The Final Pitch By Gearóid McKendrick

 This week was the final week of the course and time for our final pitch. We were all busy preparing to present to esteemed guest such as Niamh Bushness the Start-up Commissioner, Geraldine Flynn the Head of Recruitment at Twitter and Gary Leyden Head of NDRC Launchpad, among others.

This week’s work

We were all focused on continuing with customer interviews in order to gain even more insights into their problems and solutions these problems. This helped us prepare for any questions that might be posed to us during our pitch.

Aisling presented on behalf of the group. This week she was busy practising and preparing the pitch whilst working on the financial figures for the business and updating our MVP video. Marie was writing posts for our blog and pulling together info about each team member for our ‘about us’ slide, while Claire was becoming a master app builder and putting the finishing touches to the prototype for ‘Giftitude’. I worked on the landing page slide for the presentation and pulled together the key insights from all our interviews on Launchpad Central.

This week, we were able to apply everything we learnt in our class with Andrew Keogh from Aristo and used his suggested layout for putting together our pitch. This was a great help in planning our approach.

The big day!

We began the build up to the pitching session by Tweeting about the event. Aisling set up a tweet screen in the venue which showed all Tweets using the hashtag #SmurfitStartup. As the guests arrived we found out that our pitch was first.

Aisling presented and done an excellent job. We were all very proud of her. The judging panel had some questions and comments – one of the main ones being how difficult it is to break into the SME market which is something we had discovered ourselves through our customer interview.

The other groups pitched and it was very interesting to see their progress and to hear the judges feedback and comments. After the class we had the opportunity to talk and network with all of the attendees. And that was the end of our journey. It was an amazing experience and each of us learned so much over the 12 weeks. We would like to thank Rohan, Ruiqi and Raomal for all their support during the semester and for all of their hard work the put into organising the final pitching event.

Financial Planning for Lean Start-ups - Marie Mansfield

Stay on top of your finances. Don’t leave that up to others. This was the warning from Jack Foley our guest speaker on financial planning for lean start-ups. As a class of potential entrepreneurs it seemed like we all had a lot to learn from Jack who was eager for us all to tackle the complexities of financial management. Introducing us to FaB Linker (www.FabLinker.com) Jack shared the key financial concepts to help start-up businesses build a financial plan and more importantly how to effectively manage and track their money and finances. FabLinker was created to ‘ help entrepreneurs and non-financial managers understand, enjoy and use appropriate financial skills’. During the lecture Jack walked us through the language of Finance explaining the key financial terms - Balance sheet, Equity, Liability and many more. Learning the language of Finance helped provide a starting point to deepen my knowledge of Finance planning and reinforced the importance of building the necessary financial skills to engage with potential investors. The FabLinker software system Jack shared proved more challenging to absorb and was not possible to apply to our project with just a week to go before our final submission.

Engage Digital Financial Planning

To define our financial plan we had to first decide on our Revenue Stream, then look at our pricing plan and our sales pipeline. Mapping out our financial plan below for year 1 we focussed on start-up cost for estimating running costs per month versus potential revenue per month.

Revenue Stream

• Year 1 - 3 : SME subscriptions
• Year 4 + :   Reports for 3rd party bodies
• Pricing plan

• Freemium model
• Premium model
• Concierge service
• Sales pipeline
• 5 team members – 20% conversion rate of meetings
• Year 1
• First half

• Business development, brand development, technology development, networking, promotions and marketing
• 10 prototype clients SMEs in Dublin City
• Cost in Year 1
• Data analyst salary: €45,000
• Outsourced development: €40,000
• Overheads: €25,000
• Promotion: €10,000   
• Total: €120,000
• Second half

• 10 paying customers at €3,600 annual subscriptions.
• 10 customers paying €500 in concierge fees
• Revenue in year 1
• €36,000 in subscriptions
• €5000 in concierge fees
• Total: €41,000
• Deficit: €79,000

This is our MVP financial model and hope to be able to leverage the FaBLinker system as a reference point for future financial forecasting and tracking.

