Two-Sided Market Situation. Who is Our Buyer Persona on One side of it?

So far we have been concentrating on validating the VP for just one side of the market we are planning to target. You can get the idea by checking our Business Model Canvas below:

Based on the customer interviews we conducted last week we were able to come up with the Buyer Personas - we tested only One Side of the Market Value Proposition and here's what we came up with:

From several individual interviews we found out that quite important thing that makes people "get off the track" (e.g. to follow their healthy or just specific food requirements) is traveling. More often it's harder to find healthy food options while abroad (we decided to add a new customer segment - for new people in local area or tourists):

What do we do next? During the lecture today we got some ideas from our professor and audience - e.g. test and validate the Customer Segment who are actually exercising plus conscious about their food choices (e.g. sportsmen and/or gym visitors). In addition - we will have to test other VP's for the "other side of the market" as well as Channels we should use.

Post by: Laura

Testing the Renewed Value Proposition and Customer Segments

Validating Value Proposition

As we second week approached, we decided to conduct deep interviews from both, people in industry and those who are exercising regularly and/or concerned with their nutrition. One of the first interviewee happened to be a personal trainer, James Murphy. He invalidated the initial value propositions (VP) that we had straight away, telling me about three sports meal delivery services currently available in Dublin. Whats more, he was skeptical about meal plan being done over an app as it requires a deep understanding of persons' nutritional requirements, exercising level and body composition.

We've also conducted several interviews in order to find out what bothers people most and came to a conclusion that many people find it hard to balance their almost-healthy diet during the week and not-so-healthy choices when dinning out or going to clubs or bars during the weekends or after work.

Our group gathered for a brainstorming session, during which we invalidated some of the hypothesis we had before around meal planning and food delivery services. Taking into account interviews we did and feedback we got, we came up with a slightly different VP which included providing healthy food options information, breakdown by diet type and/or nutritional information of the meals in restaurants and calories count at bars and pubs in Dublin (can also be expanded to other cities). What we needed at this stage is to validate our new value proposition and gather extra information about our potential customers.

 

Post by: Julia

New Business Venture. Finding a Problem to Solve.

Welcome to FitOneVenture blog! We are two UCD Smurfit Business School students - Julia and Laura currently learning about New Business Ventures. In this module we are planning to learn both from theoretical and practical perspectives on how to go about launching a Startup. This blog will be our diary on our ideas, actions, experiments, successes and fails. We do not necessarily intend to create a multimillion business (although why not?) rather than learn ourselves how to go through the process of creating a Start-up in the right way (if there is one).

We are starting our New Business Ventures module by finding a balance between a theory and practice. As we learned from the first lecture right away, we needed to come up with the problem our potential customers may have and idea how to solve it only afterwards. It is important to understand whether this problem or need actually exists so that we can find a market for it. This diagram portrays what steps we will be following throughout the upcoming weeks.

 Source: LeanDisruptor.com

Thus said we had to concentrate on the hypothesis of the problem first. This is because we haven't tested it to find it true yet. So here's how it all started:

The initial problem:
People who are health conscious and trying follow healthy lifestyle and have some fitness goals may not reach them if they do not balance exercise with healthy eating.

The idea how to solve it:
A platform which offers nutrition plans and healthy meals delivery according to customers' fitness goals.

This is just a brief summary of how we started, so after coming up with these hypothesis we had to follow the Business Model Innovation Canvas to actually check the sections out one by one and test if what we thought is correct and how we can develop our idea further.

• The canvas is a set of Hypotheses. i.e. Guesses.
• It helps us to organize our thinking! It is not about functional organisation but about the business.
• The real question is How do we change those guesses into FACTS?

 

Source: LeanLaunchpad. LeanDisruptor.com

At the initial stage we started to do interviews to test whether our problem is actually a problem that has not yet been solved, if the customers may find it appealing and need it and of course - who would then be our customers? The next blog post will describe exactly that.

Post by: Laura