Here's an overview of what we've been up to in June.
Hi friends, welcome to Chillsy's 8th monthly update! (Sorry we’re late 😅)
Chillsy exists because we are frustrated at the lack of practical opportunities to make meaningful connections, and subsequent missed events and activities.
In these updates, we'll share what we've been up to, and our progress towards our goal of helping people overcome various barriers including time, opportunities, confidence to do things they enjoy and feeling less lonely.
Our Focus this month - Growing towards product!
June was insane 🤯
At the start of the month, we were a bit lost as to how our work could smoothly translate into some kind of product. One of our key goals is to solve the problem at scale, and while the brunches may be effective and desirable, the scalability of the format is pretty limited. We tried to move to wireframing, but it all felt very unsteady.
Gals Dining (A more relevant experiment):
So, we ran a new initiative called Gal’s Dining. This time we asked our community to suggest where they wanted to eat, what date, and how many people they wanted to go with. We then connected them with people in our community who matched their personalities and interests. Frankly, it was very rushed, and we underestimated the logistical hurdles involved. But, we successfully organised 3 dinners, for 12 people (Who paid to attend).
Our key learning was that the individual event suggesters didn’t actually matter that much, but rather archetypes that they represented. People chose to attend dinners that aligned with who they were, and so everyone got along. The party, festival, and go-to-town people found each other. The artistic, creative, homebody people found each other.
Our Customers:
We also wanted to understand who really needs our product, so we used the most important metrics (LTV, attendance frequency, engagement intensity prior and post-brunch) to identify our top 15 super users. We then interviewed as many of these people as possible and were able to see some pretty clear patterns, and markers, for who, why and how they would use our product. The most interesting thing for us to see was how big of a role personality, and behaviour played.
We think this understanding will really help us tailor our product, and connect with our users on a deeper level.
Marketing and Press:
A key idea we’re learning through our work is the power of narratives. Understanding our story as a brand, the story of our users, and our own story, and then how these resonate and fit with the current social context. Sharing the right story, with the right people in the right way can be super powerful. This led us to some pretty cool opportunities, particularly with media.
Our work with Gal’s Brunch was shared on TVNZ’s Seven Sharp and AUT’s Te Waha Nui website!
Ending the incubator:
It’s been an insane 6 months working with the Creative HQ team, our mentors, and our coach. We believe we made the most of the program and as this phase comes to an end, we’ve planned goals and what we want to achieve for the next 3 months. Specifically, we want to:
Launch a platform MVP by August
Grow signups steadily over the coming months
Run our Gals Brunches to continue helping people make friends
Test a subscription model
Good, Bad and Ugly
Good
Over 100 organic signups in the last week of June
A much deeper understanding of the customer, the product, and our business
Bad
Slow progress on delivering a product
Ugly
Nothing to mention!
Our Focus For Next Month
Testing a variety of channels to grow our list of attendees and signups
Running brunches at double capacity (40 attendees/brunch), and expanding to 30-40-year-olds
BUILDING! 👩🏽💻
Kudos
To our amazing mentors Sean McGrail, Kadri Uljas, and Jonty Hodge
Our program leader & coach at CHQ, Ben and Marwan
Asks
“Remember that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step” 👞 🌟