In the Wanderus State of Mind

While in the making of _____

[inwanderus]

Understanding Our Consumer PAIN

Through our work at SLP we’ve talked a lot about Steve Blank’s Customer Development Methodology:

Customer Discovery -> Customer Validation (repeat w/ multiple MVPs) -> Customer Creation -> Company Building

It’s an iterative process that focuses on understanding the customer pain and solving from that point, as opposed to a more linear approach of identifying a problem and solving to the best you/your team’s abilities. This approach forces you to crowdsource the pain, synthesize, test mvps, and then develop. I’m very curious people and behavior, so I’m confident that this iterative, people-centric approach can help us get closer to our goal.

Nonetheless, we’ve struggled with it. We’ve struggled to identify the one pain that our customers have. We saw an opportunity space in lowering access barriers to urban outdoor spaces. With more research, we also found that people, for almost all age groups, were spending less time outdoors. Yet, we see reports showing the correlation of time spent in green spaces with increased mental and physical health, green spaces providing relaxation, concentration, productivity, and even doctor’s providing “park’RX’” prescriptions for a variety of issues ranging from asthma, diabetes, and mental health disorders. (These people are going to the doctor to FIX their pains, and are given parks as a CURE).  The exact pain (pain is a feeling and is personal) that we’ve heard from people has varied:

Original thoughts customer interviews and their thoughts on pain -

Love the outdoors, but I have other competing priorities (not a pain, but a reason why)

I spend most of my time outdoors with my friends, on occasion I’m exercising outdoors.  (not a pain, but reasoning)

I’d like to spend more time outdoors, but I’ve got competing priorities (reasoning)

One’s ability to find restful and relaxing places within the city (solution)

One’s ability to access outdoor spaces (solution)

not easy to access outdoors (reasoning)

Hard to plan outdoor time into immediacy of everything else in life (reasoning)

Updated thoughts on pain - (if you’re reading this, what is your pain?)

feeling unhealthy - inactive

overwhelmed from the pace of the city  

too much screen time,

stress from work, life, etc.

desire to be healthy

motivation - fear of looking unhealthy

claustrophobic

inactive, dullness

Update # 2 on thoughts re: customer pain:

Most people would like to spend time outdoors, majority of those people would like to try something new, but rarely go to new outdoor spaces

Many people identify with a green, healthy, active lifestyle, but they don’t have immediate convenient ways to access it

Urban centers are drawing over 80% of the US population to reside there, just 100 years ago it was an inverse proportion. How are these people nurturing their outdoor needs in constructed spaces like cities?

Plan for next week:

1. More interviews -- targeted for November Project, Lululemon Team. Using invision to get feedback on a prototype.

2. Meeting with Marc to discuss customer pain/development.

3. Answering, why must people use Wanderus?

4. Five Forces analysis

[inwanderus]

CONNECTpreneur Overload

I just attended a CONNECTpreneur event in Tyson’s Corner courtesy of SLP. It featured Timothy Chi, CEO, Wedding Wire, several startups pitching for funding, investor panel talking about real-life early stage investing, and lots of opportunities for networking. My favorite part was Timothy Chi shouting out Daniel Khaneman’s, “Think Fast, Think Slow” and Behavioral Economics. 

A short digression:

Think Fast, Think Slow wiki entry tells us:

“Khaneman discusses two modes of thought: 

"System 1" is fast, instinctive and emotional; 

"System 2" is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. 

The book delineates cognitive biases associated with each type of thinking, starting with Kahneman's own research on loss aversion. From framing choices to people's tendency to substitute an easy-to-answer question for one that is harder, the book highlights several decades of academic research to suggest that people place too much confidence in human judgment.”

Overall, it was a good quick insight/jolt into what felt like the world outside of the protected DC tech bubble, lots of real people trying to grow businesses.  Some of presentations were good and helpful for me to watch as a presenter for Wanderus, but a lot of them were either not in my area of interest or the logic behind investing didn’t add up for me. I did meet one person that could potentially help Wanderus grow and the car ride home with the other SLP colleagues was good too; It was nice to hear what Tanja, Jun, and Kentaro thought of the event and SLP.

I also wanted to do a check-in on my personal mental state and the state of Wanderus. 

