It’s all about the feels
Well, you’ll never guess what happens when you put yourself out there and tell people you’re writing a blog about your new startup. OK, so maybe this isn’t news to anyone, but it’s gratifying — the one downside being the amount of time I’ve spent checking my Medium stats since February 10th.
Of course, knowing people might actually be reading this ratchets up the pressure to write something worth reading, but if this isn’t to become a major chore every week, I need to stick to what’s new and newsworthy.
I met with a film producer friend who’s keen to get involved with Race.Radio in some way. Serendipitously, a Swiss client has asked him to film at an amateur cycling event — the Cyclotour du Léman — which circles Lake Geneva. It takes place at the end of May and I’m keen to ride it with a good friend I met at Hyper Island, Michael, who’s based in Zurich.
We talked about the possibility of somehow piggybacking the trip to shoot some footage for a short website clip and/or crowdfunding video. This gives me a firm date to work towards (not to mention another cycling event to look forward to).
Over beers, the conversation the importance of not just demonstrating use cases, but tapping into deeper emotions. Not just what you could do with Race.Radio, but how it would feel to use Race.Radio. This got me thinking more about the current brand positioning (or lack of one) and I spent the best part of a day — and a lot of spare brain cycles — pondering brand essence, purpose, vision, values and the like.
I’ve written a longer post about this thinking, but it’s probably enough to say here that I concluded it’s all about shared experience and effort. Basically, cycling is great alone, but better together. “Shared endeavour” is my working brand essence.
Fortunately, designer Bern has now set aside a proper chunk of time from mid-March to do some serious work on the brand and with that done, we’ll revisit the website design to infuse it with emotion. I’d be interested to re-run my Cycling Technology Adoption Model (CTAM™) research once the site is upgraded to see if the changes increase the likelihood to purchase.
Meanwhile, Michael is exploring a SaaS solution that will give us some basic telemetry without having to install server-side admin tools. This should help us to pinpoint — and then fix — what’s causing errors.
I’ve signed up for a mid-March cycling trip to Mallorca with a friendly group and so the aim is to go out there with a bunch of prototypes and see if we can do some proper user testing i.e. not just see if it works, but how people actually use it when it works reliably (and of course, how that makes them feel). With the weather still utterly grim here in the UK, I know exactly how five days’ riding in the warmth of the Mediterranean is going to make me feel.
I’ve shared the investor presentation with a couple more people, friends of friends. Nice feedback on the idea, but still no firm interest. This is the challenge with going to people who are first and foremost keen cyclists (as opposed to serial angels) — betting £5,000 on a passion project might be conceivable, but putting £30k or £50k of hard-earned savings on the line feels too much of a gamble, whatever the potential returns.
Over and out.