Focus and important To Do’s for our team.

With less than a week to final submission the main areas of focus for our team are as follows:

• Aisling: Complete draft presentation for Mon 24th Nov final presentation.
• Claire: Complete final prototype for the Engage Digital Giftitude App.
• Marie: Complete final consumer interviews to test hypothesis around Gifting versus discounts as our value proposition for consumers.
• Gearoid: Review all interviews across SMEs and Consumer sets to identify trends and conclusions.

Change ahead!

Over the past couple of weeks we've made some changes in a new direction - let us tell you how this came about...

Problems our competitors face.

From speaking to three potential competitor start-ups at Web Summit - the biggest obstacle they face in expanding is competition with other deals apps/websites. They have both identified the need SMEs have for data and interestingly they have not had trouble getting businesses on board. The trouble they have is getting customers to use their app. The SMEs customers have deals coming at them from every angle every day and they do not see the value in signing up for more deals.

1. So how to we stand out from the groupon / living social/ / grabOne / dealrush? 

We do not provide discounts we provide gifts.I have researched the consumer affect on discounts and the outcome is that a discount is perceived as being 'low quality' and a bargain or sale does not lead to loyalty to a brand. A gift makes the customer feels appreciated. Gifts are more effective at leading to brand loyalty than discounts.

We should refrain from using words like 'specials' or 'offers' or 'discount' or 'free'. We should emphasise 'loyalty' 'appreciation' and 'gratitude'.

How we set this up from the App perspective?

1. The customer downloads the app to alert them on gifts that they would enjoy in their area. 

2. The customer fills out their details to ensure they receive tailored gifts. i.e date of birth (for Birthday presents) gender, occupation, interests/hobbies.

3. The customer decides if they want daily,weekly, monthly or no communications about free gifts.

4. The customer is notified by GPS when there is a gift in their location.

4. The customer can decide to share the gift with a friend and they can both use it together.

5. The customer needs to fill out a 5 question feedback form in order to have the gift deducted from bill. This is to see if they would like similar gifts in the future

6. We can allow customers to search for gifts based on their mood

The main concept we see working is that it is instantaneous and shareable. The customer is with their friend walking down Grafton street. They get a pop-up on their phone - free scoop of icecream in Ginos with a purchase of speciality coffees. The app user accepts the gift shares it with their friend and they instantaneously enjoy the gift. They both give feedback on experience.

If we alternatively are giving them 20% off icecream and coffee at Ginos they are picking it because it is cheaper than other alternatives. What happens when Ginos is full price the following week? They won't return because they perceive Ginos as being lower quality than alternatives and they don't want to pay full price. The lasting impression with Engage digital is that they get will be the good experience and free gift in Ginos. 

How will this work from our clients perspective?

1. Ginos wants to introduce a new product to appeal to young professionals as their customer base is mostly kids and students. It is coming into the winter and icecream sales are dropping they decide to trial speciality coffee.

2. We send a notification to every young professional in the area. 

3. We provide Ginos with analytical data on; 

• How many people availed of the gift
• What was their demography
• What did these people think
• What time of day did they purchase

4. We will provide Ginos with real solutions based on the data.

5. We help Ginos get a wide base of LOYAL customers by inviting customers who provided positive feeback to join their 'VIP club' where they can avail of a special month gift. 

Pricing plan: 

Ginos can send out a gift with no charge and Customers can avail of the gifts for no charge. If Ginos would like to avail of survey, analytics or VIP club they will be charged a monthly subscription.

How do we test revenue streams? 

1. Full steam ahead with customer interviews 

Simply ask the questions - 

Do the discounts make you feel more loyal towards the brand? Why? Why not?

Do carry loyalty cards for multiple shops that provide you with similar services?

How do you define loyalty?

My findings are if people have a card for one coffee shop they have a card for multiple coffee shops.Therefore LOYALTY CARDS do not = LOYALTY. 

