Prototyping to Survive a Pandemic
How 3 entrepreneurs used rapid prototyping to pivot during Covid-19
For the small business economy, there’s nothing more terrifying than an unexpected shutdown to bring daily operations to a grinding halt. In these unprecedented times, small businesses across North America have had to adapt and relaunch.
In the first three weeks of America’s “Shelter in Place” orders, we worked with over 400 companies to write their strategy to keep their business afloat; We heard a lot of heartbreaking stories coming from the frontlines but we’ve also heard a lot of inspiring success. Here are a few of the individuals who have persevered to make a way in the midst of the impossible. Their stories of innovation and leadership in the face of uncertainty are the success stories we all need right now.
Thomas Liu of Loose Leaf Boba Tea started selling Boba Tea at the young age of 19 at Swap Meets with his (then) girlfriend. What started as a small cafe to serve Asian Americans in his local community, has grown into four locations making artisanal Boba Tea, sharing culture with Americans all across the United States.
When the shelter-in-place orders first came down in Long Beach, California, Liu was paralyzed by the news of the pandemic. Sales dropped 70% overnight, rent still needed to be paid and Liu didn’t know how he was going to keep providing his team with a pay check, much less continue to care for his young family at home.
Liu made the decision to establish strict sanitation guidelines and social distancing protocols to keep both his team and his customers safe. At the same time he began to recognize that people in his community were losing jobs overnight, local children weren’t getting access to the meal programs that had previously been offered in schools and many people were struggling to keep going. He began offering free lunches to anyone in the community who needed it. This not only boosted morale amongst his team and gave them a sense of purpose, it proved to the local community that Liu genuinely cared about them, and they rallied around his company as a result. Donations came in to keep his doors open and when he expanded his brick and mortar store into an additional e-commerce business, his DIY Boba Tea Kits sold out immediately.
Launching a new e-commerce product overnight was a completely new experience, but through the process Liu learned that great leaders are built when they rise to the occasion and give it their all — even if they don’t have all the answers yet. Through prototyping ideas and finding solutions, he was able to benefit the people he was seeking to serve: his team, his family and the community as a whole.
As a Vancouver-based personal trainer, Ian McWalter’s fitness coaching is built on a foundation of human connection and personal growth. With health centres and gyms being of the first industries to close their doors in response to the pandemic, McWalter was quickly left without a way to maintain his primary source of income. Yet more than that, closing down the gyms meant that he was so longer able to meet in person with his clients or serve them in the way he was used to, leaving both McWalter and his clients without the usual support and community they had come to rely on.
McWalter quickly pivoted to a virtual platform and was able to continue serving 85% of his clients through online training sessions. But through this, he recognized that not everyone had access to the equipment they needed to maintain their health goals. He put out an investment and purchased gym equipment from a local facility that had closed its doors permanently and began offering contactless delivery of gym equipment, available for rent to his clients. He would sanitize each item, package it and deliver it directly to his client’s doorstep, including a personalized workout plan for 1–3 weeks.
McWalter admits that in the beginning prototyping this process had its challenges as he established a new home-delivery service in the beginning. Instead of letting errors hold him back, McWalter saw every feedback as an opportunity to gain new data, prototype a new solution and then make an adjustment. This rapid process gave him the ability to launch his new delivery service in 36 hours. Word of mouth has spread and McWalter has been gaining new clients daily.
Out of anyone in this pandemic, it’s likely the children and youth who face some of the greatest challenges. Being pulled from classes abruptly and separated from their friends with nothing at home to keep them inspired, left a huge void for youth across America.
Unable to connect with students and teachers due to our new social distancing society, Kevin Felix Chan, Co-Founder and CEO of Best Delegate, an education company that provides Model UN experiences to students and teachers worldwide, Chan found all his events shut down and his calendar cleared. With the cancellations of large gatherings, impacting both after-school programs and upcoming summer camps, Chan saw a huge opportunity for to step up and serve his community, filling the educational void. He quickly applied rapid prototyping to establish an online program that offered his Model UN experiences to students and teachers left at home through the lockdown.
Not only did this create new job opportunities to qualified college students who were temporarily out of work, it also provided parents with an educational experience to keep their youth occupied while at home during school closures. Moving his programs online also meant that an entirely new audience was opened up to him and to date, over 80% of his online students are participating in a Model UN program for the first time.
Chan was able to build this new platform in a few short weeks by eliciting user feedback, a key part of the prototyping process, so that he could identify the biggest needs of both parents, teachers and students; then build a solution that would serve them. Through continuous iteration and prototyping, Chan has now built five versions of his virtual Model UN debates, each one becoming more advanced than the last.
Through it all, opportunities to serve are everywhere, even in the midst of a pandemic. These entrepreneurs show us that rapid prototyping can be applied to any industry, that business strategy can sometimes be found in the simplest adaptations, and that you don’t have to completely re-design your business model to survive a pandemic — you just have to find a way to continue to do what you do with excellence, in a new format for your audience.
And this might be the biggest lesson of it all.
