Our Focus this month - Brunch! (MVP Development)
At the end of the previous month, we had just pitched, completed some product discovery activities, and wanted to get stuck in developing a product. But... we quickly realised we didn’t know what we wanted to build! While we had a grand vision of what a solution could look like, we had no idea where to start, or if people would use it.
So we went back to the drawing board, concentrated on our learnings, and laid out a clear set of criteria we wanted to fulfill with a solution. This led us to ✨ brunch ✨.
This diagram highlights the kinds of things we were thinking about:
After concluding on brunch, we still had to execute. We didn’t have a platform and limited social following, so we decided the best way forward would be a Concierge MVP approach.
But what even is a Concierge MVP?
Concierge MVPs involve manually helping your users accomplish their goals as a means of validating whether or not they have a need for what you're offering. Building a product is not even necessary.
Our implementation
Our customer’s goals were to meet new people and make friends they could then do activities with. We generated a network of users who were interested in the same goal and matched people who seemed like they would get along. We managed the logistics and sent them out to brunch.
So far we’ve run 5 individual brunches with more coming this weekend.
We started by creating a Bumble BFF profile promoting the event. This allowed us to be precise in who we were reaching, and we knew this is where a bunch of dissatisfied users were. However this was very time-intensive, so we’re transitioning to organic content and community building (plus we got kicked off the platform 🤣). We’ve realised the importance of safety and verifiability that our service is legitimate and trustworthy, so we’ve set up a website with testimonials and branding.
With each iteration we plan to continuously increase quality and fidelity, as well as test assumptions and other models.
Our Brunch Goals
We want to serve 100 customers by mid-May (currently at 25).
We want to understand how many people will return to brunch & why.
We want to improve the quality of the matching and experience consistency,
We want to build automation to minimise admin.
Good, Bad and Ugly
Good
Having filled almost all brunch seats within the 2 days of promoting it is a BIG W for us - (95% through organic and low-effort channels)
Almost 80 Gals Brunch signups & we have now paying customers (people see value in what we are providing) 🥺
Our Auckland-based Facebook Group is at 400 members!
Bad
Having two long weekends in a row has thrown us off a bit with progress and brunch timings
Ugly
Still no meaningful progress on a product 😣
Our Focus For Next Month
Developing brunches
Testing other verticals
Testing other models
Increasing the value of each event
Kudos
Our mentors for holding us accountable to the problem!
Stephen from Tinybeans for helping us think about the product from a different perspective.
Asks
“Drink plenty of water, and get a solid 8 hours of sleep when you can. Also, make sure you wear a coat when you go out, the weather is getting kinda cold” - Your mother