2. SME interviews

Ask our set of questions and they ask how they measure customer feedback?

Finally, we'd like to link some theory from our course into our project 




The book is called 'Customer Loyalty - How to Earn it, How to keep it' by Jill Griffin.

It goes through the 7 key stages of growing a loyal customer.

1. Suspect (Everyone who might be interested)

2. Prospect (someone who knows about and has a need for your product/service)

3. Disqualified prospect

4. First time consumer

5. Repeat consumer

6. Client

7. Advocate

Here is how I was thinking we incorporate this;

• We send a gift to every suspect, this turns them to a prospect 
• We disqualify those not interested and those who gave a bad feedback
• We then track how often the consumer frequents the business. 
• Once they purchase a second time they are a repeat consumer.
• If they purchase once a month they are a client and we then help them become an advocate of the business by allowing them to share special gifts with friends.

Proposed new Value proposition for SMEs customers

Engage Digital provides SMEs customers with gifts tailor made to their specific interests. SMEs customers can share gifts with like-minded friends, SMEs customers provide feedback to the SME to avail of the gift

Our next blog will tell the exciting tale of our financial projections! :)

Stay tuned

Don't Sell, Don't Preach - Tell Your Story

This week we had were coached in pitching by Liam Casey from Aristo.

We took a lot away with us from this session. First and foremost we learnt the importance of telling your story when your pitching to a crowd.

Liam tells us that just because you are behind the microphone or on stage or in front of a projector - it does not meant that you can't have a conversation with your audience.

Liam emphasises how important the audience is. They may be your customer or they may know your customer. If so, let them really feel your customer's pains! Let them feel that you understand! Make them believe that you have a solution.Grab your audiences attention with your solution - this can only be done when you really know your audience.

A key tip we took from today is to speak from your experience to earn your audiences trust.

This week we are going to take what we learnt and begin to work on our final presentation for the 24th of November.

We are going to also concentrate specifically on our financial projections this week. 

We will be working together to decide our revenue stream, and sales model and our sales pipeline these will help us work out the revenue Engage digital expect to make.

We will keep you posted!!

Big Data Revenue Streams take two

It's time to take a second look at how we're going make some money out of all of this?

The problem we are facing is deciding how. We have a multi -sided business model

1. SMEs

2. SMEs customers

3. Third party market/consumer  trend reports

We have really pitched our wagons to infinity and beyond as we want to be able be an oasis of information for third parties looking for indications on consumer sentiment or SME trends.

We have noticed that there is very little information out there on SMEs and consumer behaviour in Ireland. Even the reports that we have found are outdated and not specific to customer segments or SMEs industry.

We've now found ourselves in the Revenue Streams Maze, 

How can we test if this is a viable revenue stream?

Also, when will this be a viable revenue stream for us?

What value can we add by creating market/consumer trend reports?

Who will it add value to?

How much value will it add?

We have a huge amount of unanswered questions! Which made us realise that - maybe we are not ready to investigate this aspect of our revenue stream.

We believe the best next steps would be how to create revenue streams from our SMEs and their customers.

We got out of the office this week and spoke to some experts in the field of data and two potential competitors. We wanted to discover their opinions on pain points with revenue streams.

The leader in the field believes that SMEs are not aware of the potential of data and those who do perceive resources as a barrier. 

The competitors believe it is down to the SMEs customers not getting on board. SMEs customers have tonnes of deals sites targeting them every day. 

They do not have alliance to any one particular app/website they just want to best deal in the most convenient way.  

This week we are going to figure out how to get the very best revenue stream from our SMEs by maximising customer involvement. 

We will further research our third party revenue stream when we fully understand our basic product offerings. 

Revenue Streams

Marie Mansfield

A ‘startup’ is a company that is confused about – 1. What its product is. 2. Who its customers are. 3. How to make money.”— so says Dave McClure, 500Startups co-founder.

