Customer interviews Day 1

Our team split, 2 to the M Street and 2 to Eastern Market in Capitol Hill. I went to the latter. It was interesting to interview people for the first time about our product. Surprisingly, I was not rejected as I would had imagined. People were cooperative in general.

Some of the interviewees were helpful by taking their time to remember examples while others answered fast. I interviewed a previous management consultant and he tried to give valuable insights at the end. He said we should consider a product that would sell higher amounts of recycled plastic faster. For instance, producing products that can be used in buildings structures etc.

We discussed this idea with the group, and we thought it would be hard to go with the consultant’s example, in spite of the logic in the suggestion, because it means we need to compete with big corporates that already have big market shares. If they see that our product is succeeding, they have the capability to copy our model and use their scales, which would make our evolution very hard.

Another observation, I noticed people would be frank in their answers. Some said they won’t more for our products, however, they will consider them if they were the same price. I think part of their frankness is because they don’t know us and we did not ask for personal names / e-mails etc.

Lastly for today, one interviewee said that he was price sensitive even though he cares about environment a lot. He explained that having environmentally friendly criterion is a threshold, thus, all other alternatives for our products would are environmentally friendly also.