On making a market
For this post, we deep-dive into user research I led for the early stages of product development at Vimcar. Follow me down the rabbit hole of an undiscovered market and download a cheat sheet with the real interview questions we used on our way.
When starting a business, I would like to suggest to pin one question to your desk and come back to it whenever you are stuck:
“Why are you in this?”
More to the point: What fundamental value is behind your work? In which way are you hoping to make someone’s life more awesome?”
It’s fine if you can’t answer this for most of the time. Yet, the underlying attitude behind these questions should be fuelling anything you do. This is especially true when heading out to gather intel on potential users for an idea you are working on. So please, always remember: this should be about them, not you.
Below is a story about understanding the uknown world of your users. It is, at the same time, a story about attitude.
Part 1: Shit, this is boring
Vimcar started off with a whole bunch of ideas. We seriously explored several directions in which live automotive data could be put to use.
Early on, one of them was trip-logging: to automatically extract kilometres driven by corporate vehicles and then use this information to generate valuable business insight. Bonus fact: documenting and categorising the movements a commercially used car makes will unlock vast tax exemption options in many countries around the world.
Boring, right? Precisely my point. Bear with me.
To get a feeling for the potential market at our hands, we did a bunch of desk research:
- Understood registration figures and trends. The market for corporate vehicles proved to be significant and growing, it had surpassed the private sector. Good news.
- Digitizing fleet-documentation did look like an interesting challenge. A shocking proportion was still done with pen and paper. To the more intrepid, suppliers from the nineties would offer black boxes, hard-wired to each car, for €1.000 a pop, including desktop interfaces that resembled an early version of MineSweeper. Even better news.
- Solutions for small businesses or entrepreneurs? Were not available. While the Connected Car market was literally on fire, nowhere to be seen were serious, entreprise-grade products to made sense of corporate vehicle movement. https://www.automatic.com was in its infancy. Other “engine analytics” products began showing up, just as much geared towards a speculative consumer market as automatic was. All these OBD-enabled products were being marketed under the “connected car” banner, yet essentially, they amounted to little more than expensive, data-leaking gadgets. The harder we looked, the less we found proof for a viable market for this stuff. The most plausible explanation seemed to be this: There just was not enough of a problem to be solved. Noone could justify building a product around our little mileage problem.
So there was no market. End of story. 🚧
Until we started calling.
Part 2: Talk the talk
Because you see, we decided to not trust this outlook, essentially shoving aside objective analysis and instead launched head-first into a user research project, anyway. This was a massive risk to take. Vimcar had a tiny team and time was running out on a decision what to focus on. However, while staring at the “documenting business driving” niche, we were only able to make out how narrow it was. To gauge its depth, we had to go and take a look ourselves.
So we did.
The team went to ridiculous lengths to track down people who matched the profile we were interested in: driving a business car, using it mainly for business reasons, working for themselves or for companies of a certain size — plus a smattering of other metrics. We scheduled appointments for phone interviews or met up with users if they lived anywhere near.
It was hard. The team pestered friends and families, posted on Facebook, asked people they met in the parking lot, drove everyone nuts. At some point, we even joined an online forum and started our own thread. Believe me, this is a dark corner of the internet we never expected to get to know so well. Eventually, though, we got our interviews, seven of them all up. You can download the actual interview guides we used here. The first bit is obviously entirely geared towards our connected car topic, but I am sure you will get the drift.
In our research interviews, we explored a world utterly, entirely unkown to any of us.
We were listening in on how our potential users conducted business and began piecing together how they spent their days. We started shedding more and more light on a breed of people who used their vehicle for work every single day — for a myriad of reasons. Some to impress clients, some to commute, some to transport tools and goods, some for the sheer joy of it.
While listening and talking along, we were way out of our depths: Quizzing long-standing businessmen and -women about their working lives, ourselves being twenty-somethings, the team was learning virtually while on the go, while they were interviewing: personal finance, the tax code, car data. Not a single one of us even owned a car at the time. Our users were the experts, not us. We made it up as good as we could, embarrassing ourselves on a regular basis.
All the while, the silver lining of our research was a different one: By so profoundly leaving our comfort zones, we were being taught a basic lesson in empathy and mutual human understanding. We learned to have a conversation, to start chatting, to get people to tell us how they really felt — basically, we received a lesson on how to give a shit.
It was painful. And worth every minute of it. Here is why:
The takeaway
What our interviewees ended up sharing with us was sorely missing from the spreadsheets and hidden from any industry analysis. Their heartfelt stories, it turned out in hindsight, emerged to be the raw material Vimcar would base its first real product on. They helped us venture into issues that were far beyond any of our own little Berlin tech-bubbles. They ensured sure we were not making the mistake of designing a product we or our friends would like.
And through listening, scribbling along and listening some more, by condensing those individual stories into personas and timelines, everything we did took a shape which would make those people we had talked to… happy! It informed our UX design, which turned out to be ground-breaking. It helped carve out specific USPs, which were based on issues we heard about again and again and made Vimcar stand out profroundly from the get-go. Other stuff we were able to push into the backlog with confidence, saving us time to get to a first MVP.
This was not a mere exercise in “design space exploration”, we were not in this to tick some boxes and get on with it: Grilling potential users made Vimcar.
You know how in these strategy games you need to first send out your troops to discover the map before you are able to set up your village? That is exactly what happened. With each step we took into unknown territory, we gained ground to build on. Unbeknownst to anyone, we were making a market.