For the Big Data team this week has been all about our revenue streams and how to make money.

As we evolve our approach and learnings through our SME and customer interviews our main focus this week has been to identify the revenue streams for our data service.

This week has been the most complex and confusing as we tease out the value of our product and the potential customers who will be willing to pay for it. We are still at the early stages.

Based on our 30 + interviews so far we are now more aware that cost is the key driving factors for small business owners so our solution will need to be high value and at a price small businesses can afford and more importantly are willing to pay for.

To attract SME our starter service would be based on a freemium model offering SMEs targeted customer data relevant to their business. This would not yield any revenue but vital to launch our service and enable SMEs to try out our solution with no cost impact for them.

Our next level service would be a Premium service offering customised reports updated with latest data/insights for their business.-Market trends/Referral scheme based on a subscription model.

And finally a Concierge Service – with consultants to advise /help SMEs implement   recommendation based on the data /insights for their business.

We have now come to realise we need to extend our revenue streams beyond SMEs to find new potential review streams.

 As a team we will explore  third parties that would value market and trend reports on SME – Start-ups, Investors, Government Bodies.

We have not yet figured out how to test our new revenue streams and this will be the focus of the team over the next 2 weeks.

What we have learnt in the class this week.

This week it has been great to see all the other team projects come together and share their learnings at our Monday class. All teams seem to be experiencing the same challenges testing their Value proposition and assessing revenue streams. There is no  easy answer for any of the teams and will involve  many more targeted interviews and experiments with end customers, relevant SMEs and some guidance from start-ups who can share their experience and advice.

Role of the each of the team during the week.

With just 3 more weeks to the end of our project our team is getting clearer on each of our focus areas.

·         Widen our interview net beyond SMEs – look to mentors, start-ups and potential 3^rd parties to explore/test new revenue streams.

·         Complete 100 interviews with SMEs and consumers – each team member will focus on 20 interviews.

·         Weekly update of team blog – rotate weekly blog update.

·         1^st MVP Prototype

·         V1 Landing Page

Sean McNulty - Mapping Our Customers

Mapping our Customers

By Gearóid McKendrick

This week (20 October), Sean McNulty, CEO of Dolmen was a guest lecturer. Sean shared some of his experience with us about making ideas work and developing new products.

This session was really interesting for us and as part of the session we began working on a needs discovery map for our customers, along with empathy maps and need statements.

Needs Discovery Map

We found this was a great way to look at our potential customers and was not something we had thought of before. It involved mapping out a process in which the customer is involved and looking at the emotions (positive or negative) associated with each step in the process.

This was very interesting as it made us focus on the customer pain points. For our examples we used two different types of users: One was a loyal customer of a restaurant going for a meal and the other was the process of restaurant changing their menu. You can see our needs discovery maps for both customer types below:

Regular Rory – Loyal restaurant customer needs discovery map:

Owner Olivia – Restaurant owner needs discovery map

Empathy Map

After looking at the need discovery map we focused on the empathy maps. This was another useful and interesting too which focuses on the different type of user or stakeholder that might come across our product.

The main aim of the empathy maps is to discovery user needs that are under-met or not met at all. This is done by choosing individual pain points and determining what would be a great outcome for each pain point.

Need Statements

We worked on need statements for the last part of the class. These are statements that focus on the outcome or goal for the customer and how the outcome can be measured. These statements which are redrafted multiple times and are informed by the insights gained from our customer interviews and should be:

• Focused on the outcome rather than a solution
• Specific
• Looked at from a broad perspective
• Use positive and relevant language

The need statements for our business are:

1. Easily gathering useful insights about their customers' spending habits and preferences, and understanding how to use this data to develop/expand their business in a practical and meaningful way

2. Maximising the benefit of existing/proposed loyalty schemes, to both SMEs and their customers, by capturing data to improve customer experience and inform business decisions

3. Making smart business decisions in a cost-effective way, through identifying the needs of their customers 

Refining our Value Proposition through Customer Interviews

SME Customer Interviews – Our Analysis

By Gearóid McKendrick

This week we met as a team on Monday (13^th of October) to take stock of where we are with the project. We took this opportunity to compare notes and to analyse the customer interviews we have done so far, hoping to spot some trends and insights along the way!

