Project Nande — Vol. 4
Project Nande is a membership club started by a group of Chicago based travel writers, photographers, and filmmakers. Our mission is to help members discover every corner of Chicago, cross neighborhood lines, and make the most out of their Chicago experience. Here are links to Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 and Vol. 3
It’s been awhile since the last post so I thought it would be a good time to update how things have been going.
For the longest time, we were obsessed (and still are) with getting into our hypothetical user’s mind and building something we thought they would find valuable. That whole process is documented in our previous posts which can be found in Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 and Vol. 3.
Well, finally in August 2016 we hit that big launch button and what happened next? Nothing much. We did get a few sign-ups here and there, but for the first few weeks we had a “build, hope, and pray” strategy. That needed to change so here’s what we did next.
We got to know our subscribers
While we didn’t get a huge influx of sign-ups from the start, we did have a couple of subscribers in the first few weeks after launch. That signaled to us that at least a few people thought we were doing something worthwhile.
The bad news was that we weren’t really sure where they came from, who they were, or why they subscribed. We were operating in our hypothetical black box. That had to change so we e-mailed all of our subscribers and offered to meet over coffee.
After 5 or 6 interviews we finally started seeing a pattern among our subscriber base. Here are some common traits.
- Lived in Chicago for over a year
- Value experiences over material possessions
- Highly organized and makes an effort to explore new places
- Usually the person in their friend group who is “in the know” about things to do in the city
- Has an adventurous spirit or personality
- Tries to avoid Yelp. Doesn’t post a lot on social media
- Tends to read publications like Thrillist, Time Out, and Chicago Reader to find things to do.
Those are just a few of the common threads we found among a lot of our members. Moving forward, we used that info to help better refine our pitch, branding, and target audience. That started to payoff soon after.
The graph above is a graph of our active members. Where we finally see the graph go up coincides with when we started talking to our members and using that info to refine our marketing strategy.
What’s Next?
One of the benefits of talking to our members is that it helps us figure out what they want, and it inspires us to be creative and make new things that we think they’ll find useful in exploring Chicago.
Our next experiment is creating an actual physical booklet of our guides. Here are a few teaser images. It’s still a work in progress, but we hope to publish these booklets on a quarterly basis and give it to our annual members.
In it we’ll have bonus content, sections to keep their own notes, and deals we’ll negotiate with businesses on behalf of Project Nande members.
If you like what you see, then you should become a member! And if you want to get in touch and have a chat about what we’re doing, you can e-mail either one of the two people at Project Nande.
andrew@nande.co
chris@nande.co
