With much pride, there's absolutely no doubt we were exceptional on Thursday during our first official smoothie sale. Why? Easy. We were prepared and had analyzed our customers. We knew, for a fact, people were demanding smoothies and where completely willing to buy them on campus. My role, at the stand, was not to sell smoothies, nor collect S/.5 per smoothie, but analyze our customer’s thoughts, feelings, emotions and most importantly, why they were buying smoothies from us. I stood a meter away from the stand and simply looked at what people did (yes, like a stalker) and reacted to the idea of smoothies on campus. Luckily, there weren't times during the stand that I felt something was not working, nor needed my help. However, as normal human beings, success brings confidence and power to our startup, but we most certainly can't predict the future with our one-time success. There's a mentality that we need to keep in mind, a long-term mentality that will attract us a bigger amount of customers and gain us profit for the future. As my not-yet-meet friend Eric Ries calls it, the I.B.P.M.D.L cycle.
ideas:
To begin, in order to create something, you must have an idea. Luckily, in Blendz, that idea is clear and purposeful. Should we not come back to that idea again? Most certainly we must. We have succeeded once now, proving that people demand our product. However, if we want to have greater success we must have a new idea for our stand that’s a game changer. This can be new smoothie, something to eat (Muffins, Cupcakes, Cookies, etc.), more customer interaction, a fundraiser, etc. This won’t exhaust our customer exhausted by an overload of smoothies.
BUILD:
After you've tightly grabbed on to your idea, as a business, you must begin producing your next game-changer. Think about when you can test it, think about how effective will it be, is it desirable and feasible? Don't test it on yourself, nor your colleagues, but on your customers. Send out a survey, call people, send an e-mail or ask for verbal feedback. If you want people to buy your smoothies, (or product) you must give them a reason to do so.
PRODUCT:
Possibly, after hearing and reading hundreds of customer feedbacks, you may begin building your product. You may tweak it a bit while building it. For us, as a smoothie startup, we may want to create a new smoothie. The flavor is what we want to focus on. We're obviously not creating a Mango and Camu-Camu (Peruvian Fruit) juice because more than half of our customers don't even know what Camu-Camu is. However, we might have testers a couple of day before our second big smoothie selling. We can ask them what smoothie they most-prefer and get some valuable data from them. This step connects, in a way, with building that perfect product, however, you must test your product in order to get it perfect.
MEASURE:
How do you measure your success? Sadly, with the amount of profit you've gained. If you've sold out, that proves you were successful, on the contrary, if you didn't, then, you've messed something up or people didn't have such a high demand of you're product.
DATA:
How do you measure your success? Sadly, with the amount of profit you've gained. If you've sold out, that proves you were successful, on the contrary, if you didn't, then, you've messed something up or people didn't have such a high demand of you're product.
LEARN:
It is here, in the learning part, where you're able to create a whole new idea for you're business. It is that kick that you'll need in order to guild you to your next game changer. You'll learn from your mistakes and try to make something new and better. Take in consideration that if you've learned little, or not gotten enough feedback from customers and then analyzed, then your learning will be vague and very un-useful. This is because in this section, learn, you're focusing on what you know you won't do again, and what you will. It's basically discarding what's bad, and working with what is good.