For this meeting we focused on discussing the results of our SME interviews. While doing this we noticed some themes that were popping up. In particular independent café/restaurant owner were slightly anti-branding/marketing. They want to keep their independent feel and personal service and are cautious about upsetting or annoying their customers. However, they did seem to have a strong interest in the data analysis side of the business but would want to gather data in a way that wouldn’t annoy customers.

We noticed that those of whom we interviewed could be roughly placed in 4 different categories (below). This was interesting for us, as it allowed it to identify our SME customers even more specifically and eliminate those who we don’t think would be interested:

1. SME’s that don’t want to expand

We found that some small business do not want to expand – they are passionate about what they are doing and that’s enough for them. They have built a personal relationship with customers over the years and are happy to continue as they are. For them, this is a passion and they have no real need or desire to expand their business. Therefore the people in this segment may not be interested in a product that helps them make more effective business decisions.

2. SME’s that want to grow

This will be a key segment for our business. These are SME owners who are in the process of expanding or who want to expand their business. They want to bring their passion and love for what they do to more and more people. They are savvier about things like data analysis and marketing, but are still cautious about marketing. Above all, they want to keep their customers happy and would not like to do anything that is likely to upset them.

Some are too busy to look at data solutions but are tech savvy. They would like to implement a loyalty scheme for customers, but simple don’t have the time. For many, the only data they have is from the till system but they have little time to do analysis on this.

Others currently use digital loyalty cards and use this data to make business decisions. However this data is being used to bring in new customers rather than developing and retaining current customers. One of the biggest gains for these people would be making data analysis less time consuming and finding a way to dig deeper into data.

The people we spoke to in this category had strong opinions on data. They do not like the idea of gathering data as they have a close relationships with their customers and don’t want to jeopardise that. They are wary or losing their personal level of customer service. A pain for this category is finding a way to collect customer information in a way that doesn’t feel impersonal or too ‘corporate’.

3. Different Industries

We interviewed businesses from a range different sectors other than the service industry and found that they have different issues. Included in these interviews were travel, web and construction businesses.  One of their issues was pricing. They would like to find more trends and insights about their customer base and what their average spend is on similar services and products. This would allow them to price their product more effectively. They have made mistakes on pricing because of lack of information about how much customers are willing to pay. A gain for them would be replacing hindsight with insight!

Another pain for them is lack of qualitative customer feedback. However, some (specifically web based) find the information received from Google analytics is sufficient. Most of those interviewed would be interested in some sort of a corporate loyalty scheme to reward their corporate customers.

4. B2B’s

For B2B’s loyalty cards wouldn’t work for them but would be interested in customer and market insights Again this category would like information and insights to help them ensure that they are not making mistakes when making business decisions.

We found that a lot of decisions and information they have about customers are based on assumptions and observations rather than actual data.

So, what next?

We all agreed that we are finding it difficult to get people to interview, especially for the SME segment of the business. Although we have managed to gain some insights through interviews, we are concentrating our efforts for the next two weeks on tracking down more people. Aisling has put together a list of SME owner from LinkedIn. We are going to divide this list and get in touch with as many people as possible.

The insights we get from talking to people will be key to building our business successfully, so this is a priority for the new two weeks.

Customer Journey Get, Keep and Grow!

