Applying “Lean” to a social venture
“If you think you have certainty as a startup, you’re dreaming.” Bernhard Kappe and Todd Wyder prefaced our Lean Startup discussion with this statement; after all, a startup is, by lean definition, is “a human institution designed to create new products and services under conditions of extreme uncertainty.”
A key goal of the lean methodology is to run several minimal experiments to get as much direct feedback from the consumer / customer as possible... “So... how are you going to test that?” Our team heard this several times as Jamie Jones and Linda Darragh coached us through each of the canvases. These experiments are key to decreasing the uncertainty of the business while learning inexpensively. These learnings validate or falsify hypotheses, which may lead to major pivots.
Major pivots are brought on by either changing the problem to be solved or changing the target market for which the solution is being offered. A key driver of this could be customer acquisition costs (CAC) being too high (in comparison to lifetime value of the customer). We are looking to mitigate our CAC by sharing them with our business partners. Because awareness is low, cultivating awareness and education around female hygiene and our product will be a great cost.
But pivots are okay: as Chuck Templeton told us, “Stay connected to your vision - not your solution.” Azadi has been exploring different entry points to launching a pilot project come January. In the past month, our discoveries about the market landscape of rural India have lead us to shift our go-to-market strategy from a B2C to a B2B approach. We are currently investigating how to employ a franchising model to establish profitable partnerships with community-based organizations (CBOs) and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). We feel this model design will be most successful in addressing the unmet accessibility, availability, and affordability needs our market faces with respect to female hygiene products.
The biggest challenge is designing an experiment to test receptiveness of our product and whether or not people will buy it. When it comes to startups in the social enterprise space, we’ve quickly discovered that these challenges will manifest themselves in various ways. For our venture, and others in the Impact Engine that have a physical product offering in an international market, this is particularly challenging because market testing is not easy to do when removed from the market.
From a customer segment perspective, we learned that our target market isn’t simply the 300 million girls and women and rural India that do not use sanitary pads due to the “3 A’s” constraints. We need to “dial in” on segments of this population (by geography, demographics, etc.) to narrow our audience down to a target. Our team in India has already identified geographic entry points to market and is currently designing field research to get to know our customers better.
We plan to print a poster size of the canvas and put it on our wall at IE to macke sure we look at it everyday. With the understanding that most people overbuild their Minimum Viable Products (MVPs), the ultimate challenge is: how do we build an MVP that keeps our value proposition intact? A possible way to test the market is with existing products - we are currently investigating this possibility.
