Who's the Buyer on The Other Side of The Market? Restaurants, Healthy Food Shops

Time to check who's on the "other side" of the market! We have already determined the approximate profiles of the user (e.g. Active Amy and Traveller Tom from one of our previous blog posts). Now we went out there to validate our VP for Restaurants/bars, Healthy food shops and markets. These are our potential customers as well and this segment is going to be the one to consider getting the revenue streams from. This was decided based on the specifics of the offering - the main product is a website/app and users are usually not eager to pay for apps, so we have to find someone else who will pay. To add, from our group discussions on revenue streams (which we will discuss in further blog posts) we understood that Advertisers (both - restaurants in area and others) may be the source of the revenue as well, therefore we updated our Business Model canvas to include them there as well as a target audience.

Putting together all the information, we came up with the Buyer No. 3 (not really calling them "a Persona" though).

Post by: Laura

Some Findings on Nutritional Information Issues

The idea of our startup is to provide our users a resource for their food choices - enabling them to find a place to eat out or buy products. Depending on our findings this may include cuisines (e.g. Indian, Italian), various dietary requirements (e.g. Vegetarian, Vegan), and nutritional information (e.g. calories). This blog post should give you an idea on what we found out on the latter.

Source: Calories on menus in Ireland
REPORT ON A NATIONAL CONSULTATION
June 2012

From our in-person interviews and survey conducted from consumer side of the market (168 responses so far) we found out that people have various food preferences and requirements. Some of them mentioned that they do not count calories per se but are sticking to a reasonable food portions. Others implied that eating out derives them from their healthy diet or they tend to intake too much calories.

Source: Calories on menus in Ireland
REPORT ON A NATIONAL CONSULTATION
June 2012

So with our solution we will be trying to address these (and many other) customer pains. One interesting finding was that even if the person does not really count calories, when they have them displayed on the menu, they will still go for lower calorie meals. This shows that providing customers with such information can impact their choices. To add, we came upon the Report On a National Consultation "Calories on menus in Ireland" created already couple of years ago. Already then the surveys were conducted and according to the report "Consumers who report using calorie information (15%) tend to make lower calorie food choices. In addition, there is evidence that calorie menu labelling creates a demand for healthier options – including smaller portion sizes." So our observations are actually confirmed by a nation-wide research. What is interesting is that the report also confirms that people who use the calorie information provided actually do purchase/ear fewer calories. 15% of the surveyed population already used the calorie information on menus at the time when the research was done. To add, here are some additional useful facts from the report:

A total of 3,130 submissions (2,666 consumers, 322 health professionals, 73 food businesses and 69 others) were received via the consumer survey. Ninety six percent of submitters want calorie menu labelling in all, or some, food outlets. Eighty three percent want calorie labelling in all food service businesses. Of the 13% who preferred calorie labelling in some outlets, their order of priority was: fast food outlets (95%), coffee shops and delis (63%), cinemas (58%), vending machines (57%), pubs (26%) and restaurants (18%). The main reasons given for wanting vs. not wanting calorie menu labelling was ‘empowerment to make informed food choice decisions’ vs. ‘calorie labelling is unnecessary and ineffective’ (46% vs. 3% of the total group respectively).

All of the above helps us to validate our hypothesis for the Value Proposition for the one side of the market (consumer) and the product therefore may enable people to make informed food choice decisions they are looking for (here we are referring to calorie count ONLY and not taking into account other information we may be able to provide). If the problem is calorie count, then consumers may be able to find a place within their calorie limit.

Source: Calories on menus in Ireland
REPORT ON A NATIONAL CONSULTATION
June 2012

However, the other side of the market (e.g. restaurants) may not completely agree to display the calorie count of their meals. This, according to the report is quite some problem. Implementing calories on menus may be a challenge if the menus are seasonal and changing often as it is the additional time and resources restaurants have to invest. McDonalds, Burger King, Subway and Insomnia are among the chains that have introduced calorie labeling on their main overhead menu display, but Beshoffs and O'Brien's Sandwich bars have not, an Irish Independent survey in Dublin city center showed. Supermacs has a small panel with calorie counts at the side of its flagship O'Connell St base, but not on its main overhead menu, meaning a customer would have to actively seek them out before ordering (Source: Independent.ie). So, theoretically this is doable. Nevertheless, Health Minister James Reilly has pledged to introduce legislation by the end of the year forcing every business that serves food to display calories on their menus, if they are not complying voluntarily (Source: Irishhealth.ie).

If the calorie labeling is forced by a law, then our product will have more restaurants to offer within the app. In our case calorie information is not the only nutritional information we are planning to provide, therefore restaurant attitudes may not have as heavy impact on our product, because there is much more information we can use. What matters is that the consumers are actually alert about their food choices and want to be enabled to make informed and healthier ones.

Post by: Laura

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