Our most valuable and probably also most striking lesson learned from our initial get-together as a newly-formed team is that we learned how to efficiently communicate with one another. Considering the fact that our team consists of people from 3 different nationalities and with 4 different personalities (taking the results from the personality test into account) this leaves us with a great diversity but also a challenge with respect to differences in working-mentality and problem-approaching.The idea generation worked out quite well, as we all shared one potential idea in a google-drive document to start with, giving every member the chance to rate the ideas based on the attributes discussed in class. We got to learn that we are all very open for discussion when it came to selecting our most valuable idea.
The most difficult part was how to properly analyze and structure the very basic construct of our business idea and potential obstacles that we will have to overcome in order to build something successful. Here it was amazing to see how the variety in our team helped to come up with different aspects, issues and dimensions of the idea and therefore carefully considering various potential scenarios and objectives. Nonetheless, especially during an open brain-storming session, it is not easy to work efficiently and not eventually lose sight of the greater picture, while still taking into account every aspect mentioned by the team members.
LESSONS LEARNED
During the second week of our project, we managed to break our idea down to the main benefit that we want to provide and sell to our customers. Especially with respect to the business plan canvas, we learned that - as mentioned in class - our first try-out was really just a business-plan 0.1.
The Canvas brings several advantages: It is very visual and dynamic. We have everything important there at one sight and the sticky notes we attached facilitates the process of easily changing or moving around throughout group-discussions. After all, we came to terms with the fact that the Business Model Canvas is focusing on activities – not results.
We still had to go through several amendments, as we came up with different approaches and ideas in some of the sections. Learning that sometimes it is okay to start from scratch again and reconsider a whole idea (e.g. our key value propositions) in order to get to the bottom of it all, was very valuable. Furthermore, we came to terms with the fact that especially when facing various tasks, it is easier to form smaller groups which then focus on a specific task. Afterwards, openly presenting the outcome and finalizing it all together as a whole, saves time, gives new insights and increases the overall efficiency.
Moving onwards to the Hypothesis-testing we had some issues coming to terms with which of the multiple Hypothesises that we stated at first actually were the most striking ones. Rating them in the Cluster of 'Probability of Invalid Hypothesis' and 'the Impact in the Business Model if Invalid Hypothesis' profoundly increased our understanding of how high the risks would be for our business model and which ones we hence would have to choose.
Session 2
The third week of our project has started off with the lecture in which we got introduced to certain new dimensions of the project and activities that would help us to gain in-depth information on the formulation of our hypotheses, an identification of the thoughts and feelings of a potential target customer and how we are performing with respect to our competitors.
Despite the fact that we, unfortunately, didn't get the chance to present our own hypotheses in class, it was valuable to get insight into the presentations of other groups and the feedback that the professor and the students gave one another.
The different activities applied during the lecture and afterwards provided us with further information which helps us to better define our aims, obstacles, target segments and insight into the wants and needs of the customers. Before, we had not properly considered which 'pain' and 'gain' the consumer might technically be associating with our product, especially filling out the empathy map has helped us to focus on these facts. Also properly focussing on 2 actual characters, while writing the Persons for them, has reinforced our position and that our software is, in fact, addressing real-life problems and aims to create a solution to these.
Putting all the pieces together that we have acquired from different activities, it gets us a broad overview of where we are headed to and how to get there. Especially mapping the value curve of our product together with a competitors service showed us what our unique value proposition really is and why our product is standing out compared to other services available in the market. Knowing the core benefits of a product/service helps to build a brands identity, underlines which features to lay the focus on and which aspects to further overthink and develop.
Building the interview-scripts for our two customer segments was a good task to dig deeper into which insights we would want to get from our consumers, in order to target the most important aspects and focus on perfecting them in our product. At first, it wasn't easy to come up with various scenarios that the target segments are going through in their daily lives, but open-discussion and brain-storming with all the team-members brought in perspective from various sides and helped us to come up with enough situations to build up the interviews upon.
This week we have made a great jump, especially with the physical modulations of our app, we had to take another step to properly brainstorm all together and take into account which features and applications we would actually like to offer to our customers. The prototyping was also useful to see how far we can get with our technical knowledge and how much effort an actual system-implementation like ours would require. We have come to the conclusion that the coding of an App is clearly feasible and could be easily outsourced to experts. Conducting some research on the Bluetooth-Transferal of our digital receipts, also this seems doable. A note of caution though, as we are still facing the issue of personal data infringement and potential other legal restrictions. Further research and expert-interviewing will help us to get a better understanding of the matter.
In class we got the chance to reevaluate the channels and the type of relationships we will be facing throughout our business development and final implementation of the system. This was fairly easy for us, as our original point of views did not really differ after getting introduced to new ideas regarding channels and relationships. More difficult were the discussions regarding our sources of revenue. As we are aiming to offer a Freemium model, most features of our application / service are supposed to be freely available to our customers. This leads us to an issue, as we are having difficulties to evaluate how many people would be willing to pay for an upgraded version of our expense tracking app. Also, the question of whether environmentally concerned people would simply become supportive of our system, only due to the contribution of waste reduction is still in the room.
uAs we are lacking insights to these questions, we have decided to actually conduct interviews with the scripts that we have prepared to last class, in order to receive valuable information from potential customers. We have chosen 2 ‘environmentally conscious’ people and 3 ‘organized people’, all at different ages, to get a fair insight from both customer segments.
The idea to expose them to different scenarios and make them rank due to their importance/affectedness is a very easy but highly effective way to understand the needs of a customer and which struggles / problem they are facing on a day-to-day basis. We have come to realise that both customer segments see great potential and an innovative solution to their problems - it has made us confident that building a broad customer base would indeed be a feasible goal.
The information will yet have to be properly analyzed and hopefully transformed into solutions by the GreenTrackers Team.
