The Concierge MVP

Or: that time when we drove around a rental van full of children’s bikes and balloons

Laura Niemi and I getting ready to deliver the bicycles to our pilot customers

A key part of being a service or a business designer, is to be curious about people’s daily lives. When we meet people, we don’t only ask them to reflect on their most spectacular memories, but also talk about the mundane, the routines that make up 95% of their daily lives. The aim is to better understand what people do (and why) and ultimately, to uncover unmet needs and pain points.

In 2019, we interviewed over 50 people in Finland about the impact of sustainability on their daily lives. How had it impacted their daily routines? Are they doing things differently from five years ago? What other changes would they like to make, but haven’t been able to do yet (and why?) Based on our exploratory research, we generated many ideas (hunches) for new services our company Fortum could consider developing. One area we became interested in, is bicycles.

When bicycles become a hassle

The interviews taught us that many people love cycling, but they hate the hassle of getting a suitable bicycle, and keeping it in good shape. For example, a woman named Johanna said that she had been cycling enthusiastically in early spring that year, but then one day in May she got a flat tire and her bicycle had been collecting dust in the basement ever since.

She knew how to fix it or how to get it fixed by a professional mechanic…. but the bottleneck was just not getting around to it. We decided to run an experiment, to learn if and how we could help people with a new service. For our MVP, we narrowed it down to children’s bikes, because parents had told us that buying (and re-selling) affordable, safe bicycles is a recurring hassle. Or, as one of our earliest customers (Katja) told us:

“I spend way too much time on Facebook Marketplace desperately looking for decent kids bikes. It’s like looking for a needle in a haystack. And then a year later, my children have both grown 10 centimeter and I need to start all over again”.

GrowBike: a subscription for children’s bikes

So we came up with a new service in which children’s bikes are delivered to your door, and they are exactly the right size for your child. The bicycles are not new, but they have been properly maintained and checked for safety by a professional mechanic. At the end of the cycling season (at the start of winter), we pick up the bicycles again. We called it GrowBike.

Validation on a shoestring

To validate whether this solution solves the customer problem, we didn’t just want to ask people theoretically what they thought about our new service. We wanted to know whether they would actually use it and pay for it. And we also wanted to know what they would think of it after using it for a few months. Would they sign up for another year? Would they start telling their friends about it? So we decided to run a small pilot, in which we provided the actual service, but only to a small group of customers. And we decided that, rather than prematurely investing loads of money in apps, and logistics and everything else that makes up a full-scale service, we would keep the costs low by running the whole service manually.

This is how it worked:

1. We recruited people (for free) on Social Media. We posted a message in a public Facebook group for parents in the Helsinki region, asking wether anybody was looking for a children’s bicycle. When people showed interested, we explained the GrowBike service, and asked whether they would be interested in joining our pilot.
2. People could sign up through a simple sign up form (Google Forms), in which they filled in their contact information, address, and provided information about the type and size of bicycle they were looking for. We also asked them to pick acceptable colours (I have kids myself, and I know how important the right colour can be).
3. We made it clear from the start that the bicycles were not going to be new (they might have some scratches), and that we would be charging 10 Euro per month for the service.
4. This didn’t stop people from signing up. Within only a few days we had reached our goal of 10 paying customers signed up. We actually ended up with 13 customers after a week, and then we quickly closed the sign up form.
5. While people were signing up, I started searching for suitable bicycles on second-hand markets (Facebook Marketplace, Tori). I bought the bicycles and picked them up with my car. Sometimes a Fortum colleague who lived nearby would pick up the bicycle on my behalf.
6. A freelance bike mechanic thoroughly checked all the bicycles, replaced any worn-out parts, and made sure all bikes were properly maintained.
7. When all bicycles had been serviced, we rented a big van, and delivered the bicycles to the 13 addresses. We attached a big balloon to every bicycles, to make the customer experience more joyous and memorable.
8. For the purpose of the pilot, we set up a WhatsApp group, in which the customers and we could freely discuss the service. We could also use it to communicate about practicalities (e.g. the invoicing), and to ask specific questions about the experience (e.g. “have you had any trouble taking the bicycle into use?”)

When parents were not at home during the delivery, we parked the bicycle in front of their home, secured with a combination lock. The balloon made it easy for them to locate it.

The benefits of a Concierge MVP

If you are familiar with Lean Startup terminology, you will recognize this as a Concierge MVP. This type of approach saved us a huge amount of time: from the moment we decided to run an experiment, it only took us 3 weeks to deliver the bicycles to our paying customers. A secondary benefit of the Concierge MVP approach, is that it led to a lot of personal interaction with our customers. Being at their beck and call, we gathered many rich insights into their perception of the service, and how it solved (or didn’t solve) their problems.

“My daughter was delighted. She said something like “Wow…is that for me?! Is it my birthday already?” and then she wanted to try it immediately. She’s been using it all summer. GrowBike suits perfectly with the age of my child, because she needs a new bike almost every season, and this saves us a lot of time. We personally love it and would gladly sign up again.”

Our bike mechanic Tyron from Nice Bikes Helsinki thoroughly checked each bicycle, and replaced any worn-out parts

Not struck gold yet

The pilot itself was a success, in the sense that customers really loved the service, and would have gladly signed up for the next year.

Unfortunately, we have not found a partnership model yet (a collaboration model with other companies that would handle part of the operations) that can sustain an attractive business case.

We continue exploring cycling and e-mobility cases though, and the insights from this experiment will undoubtedly be very valuable in the future.