Week 2: In our last post we discussed how we uncovered the initial problems that people have with cooking through our market survey. In this post I discuss what we did next in preparing for our initial test launch. Inspired by Eric Ries’ Lean Startup we set out to create a minimally viable product that would meet the basic needs of our customers, without needing to have a “perfect product” on day 1. To do this conducted in-person interviews with families, set up our initial e-mail list, and launched our beta website. We conducted 3 initial ordering periods to see if people were willing to pay for ChopBox, and to test the entire process from recipe creation to delivery. All this led up to validating our service with real paying customers. So let’s jump in!
Family Interviews
If ChopBox was to design a better dinner for families we first needed to experience a few family dinners ourselves. We contacted a few people we knew and arranged to visit the Spring family around dinner-time. Between mom who works part-time and dad who works full-time, taking care of 2 year old Cody and getting dinner on the table could be a little chaotic. For our interview, we decided to find a recipe, purchase all the ingredients for them, and watch as they cooked the meal together. Our goal was to step back and observe everything that happened and didn’t happen.
Family Interviews
If ChopBox was to design a better dinner for families we first needed to experience a few family dinners ourselves. We contacted a few people we knew and arranged to visit the Spring family around dinner-time. Between mom who works part-time and dad who works full-time, taking care of 2 year old Cody and getting dinner on the table could be a little chaotic. For our interview, we decided to find a recipe, purchase all the ingredients for them, and watch as they cooked the meal together. Our goal was to step back and observe everything that happened and didn’t happen.
The interview opened our eyes to some of the key problems the family had:
The Spring family usually cooks the same few meals every week. They would like to try new recipes, but they often end up buying too many ingredients and have to throw the extra away at the end of the week. Mom mentioned they usually have time to go to the grocery store, but it’s difficult bringing a child into the store with them. We also found that it’s difficult to follow a recipe with multiple steps and instructions, cook, and entertain their son at the same time.
This interview along with others led to us creating recipes with:
1. Fewer than 8 steps
2. Familiar and approachable ingredients
3. Cooking times less than 35 minutes
The Spring family usually cooks the same few meals every week. They would like to try new recipes, but they often end up buying too many ingredients and have to throw the extra away at the end of the week. Mom mentioned they usually have time to go to the grocery store, but it’s difficult bringing a child into the store with them. We also found that it’s difficult to follow a recipe with multiple steps and instructions, cook, and entertain their son at the same time.
This interview along with others led to us creating recipes with:
1. Fewer than 8 steps
2. Familiar and approachable ingredients
3. Cooking times less than 35 minutes
Reaching Potential Customers Through E-mail
After we designed our first recipes we needed a way to get the word out to potential customers. We decided to focus our efforts on building a good e-mail list, as our first customers would likely have some connection to us (friends, family, co-workers). We built our customer e-mail list to over 600 people, adding all of our friends family, classmates, and colleagues. I’ve usedMailChimp for a number of projects before and love the easy to use design templates and analytics, all available for free. To reach the most people I chose to include everyone I knew in my e-mail list because even if someone may not be a customer, they could share our site with someone who might be. Below is the process we used incase you want to follow a similar path:
After we designed our first recipes we needed a way to get the word out to potential customers. We decided to focus our efforts on building a good e-mail list, as our first customers would likely have some connection to us (friends, family, co-workers). We built our customer e-mail list to over 600 people, adding all of our friends family, classmates, and colleagues. I’ve usedMailChimp for a number of projects before and love the easy to use design templates and analytics, all available for free. To reach the most people I chose to include everyone I knew in my e-mail list because even if someone may not be a customer, they could share our site with someone who might be. Below is the process we used incase you want to follow a similar path:
- Download all your e-mail contacts as a .csv file from your e-mail service (Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, even AOL….)
- Download your LinkedIn contacts by following this handy-dandy guide here: Export LinkedIn Contacts
- Ask friends and family to send you all of their contacts (within reason)
- Import all your contacts into a master excel sheet with columns for first name, last name, e-mail (These are the most important)
- Create a MailChimp account and upload the excel sheet to create a new list.
- Now just create your newsletter template, write your message, and send away!