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
stress from work, life, etc.
motivation - fear of looking unhealthy
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?
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?