From idea to experiment — How we enabled people to sign up for our candy subscription service in two days
This blogpost is part of our Dogfood-Series. We’re building a subscription business and document the whole journey. In the last blogpost we talked about the importance of using our own products along the way. Today, we are going to look at how we kicked things off and launched our first experiment.
Kicking off the project
A week ago we had our first meeting with the team to kick off the candy subscription aka dogfooding project. Our goals during this meeting were to make some decisions on how to start out, what to do first, and to make a plan for the coming weeks.
Here’s how it went:
1. Getting ideas out of our head
When we got together for the first time, a lot of things were unclear. All we knew was: “We want to create a subscription service for candy”. That’s it. Everyone had several ideas on how such a service might look. We wanted to get those ideas out of our heads and down on paper. After brainstorming for five minutes, everyone presented how they envision such a service: We talked about frequency of shipment, who we are selling to and what we’re selling. We didn’t take a very structured approach in this but we had one goal in mind: To get everyone on the same page and to create a shared understanding. Building a shared understanding from the very beginning creates a sense of direction and ownership which is crucial to a products’ success.
2. Discussing niches
Jeroen was the first one to mention vegan candy. That’s where things started to get interesting: The topic of niches came up.
Focussing on niches is a great way to channel your efforts and resources. The tendency might be to try to cater to everyone. But by doing so, we would end up serving no one really well.
If you want to make a product people are willing to pay a premium price for, you have to know their pains and gains (Jobs to be Done) inside out, and make something that is optimised for their situation. You need focus.
Here are some of the niches we discussed:
- Parents that want to give their children healthy candy without any added sugar
- Vegans / People that value organic food
- Expats that want to have a taste of home
- Longterm type 2 diabetics
- Westernised muslims that live halal
- Candy enthusiasts that are looking for new and “rare” candy
All of those niches above are basically assumptions. We don’t know for sure if these people would actually want to buy a monthly candy subscription. But it just became our job to find out. So instead of asking “Can we launch a subscription service?” we ask ourselves “Should we launch a subscription service?” We want to find ways of quickly testing our assumptions. Here’s how:
3. Setting up our first experiment
The best indicator of customer interest is a payment. You can ask people how likely it is that they will buy a candy subscription service. Or you can show them a webpage where they can already subscribe to it and leave their credit card details. The latter creates much more reliable data.
However, we have several niches to test. And we didn’t prioritise them yet, so we don’t know which ones to test first. We wanted to create a basic setup that we could easily replicate for all niches. It should consist of two things:
- A landing page where we can drive traffic to
- A signup page to collect payments and customer data
The result
After our first session we set out to build the foundation for our upcoming experiments.
The landing page
We used Airstrip — our landing page tool — to create a very generic candy subscription landing page. Airstrip let’s you edit images, icons and text in a heartbeat. Give it a fancy name, et voilà. We present to you: https://kilocandyclub.com/
The signup page
The landing page links to our signup page. To collect payments and manage customer orders, we are using GoMonthly — our tool to kickstart and pilot a subscription-based revenue model for your products. The signup page: https://join.kilocandyclub.com
This gives us a nice base to run experiments. Whenever we want to explore a new niche, it’s just a matter of switching content and creating a new GoMonthly project. Easy 👍🏼
So there we have it: From Kickoff meeting to collecting payments in two days. It’s now our job to drive traffic to these sites and to get our first customer. Follow our Blog to stay in the loop.
