Band-Aids Please!

Taking a break from addition, this last week we spent our time doing some subtraction, trying to streamline our proposal and patch any holes that have thus far remained hidden under the radar.

So last Friday my team got together, and filled a classroom-wide white board with all things Creative Founder: 2x2s, assumptions mapping, BMC, you name it, it was all up there.

Immediately as we were working on it, we found that the biggest hole so far is that the focus on the people is not clear and incisive enough. We’ve acknowledged this issue last week when we did more interviews on shoppers and realised that they, unlike businesses, weren’t so stoked about the story aspect that we’ve been so focused on this whole entire time. After looking at our interviews again, we realised that businesses will go wherever customers go, and that they will be interested as long as the product in question can help them gain more customers.

We were also reminded of what David Bland said the other day, that “building a marketplace could take years before anything sign of success show up”. So we decided that in order to simply our effort, we needed to prioritise shoppers rather than dividing our attention between shoppers and businesses. We then revised our interview guide, and did some more in depth interviews with shoppers about their specific difficulties and pains when shopping.

So we did a 2X2, and decided that we should focus on effort on shoppers who “shop frequently and are on the look out for specific items”, and that our value proposition would be to help them locate these specific items with more ease.

With that, we took our first step into a vast, but potentially purpl-ish ocean. And after presenting on Tuesday, we realised that in order to survive in this purplish ocean, we need to narrow down into a very specific category of items, and not just to present our value proposition as a one-size-fits all “style finder” to our potential customers.