Session 3
Session 1
Session 4
Session 5
In the last session and throughout the days afterwards we have put our main focus on improving our MVP / Prototype of the App and afterwards finalising our business idea, especially with respect to the technological matters.
In class we got the chance to build our own landing page and design a quick video that expresses the main idea of what our product/service is offering. At an earlier stage, we had already given it a try to create a first landing-page, but the tools presented to us in class were surely valuable and the templates far more useful than what we had worked with before.
Given the short amount of time of not just preparation-time itself but also the ‘to-the-point’ measures of the video (30seconds), forced us to brainstorm how narrow down the content of our idea to the main, most important facts. It was a great practise to link qualitative aspects to something creative and fun, as we believe that especially considering that the video was created for the landing page, it needs to be informative, interesting and catchy! It was also a fun task to see how we - as a team - manage to work under time pressure, splitting tasks amongst each other and turning ideas quickly into something physical! We didn’t quite manage to come up with the perfect version in the first trial, but revised it at home and now landing page & video are in line and connected to our page. As our front-page of the blog is already sort of set up as a Landing-Page itself, we have connected it to the ‘Get the App’-button, which then transfers one directly to our landing page.
Furthermore, we have improved our MVP (the prototype / mock-up of our App) due to the information given in class. As our system is split up in three different processes, we had to take a deeper look into the technology that we could find to support our idea. We surely do not have the technological expertise to physically code the app, but we at least wanted to make sure that it would hypothetically be feasible to bring our app on the market.
Firstly, we have the generation of the digital receipt, which should be rather simple, as current scanning-systems already do that. We will now have to find a way to transfer the receipt from the computer of the retailer to the phone of the customer. There are two ways we have considered, which would be
a.) Through BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy), a wireless personal area network technology which is used for transmitting data over short distances. Using this technology would ensure that the process is very fast, as goes without any effort (the customer automatically receives the bluetooth message without even having to physically do anything). We are still unsure whether this technology is already advanced enough to actually generate the full length of a receipt, as BLE is known for very simple applications requiring small periodic transfer of data. Eventually, a digital receipt would be too complex for a technology like this.
b.) Through scanning a QR-Code! Our idea would be to set up a little QR-code-scanner at each check-out-counter, where the costumer, once done checking-out, can simply hold the phone under the scanner, receive the code which is then automatically transferred into the app. This would also be a very quick, effortless process and is already proven to technologically feasible to generate such things as a receipt - furthermore, we believe that the QR-scanning doesn’t account for much room for failure.
Since we were already reading ourselves into the options we have in terms of technological realisation, we decided to also design the ‘one business process’ related to this. We stumbled across a few issues as we had first designed a business process that included the decision making of the customer whether to upgrade to the freemium-model or not. When we realised that this is an external process that we only influence to a certain extend, we decided to look into something more intrinsic, which is actually built upon our own business activities.
Hence, we have chosen the initial introduction of our system to the retailers. As the usability of our App increases with each retailers who is offering the system and offers the service of a digital-receipt-transfer to our customers, we consider it to be one of the most important and crucial steps throughout our business development process.
Considering that we are almost reaching the end of the project, we can surely say that we have grown together as a team throughout several group-meetings, millions of WhatsApp messages, hundreds of shared pictures in our group, first trials and complete rearrangements of our blog and so on and so forth! As we come from complete different backgrounds, not only nationality wise but also on an educational basis, we also manage to look at things from very different perspectives, which helps to carefully take into account the sides of the customers, retailers, legal aspects, technological details and structural processes!
Now, off to our last challenge, creating our final pitch to hopefully attract a number of investors for our Start-Up!
Session 6
Coming to the end of the semester, we have now covered all the steps required to formulate a thorough business plan and gathered enough information to fully pitch our little start-up-baby!
In our last class we have discussed we and why not we would consider becoming an Entrepreneur in either the next year or within the next 5 years! An interesting exercise, considering that we know have gained a lot more valuable insights into what building a business from scratch would require and how many little challenges you come across every day! Most of our team seemed to be quite hooked by the idea to - one day - start its own business and be one's very own boss! Nonetheless, we are still quite hesitant, being aware of how time-consuming such things are and that our Master currently does not offer us to be as committed as we would have to be in order to be successful! That doesn't mean we can't start planning just yet ;)
Throughout the lecture No. 6, we have talked about the organizational chart of our company and which positions we are already covering and who else needs to be hired in order to make a complete, qualified team to cover all tasks and departments. We have come to terms that we could cover most of the things by ourselves, apart from the technological part, as it would require an IT-expert to set up a complex, sophisticated and high-quality app, as well as on-going maintenance.
Further, we have introduced the concept of costs and setting up a financial plan in class! This was certainly not easy, taking into account that so far we have only ‘played around’ with our idea, never actually looking into figures and numbers. For the pitch-deck we have then actually talked 'real business' and put down some numbers to see if and how we are going to break-even and best possible, also become lucrative in the long-run.
Whilst working on the final business pitch, we have started to compare our data to similar business already launched on the market and benchmarked our situation to theirs! As the financial planning is absolutely crucial for building a successful company in the long run, we have invested quite a lot of time in research, brainstorming and discussing the different fix / variable costs that will occur.
Moving forward to the ‘Calendar’, we have come to realize that there is still a lot of work ahead of us and that a start-up is surely not able to work with simply a good idea and a few motivated minds! As we are still unexperienced in the fields of Entrepreneurship and especially with the means of time and market-share-acquisition, we were struggling to determine where our company would be in 5 years or even in just 1 year from now. We surely are optimistic and assume a quick and broad success for our GreenTrackers! Making sure that peoples’ lives are getting more organized all over the world – whilst doing something to actively protect our planet!