Talking to Customers
Over the last two weeks, each of us talked to various people across demographics about their gift-giving habits and difficulties faced. The answers we received were incredibly varied but valuable.
For instance:
- Some givers don’t know what their friends’ want, but when they see it, they know it’ll be suitable.
- Gift-giving ranged from Family Members only to 30 Gifts a year, based upon American Millennials
- Upon suggesting a Pinterest-like feature to curate wishlists, some suggested a more Tinder-like approach, where people swipe left / right onto objects to curate their wishlists
- A large majority use Amazon to get gifts and package it on their own
- Difficulties include getting a present, getting it when time is limited
- Adoption of new technology and apps is very common among American Millennials, unlikein Europe or in East Asia.
Build and Test and Repeat
Given the wide variety of answers we received, we decided to build a very basic platform to test a specific hypothesis and get users.
A neutral approach:
Unlike school-events where we’d hope to get as many people as possible to sign up or like a Facebook page, this was meant to be a test to observe how many people would click and respond and what their behaviour on the form was like
We set up a basic form and sent it out to the Stanford Summer Session chat and Facebook group, where everyone spams messages and posts.
Based on the “read” receipts (~40) on Facebook Messenger, number of members and usual activity on the group, GoogleAnalytics link, we estimate that around 70 people saw the message. Of these, we received about 45 unique visits, 50 total visits and 2 responses, excluding our own.
To those who responded, we sent their friend the follow-up,
For them to key in items they’ve wanted.
This is definitely not the ideal platform, but the one that was most executable.
The greatest limitation was that only people who remember, know and have friends in mind to give presents to will use this for now. Having 3 weeks in advanced birthday notifications would help.
For the moment, we’re still in the process of following through this and getting feedback and understanding user behavior.
Another Angle
Apart from targeting consumers, we’ve also started to reach out to companies who have dabbled in this space, starting with their employees using LinkedIn. While all of us have used our premium trials, we’ve started making request connections with those who are related in this domain, to understand their experiences.