Oct 21^st 2014

This week, our focus has been on customer relationships – how we get, keep and grow our business. As we have progressed with our Canvas over the last few weeks, we have identified 3 primary customer segments for our project; SMEs involved in the B2C space, loyal customers of SMEs, and government agencies/investors and media bodies. With this in mind, we decided to outline the ‘get, keep and grow’ aspects of each segment. As our channels are still slightly complex in that our service and product would be delivered through different channels depending on the segment and stage of the service, we felt this would be the simplest way to approach the task. One thing that has certainly become evident from our conversations with SMEs is that they are a close-knit community, and often lean on one another for support, either through personal connections or business groups set up specifically to facilitate a community for small businesses. Many also seek outside support or advice from professional consultants early in their life cycle, so it has become evident that word of mouth will play a huge role for us.

Most SMEs have also highlighted the lack of resources that they have to dedicate towards such a service, so it’s clear that we need to look at a low-cost model that requires very little additional workload for the business, or even isolate the selling of trend reports to third parties as the revenue stream. We are considering the freemium model at this stage as well, with a basic report available as part of the free service, but offering paid tailored packages for those looking for more in-depth reports and more hands-on consultancy.

 

  

For customers, we have highlighted the need for the rewards/offers to them to be high quality, and of real value, as well as ensuring that they feel that their data is secure, and that the app is not obtrusive. For third parties, trend reports are often vital for them to make informed business or investment decisions, for them to gain market insights and draw up accurate forecasts, so there must be a quality analysis done and high-quality reports drawn up. The reports must be released regularly, to keep firms interested, as they will want to keep abreast of current trends.

We are still finding it quite tricky to secure interviews with SMEs – one of the main reasons behind this that we have encountered is a sheer lack of time on SME owners’ part. As we have mentioned on numerous occasions, they tend to be quite hands on, and resources tend to be stretched, so this has been a challenge. We will continue to use the list that Aisling has drawn up, and as I am a member and active participant in the Irish Biz Party Group (a forum for Irish entrepreneurs and small businesses), I have posted there to ask if any members would be willing to be interviewed to help us out. 

Aside from this, the general consensus in our group has been that perhaps we aren't casting the net widely enough, and that maybe our focus is too narrow by being just on SMEs themselves and customers. Over the coming weeks, we will be looking to interview others that work closely with SMEs that may be able to offer valuable insights and help us better our knowledge of our customer segments using an indirect approach, such as business consultants, technology experts etc. As Peter Drucker put it, “The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself”! 

Customer Journey - pains and gains

Oct 10th 2014

This week we aim to learn about our customers journey by jumping in their skin and discovering if Engage Digital’s offering will satisfy a need, a want or is it simply just something nice to have.

We have learned that we need to really listen to the 'pains and gains' of our customers to understand their needs and to satisfy them effectively. We need to keep pushing till it hurts to discover pain points! As extreme as it sounds this week we are out to really learn what pains our customers face. 

We want to create a solution that our customers NEED we don't just want Digital Engage to be a product customers WANT or a product customers think would be NICE TO HAVE. We want this to be something they can't live without!

We need to ensure that the needs of our customers match our value proposition.

Our Current Value Proposition:

Engage Digital provides SME’s in the food, leisure and service industrywith a solution to access analysed information and insights about theircustomers, to aid them in making effective business decisions. 

We need to align this to our customers Need these two to really put Value in what we have to offer.

So this seems like a massive undertaking and we don't think that there is a post-it big enough to fit our to-do list. But we need to start somewhere! So this week we have decided to start off by using our new set of interview questions to help us understand our customer’s pains and gains

We will also create a new set of questions for loyalty card holders to discover the pains and gains they face. We will ask document customers views towards loyalty rewards, are they a need, want or nice to have? We will be using these interviews to help us test our hypothesis that digital loyalty cards will be an effective medium to collect consumer insights. 

We will be creating new consumer personas (both owners and customers) to represent the new customers emerging from our interviews.

We will be begin to create our Minimum Viable Product. So far we have created a short animated video explaining what we do.

Next we will put this video about us on a landing page with a link to add contact details for further information.

We will update you next week on our progress with SME and consumer interviews.
\you can check out our video here! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjWxr22aqb0

Enjoy

Aisling