#wanderus

[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]

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