#customerpain

[adstradigital]

Struggling to Get Customers Online? Here’s the Adstra Blueprint to Fix It

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Swipe through to discover how we solve the #1 pain of every business owner: not being found online.

[kiss-investments]

How To Understand Customer Pain Points

A CRM system solves many of the challenges related to growth. It helps you gather all the information about leads and business opportunities.

[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]

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