[SVIA] Sprint- Creating an ice-cream business in a day with 50+ people

| Written by Ling Ye and Steve Renda

Silicon Valley is where innovation happens. Innovation happens at Stanford, too, just faster. The SVIA Innovation Sprint challenges Stanford Summer Session Students to build a working company in a matter of hours. Given no more direction than “build an uber for ice-cream”, hours later Hope Cream emerged to “make ice cream great again”. Students self-organized to create a startup to meet Stanford’s growing need for on-demand ice-cream.

In the process students learned to apply principles of entrepreneurship to real-world problems. From engineering to marketing, logistics to accounting, students created and ran every aspect of a functioning company, with real world sales.

Marketing materials for HOPE CREAM

Choose a team and a role: All tasks and roles linked together

After a brief introduction, participants are off to select the teams and tasks they want to do. There are five main teams: Marketing and Design, Sales, Engineering, Logistics and Meta Tasks. Under these main categories, there are specific tasks (See Appendix). The key is to know what you good at or what you want to experience.

Work in Team and between Team

People start running. Tasks are linked together and require a lot of collaboration within the team and between teams. The communication person from each team exchanges information between teams, and then fills their team in. Some great methods are used. For example, in the Engineering Team, the task board gets set up, like what Jared used in Silicon Valley. Stickers are used to identify the tasks, and colors represent who the task belongs to. Big tasks listed in the Appendix are separated into step-by-step smaller tasks that are easy to tackle.

A Short Version of the Entire Process

Marketing and Design Team comes up with a company name, logo and tagline and starts marketing on mainstream social platform (buy ice-cream and get a balloon). The logistics team decides the supply location for the ice-cream and works out a plan for delivery with the Sales Team. The Sales Team decides the locations to sell and sends out the salesperson (4 people a team with a square card reader) to the spot. Then the selling starts. Customers place orders on Jotform, which feeds information to Onfleet (the delivery system) through Zapier. The Engineering Team sets up these platforms. The delivery couriers deliver the ice-cream within 5–7 mins. Based on sales information, the Business Model Canvas and customer info gets updated. Marketing changes the plan with a more targeted campaign.

See Appendix 2 on engineering tools used.

Interviews with Participants

Kong Samuel Whole Dux- Marketing Team: We are Using D3.js (an api for producing data visualization) to visualize sales and plot charts. These charts are then translated into recommendation to the sales and marketing strategies. For example, we are recommending the sales team to send more members to places with higher sales. D3 is also important for recognizing our target customer segments as we analyze the gender and age range of our customers.

Chen Yang — Marketing Team: The biggest problem we faced today is the collaboration with other teams. The data visualization of the marketing data required getting input from engineering team and sales team. Not only getting the data, but also the formatting of the data also need the efforts of collaboration.

Nicolai — Moneyman: My biggest challenge was to get access to our cost prices and online sales data. When I got access to this everything went very well.

Lessons learned

Task and Team sign-ups

The tasks were signed up on the spot and depended on the speed you basically ran to the sign-up sheets. It was very possible that you didn’t get the task that you want to do, but you didn’t want to leave, since you were already there.

This problem also triggers other ones. People can’t get prepared right on the spot. Should I prepare for a computer, bike, car or else? Need a computer to use the online platform? Need a bike or car to deliver? The less-appealing teams or tasks lack personnel in general, which can’t be solved really well on the spot. The delivery team lacked personnel, and forced some people free from their original tasks to be part of it.

Personally, I feel like it could have been more efficient and fair to have an online signup form. You send out an e-mail when the registration would start. In this case, people could go to the form to sign up for those positions that are still available.

Decision Making: Real-field Investigation needed

The decision of the operation is not clearly shared within teams and among teams. Keeping everyone on the same page is definitely essential in starting a company. A solution would be to have regular meetings, making sure everyone is on the same page. Field people should communicate with the inside management people more. The loss of on-spot perspectives affect decision-making and the improvement of the whole system. All the plans made in the room should be tested out in a real-life setting. There was an ice-cream store near a sales location. The supply and sales locations made inventory delayed or melted on the way.

Different departments have different objectives. To make revenue or to update the BMC? All the problems need to be solved through communication.

Assigned “tool” Issues

Jotform was not easy to use, and it affected the collection of data for data visualization. Jotform only had the data for sales for $150. 50% of the data was lost and got unaccounted for. Zapier messed up the location(a location coordinate pointed out to a lake in London). It also updated the info every 5 minutes, while the promised delivery time was 5–7 mins. These facts affected both Logistics Team and Sales Team. Onfleet was based on move-tracking, which also generated some problems in sales. Lesson learned: Understand the problem before building product up.

Overall, it was amazing that everyone worked together and we learned a lot! We had a revenue about $326, margin of 74%, profit about $150, and return from investment at 23%.

Appendix

1.1 The tools used

Squareup.com — Providing the card reader and the platform to track the sales (Financial part)

Jotform.com — Creating the form for the customer

Zapier.com — Link Jotform to Onfleet

Onfleet — “A delivery management software simplifies your local deliveries from start to finish” (from official website)

1.2 The tasks and roles assigned

Sales:

1. Go outside and sell ice-cream Team (Square card reader for payment)
2. Payment processing team (Work with the distribution of card readers)
3. Sales Communication
4. Work with Marketing and Logistics to determine which product to sell and the optimal price

[Supply is in close proximity with the selling place, improve the product line and update the product offering from the customer inputs] — cross team collaboration

Logistics:

1. Delivery Couriers (Use the Onfleet App)
2. Logistics Managers (Create a streamline process to manage the whole delivery system smoothly)
3. Onfleet App Manager
4. Logistics Communication
5. See Sales point 4

Engineering:

1. Setup Zapier Integration with Onfleet and Jotform
2. Create a FB messenger chatbot for ordering
3. Engineering Communication

Marketing & Design:

1. Company Name, Logo and Tagline
2. Work with Sales team to create brand marketing swag
3. Create a landing page with signup form
4. Design an order form on Jotform
5. Data Visuliazation to track live sales data
6. Marketing Communication

Meta Tasks

1. Moneypenny(keep track of receipts)
2. Track which Hypotheses in the Business Model Canvas are Validated/Invalidated