Revenue Model Week

This week we prepared revenue model for our product.

What I thought:

I thought that professionals would like to be incentivized for having a coffee with the student. I also thought that they would be willing to be paid differently for having a coffee with the student, differently for giving student a tour, and differently for letting students shadow them at work.

I tried that:

I made a survey for professionals to learn how much of an incentive they would be willing to be paid for a service. But…

One of my teammates changed the survey after we collected seven responses. I was wondering what should I do with this situation because all the responses suddenly became invalid and I knew that previous information will be needed later on. I decided to be open to that teammate and explained that changing someone’s work without approval isn’t a good habit to have and I explained why the new survey doesn’t work. The survey was eventually copied and changed back. This situation was stressful, but I’m glad we found a middle ground.

I did pricing for our product, based on our collected data from interviews. I realized that we didn’t ask about one-time payment but about monthly subscription which made it more difficult. We got a very good feedback on the presentation: One person said that people would say different thing and do different thing. Customers could tell that they would pay $20 for the service, but in fact they would pay $5 or $30. So we will do one more research on pricing.

I learned this:

Professionals don’t want any incentive for having coffee with a student, giving a tour to a student, nor for letting students shadow them at work. 98% of respondents said they want “nothing”. It was positively surprising!

It’s easy to forget about mission statement. Right before presentation we realized that our Value Prop doesn’t match our service anymore. It was too late to change the product so we just changed out value prop. It’s a huge mistake, remember to never do it! I think my advice would be to place Mission Statement and Value Prop in some visible place and look at it each time before making decisions.

Being open to teammates is crucial. Don’t be afraid to speak up if you know that feedback you have is important to your team’s progress.

Don’t ask people how much they would pay for a service. Instead convince them to buy the service for specific prices and see what happens.

Next time:

I will be even more assertive with keeping the team on track. I can feel some mistrust from my teammates, which makes me a bit upset and lost, so maybe I should dig a bit deeper into that problem. I just want good for the project and a team and maybe this is something I should communicate. Our team roles feel mixed up and it would be beneficial to fix it, to make sure every person has a clear role and assigned tasks. Maybe we are all just tired, or maybe I am just not clear enough with what I say. Who knows? I think I will ask my team what are their feelings. I hope they won’t read this blog post before I talk to them ;)

Now is the time to check how much $$ students would pay for the service.

And we will go back to our previous Value Prop, we already have an idea how to do it. We will simply move from students having coffee with professionals to shadowing and work-tours. Our next steps are acquisition, concierge test, and more research on pricing.

Here is the link to my previous post on a pitch deck: https://medium.com/the-creative-founder/startup-lessons-pitch-deck-4e2d2fa43a51