Make Something People Want: Identifying Beeble’s First Customer
There are many apps that help you take better photos. But as we all know, poor lighting and cluttered backgrounds still ruin our shots.
That’s where Beeble comes in! With Beeble’s AI lighting and background technology, anyone can take photos that look like they were taken in any location they desire.
Beeble has a lot of use cases. But to be more focused, we met 100+ potential users, gained a clear understanding of them, and finally narrowed down our target users. Today, we are going to explain that process in four steps:
1. Brainstorming potential users
2. Finding our best first customer
3. Meeting target users
4. Seeking a global perspective
Let’s dive in!
Brainstorming potential users
First, we did a brainstorming about people who might be interested in our lighting/background solution. Especially, we investigated the users of existing lighting/background solution and segmented them into following groups.
1. Selfie app users
2. Fashion e-commerce retailers
3. Cosplayers
4. Conference call users (Zoom, etc.)
5. Content creators (Youtube, Twitch, etc.)
6. Special event photos (wedding photo, Baby photo, etc.)
Finding our best first customer
Next, we prioritized our potential customers to find our best first customer. We considered three key questions referring to the YC’s guide:
- How frequent do they encounter lighting/background problems?
- How much does the problem cost them?
- Do they have the ability to fix the problem?
To find the users that satisfy these criteria, we conducted pilot investigation and concluded that fashion e-commerce retailers & selfie app users satisfy the above criteria.
Both fashion e-commerce retailers & selfie app users are good first target customers of our product
For the sake of the reader, I will focus on the case of online fashion retailers for the rest of the article. 😉
Online Fashion Retailers
Online fashion retailers put in a great effort into taking good photos: they take photos of models wearing their clothing in order to showcase the products in a visually appealing way. For this, they purchase expensive lighting, rent expensive photo studios and even shoot at overseas locations to get good lighting and backgrounds.
Meeting target users
Now that we found our first best customer, it’s time to actually meet them!
To prepare for the interviews, we studied e-commerce retailers through their online communities and discovered their common pain points. We then recruited interviewees using a hook like“We solve {e-commerce retailers’ pain points}”. We conducted over 100 surveys and interviewed 20+ potential users.
This is what we’ve learned through the interviews:
- E-commerce retailers take photos once a week on average. This is because they post their clothes on Instagram daily for promotional purposes, which directly leads to increase in sales.
- E-commerce retailers want to take photos with good natural sunlight and simple background. However, each time they shoot, they run into issues such as gloomy weather and crowded locations.
- E-commerce retailers spend approximately $50 each time (amounting to $400 per month, $4800 per year) when they rent a studio with wide windows and a simple setting to solve the lighting and background problems. However, it is still subject to bad weather and limited shooting time & money.
Seeking a global perspective
Since most of our interviews were conducted in Korea, our next step was to seek a global perspective. To do this, we posted several articles introducing our AI lighting/background technology to relevant Reddit communities (Product Photography, etc.). Based on the findings we learned from our interviews, we carefully designed our post to “hook” our potential users.
With Beeble, one can get a photo with natural sunlight even though the original one is taken in a very bad lighting
The result was amazing! 🥳 In just 3 days, one of our posts was ranked monthly best in the community. They were clearly experiencing similar shooting problems with online sellers in Korea: they want to take a picture in good natural lighting and clean backgrounds, but it is very difficult. Because we can tackle their problem head on, they asked us to keep them updated on our progress. Therefore, we are building and developing our own communities using Twitter, Linkedin, etc.
What’s Next?
Through our research, we identified our first target customer and gained a deep understanding of them. Their positive feedback gave us confidence that we are on the right track to really solve their problems. Beeble will continue to strengthen relationships with our customers and actively communicate with them.