Me - I’m bit tired after getting up early for the 7 am event in Tyson’s corner. I’m also sifting through information we’ve been given through the two-day kickoff and first Wednesday session. I’m try to reconcile that with Wanderus’ development to date. It’s a lot, because we weren’t as methodological, so we’re trying to make changes where we see value. An important thing that Anh mentioned was writing out a list of priorities for Wanderus’ development and keeping that separate from priorities for SLP. 

Wanderus - We updated our profile in SLP materials to read: 

Wanderus is an urban-centric discovery and planning tool that connects people to outdoor recreational spaces. It is a comprehensive search engine that provides actionable information about outdoor places, facilities, and events. It is integrated with a system of recommendations and notifications to encourage users into a more active lifestyle. By bringing people together and catalyzing meaningful conversations, Wanderus creates community for the outdoors.  

[inwanderus]

A very early sketch on app UI that I drew (no pun intended).

- Anh

[inwanderus]

Check-in

Hi, I’m Drew. I’ll be checking-in from throughout the journey of creating Wanderus to give updates on what we’re up to and some of the reasoning behind our decision making. If readers have any questions, feel free to leave a comment and either Anh or I will get back to you.

With the first two whirlwind days of SLP behind us, I feel energized. I see people around us who believe in us and I’m trying to balance this excitement and convert it into energy to push this forward. Alyssa, Marc, Jeff, and Cindy kicked off the program with a good review on a variety of entrepreneurial methodologies. They are also pushing the tempo, asking for us to discover and drive our time in SLP, use them as sounding boards, and also inviting us to a variety of events. Ultimately they want and I expect, this to help each team to make a decision - to launch, not launch, expand, close down, continue to grow - in an informed way.

Anh and I had a quick check-in yesterday to prioritize our work for the week. Our top priorities are:

Digging deeper into customer pain - revising and sending out a survey with focus on understanding outdoor enthusiasts’ decision making and behavior around their outdoor activities. This is a significant shift in our ideology on how to solve the “problem”.  We originally started with a prescriptive hypothesis, lower the barriers to accessing the outdoors and more people will come. Now we’re trying to make it easier for those who enjoy it. Then leveraging things like the network effect to help others find and enjoy the outdoors more often.  

Launching blog (external) - We see this as an immediate half step to “launching”. We’re hoping to gain a following that we can use with our beta testing.

Refining our 3 minute pitch (customer pain in-mind and target market problems vs potential market problems) - We had a great opportunity to give a pitch to the cohort, faculty, mentors, and advisors last Friday. Anh and I went back and forth on a script for the three minute pitch. We were in the midst of shifting how to solve the problem and the ideology behind the pitch was a mixture of the two thoughts - the original question is: How do you get more people to participate in outdoor activities, our original thought was: Create a solution that makes the outdoors more accessible with a target market consisting targeting those people who don’t go outside (it made sense at one point). Then we shifted and said:  Create a solution that makes it easier to go outdoors with a target market of outdoor enthusiasts (potential market includes those who participate only little – ultimately we’d be happy to shift the needle just a smidgen). Anyway, the pitch came out to be less than satisfactory, a bit embarrassing, especially given our recent success with a much longer and more involved pitch for MassChallenge. Anh and I are in agreement that our intro is off, so that will be what I’m trying to fix first. In the end it should flow and be very easy to memorize and presentable by either Anh or me.

Prepping for SLP June 10 showcase -  Another great opportunity is just a week away. Anh and I are thinking about some sort of a story board, perhaps with some mockups that we’ve been working on. We want to convey the knowledge gap, the convenience, and our Team’s ability to do this. We’ve recently been working with my roommate from Babson, Vicente Casellas, who’s helping out with the graphic design. We’re hopeful he’ll also help us look a bit more polished.

So far, SLP has shaken things up for us in a productive way. I’m hoping to continue to engage and learn from other teams in the program. Some of my early favorites are:

Foodhini - “a for-profit social enterprise, brings truly authentic, home-style ethnic cuisine to the fast casual urban consumer. Foodhini is a mobile on-demand platform through which consumers can order the cuisine of their choice at an affordable price for delivery within 60 minutes. The meals are prepared amateur cooks from the largely untapped immigrant communities, whose recipes have been developed and passed down from generation to generation, but are rarely available to the public.  A a socially minded company, Foodhini is providing consumers with expanded choice while also  providing a source income for immigrant chefs who have limited access the capital needed to launch their own catering businesses.”

