Reflection: User Acquisition Part 2: Company Growth

User Acquisition

We are literally, bootstrapping our way to gaining users to proof our product validations. We are in a phase of development to bring in potential customers and users. One of the biggest challenges is learning how to be resourceful with limited resources. One of our challenges was not developing the customer side of our business after verifying our user base. How might we gain more Interest in our customer side of our company funnel?

As the CMO, my goal is to be a concierge for our business directing people to our services. I focused on creating more restaurant owners as customers. We needed to bring up the design of our customer side in a matter of weeks. I had identified pain point points and learned insights for market opportunities. Being qualified CMO, or having a proper marking education or not, I needed to connect with our customers and fast.

Market Strategy

I identified a short and sweet goal. Our business needed to show interest from restaurants in order to validate our customer business model. I had taken our customer development from zero signups to two in a week’s time and now and we continue to grow from my foresight.

Customer Funnel

Making a plan from insights is a great way to get started, but I started from the top down. The top being I had envisioned the product working for the customer and then thought how would we get there? Thinking of this, created a personal passion and a belief that would work for our customers. In this method of visualization, I was able to get our first business owner’s as a customer.

Previous Email Blast

Networking Fundamentals

How do you do grow this with no money? You start with your personal connections, people who you don’t know by their first name but you know their faces. People who you don’t normally contact with, but contact all the time. Where ever I go, I cognitively think what is the experience I leave with them when I depart. This is something I’ve learned in the optical industry helping patients (best in the bay 10 years in a row). Creating these connections allows yourself the opportunity to scale at a lost cost of a bun bo hue soup at a Vietnamese restaurant.

Restaurant Owner Presentation Slide

You have to be creative and resourceful if you want to maximize your visibility. You need to be able to create relationships with people by learning their pain points and trying to genuinely want to help them. In return, they may help you with your endeavors.

“Without outside capital, you’ll be limited on your visibility, the marketing you can do, and what you can do to serve your customers.” Alejandro Cremades - The Pros and cons of bootstrapping startups.

Knowing this, you got to trust your wits and from your previous experiences to make things happen. Otherwise without capital, going through the normal marketing channels becomes expensive quick. How I was able to achieve our first customer came from devising design strategy and personal resourcefulness.

Design Strategy

Preplanning and then developing a design strategy beforehand, then executing is the way to go. Before doing my product pitch to our first customer, I needed to understand a few things before I proposed anything. Here are concepts I needed to learn in a short amount of time to be effective.

Target User
Restaurant owner Interviews
Restaurant Overhead
How restaurant advertising works
What businesses provide advertising
What services they offer
What customers they attract
Social Media advertising
Understanding Foodies

How I did It

From this, I could then better communicate with my target customer. Instead of approaching him as, hello I am the CMO of Foozi, create a situation where he wants to help you. Have a normal conversation with the person, complete whatever task that makes the situation comfortable, since he was a restaurant owner, I ordered and finished eating. I then naturally asked, being a restaurant owner, could you help me with somethings I don’t know? In this situation, we were able to get into our product and I later pitched him our potential services.

He naturally wanted to involve himself with our project wanting to help. He thought it was a good idea and he got excited about hearing it. I rode the wave of enthusiasm and encouraged his behavior and “closed” it.

A skill that you do not learn in a lean startup is your personal ability to connect with people. Hiring people who are just qualified, will not do. The difference is like comparing one standup comedian to another, and it all depends on the audience. How does this person make you feel after meeting them? Having the right person for the job makes the world of difference in the effectiveness of connecting your product to your target audience.

Restaurant Owner Insights

I thought it was unfair to be charged 25–35% using delivery services per order. In order for Anderson to keep his customer channels open, he needs to join them to increase his restaurant traffic. Unfortunately they charge a large service rate per order, decreasing profits. It isn’t sustainable for him to grow his business this way and it is becoming a pattern of restaurants closing down. Businesses are unable to keep up with the rising costs of operating in the city. It seems like he is being taken advantage of.

Let’s face it, it always taste better from kitchen to table than, kitchen to driver, through traffic to the door. Not the best setup if a meal cannot last the journey of delivery. Potentially negatively affecting his business and future sales. Dining experiencing is least common denominator in restaurant growth. Places that trend on social media, highlighting these experiences bring new customer channels the modern business. For older owners such as Anderson, it becomes difficult to keep up if you have little knowledge of this.

When Anderson decided to not promote on Yelp. I searched for Pho on Yelp and my location is close to his restaurant. I was unable to see his listing almost being punished for disconnecting his service so that he feels the “impact” of not being hosted on Yelp. We also noticed that restaurants always appear in the same order after search. Therefore restaurants appearing on page 2 and onward, are at a disadvantage when users are selecting places to eat. This is a demonstrated behavior of saving time from our previous user research. No one will spend too much time researching were to eat, they just want to see the nice pictures and negative reviews, because they want to decide quickly.

Future Progress

Our project is coming to a close and we need to plan our time well. I am concerned that we won’t have enough user numbers for our business. We need to create another strategy to expand in a short amount of time. Once we finish our MVP flow, we will be able to send it out through our user channels to gain more interest.

For our customers, we thought to expand on the idea that searches can appear randomly in list form, giving businesses an opportunity to be visible on our platform. Customers are able to highlight their key dishes and advertise them directly to the user base. Anderson liked the idea that his Bun Bo Hue would be shown to people who like to eat Bun Bo Hue. A key signature dish that people would not give a second thought, if they did not experience it in person. Instead of searching on the menu he said, he would like to see what signature dish is to order ahead of time

We also need to validate our user flow in our MVP idea. People love the idea, but we need to make it, how does our user get from A to B? We are currently designing what we think is the fastest and easiest solution. It is difficult to keep great ideas out of the flow and just focus on the given user task. Once we get the core mechanics to work we should be able to create more features of the overall experience.