from idea to validated understanding without building everything first?

20:00 The Lunos process

Our initial workshop lays the baseline: where they are, where they’re trying to get to, and their current challenges. From there it’s a very particular process of creating a hypothesis, what we believe is true, and then going out to market to test it. We look at a suite of different experimentation techniques, get into the market, speak to real customers or run simulations, come back to the table, and reach a decision: proceed, iterate, or fundamentally pivot? Everything is done collaboratively. We’re hand-holding them through it so it shouldn’t be a surprise. And we also have a DIY model developing for those who want the framework but can run with it themselves.

28:00 The aha moment and building an audience first

What is the aha moment? That’s not exclusive to B2C, it applies to B2B too. It’s that moment where the end user picks it up and thinks: oh my god, yes. Any step between the user’s entry point and that moment almost needs to disappear. We also try to get clients to a place where they’re launching with a community behind them rather than launching into silence. Being entirely reliant on paid media from day one burns cash fast and acquisition channels dry up the moment you pause spend.

35:00 The partner ecosystem

We don’t try to do everything in-house. We have a partner network: development partners, designers, branding studios, sales support, funding and financing partners. But rather than just sending a referral, we onboard each partner into everything that’s been done with the client. They arrive at the partnership already understanding the context, which means they can get to value much faster. The whole ecosystem feels like one team rather than a series of handoffs. Lunos is a Finnish word meaning draft or prototype, which captures exactly what we believe in: draft everything before you build it.