Misfit Fruits - “makes premium, cold-pressed juice from surplus fruits and vegetables that would otherwise be discarded, in an effort to combat the growing epidemic of food waste.  20 - 40% of a typical harvest, while perfectly safe and healthy, never makes it on to supermarket shelves because it fails to meet the aesthetic standards of the retailers. Misfit pays market prices for this fruit, providing the farmers with an incentive to collect this produce. Misfit Juices are currently on sale in a handful of DC locations, and the company has plans to scale aggressively in the coming months.”

[inwanderus]

The acceptance into Georgetown SLP

It was fast.

On May 8, we submitted the application for the Georgetown Summer Launch Program (SLP), a short form with fewer than ten questions. I think the process took me less than two hours from start to finish. Being a Hoya, I was 99% confident that we would be able to get accepted.

On May 13, we sent in an executive summary so as to complete the application process. As in version 1.0, I think the one-pager quite clearly demonstrated the problem we tried to solve, but the solution and business model sections could have been better articulated. 

On May 14, Alyssa Lovegrove, the Associate Director of the program, reached out to schedule a meeting with us to better understand our idea and to “make sure our program is the best fit for what you want to achieve.” I was hesitant to respond right away; we had been anxiously waiting for MassChallenge Round 2′s results. At the time, the way we thought SLP was described was such that it was geared towards the startups who wanted to gain customer traction and get ready to attract investors. We had not been that far along yet. 

On May 18, during my time-off in Las Vegas, Drew wrote me that our priorities should be 1. finding a developer, and 2. iterating design; and that SLP would not be necessarily a good fit for us. We agreed to still meet Alyssa so as to explore alternative opportunities. Drew drafted an open-ended response and I sent Alyssa an email the next day upon my return to DC. We learnt later that week that we were not selected to advance further with MassChallenge. The result was not unexpected, but we had been hopeful. The presentation Drew gave in this Round 2 had been, by far, the best one of Wanderus.

On May 22, three days later, Alyssa wrote back at 1:47 PM and suggested a conference call on the same day (Friday! TGIF!), or an in-person meeting on campus the following Monday, which happened to be a holiday, the Memorial Day. In her email, she gave us a heads-up of the time commitment required for SLP. We would be first participating in a two-day bootcamp in the last week of May, followed by six to seven three-hour weekly sessions on campus with assigned mentors and two startup expos, one on Georgetown campus in mid-June and the other in 1776 in late July when the program concluded. 

On May 25, Drew and I went to meet Alyssa Lovegrove at her gorgeous townhouse, which is only a few footsteps away from the ever popular Georgetown Cupcakes store. Our chat lasted almost an hour and a half, but it did not feel long. Alyssa herself was a seasoned-entrepreneur-turned-VC-turned-professor-turned-startup-advisor, and was very generous with her advice for our budding idea. One of the key questions she probed us was whether we truly, deeply, thoroughly understood the customer pain, aka “the problem.” She suggested we contemplate about the B2B approach, which Drew commented later on that she had meant B2B2C instead. We walked out of her house, feeling inspired and thought provoked. We were unofficially “in.” Making a quick stop by El Centro nearby to enjoy an early celebratory meal, Drew and I went back to our “workshop” to get ready for the SLP program which commenced only two days later. We knew we had to deliver a three-minute pitch by the end of the bootcamp, and, learning from MassChallenge, we would need a solid pitch script. Practice, practice, practice.

- Anh

[inwanderus]

How would you portray “urban outdoors” in photography? 

While this photo does not explicitly reveal nature’s beauty, I love how Drew playfully interacts with the surroundings. The graffiti adds a dash of color to the bleak wall, and our urban explorer’s extended arm pokes fun at the traces of a constructed life. I see an adventure ahead.

- Anh

[inwanderus]

Wanderus in the making

Drew and I have been embarking on this Wanderus journey for a while, and both have decided now it is time for us to open a semi-public internal blog as a space to jot down thoughts and lessons learnt along the way. We wish to write posts every day, and by “every day,” I mean at least four or five times per week, from each of us. (Fairly certain we will beat this self-imposed quota though). Looking forward to journaling!

- Anh