March 2022 Monthly Update
Product discovery discoveries, re-working our pitch, and a fresh new website.
Hi friends, welcome to Chillsy's 5th monthly update!
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.
This update will cover all our work over March.
Our Focus this month - Charting a path to product
This month we focused on three key activities.
Conducting product discovery
Our product discovery approach was two-fold. We wanted to understand both how people attend activities, and how people organise them. The types of activities we were focused on were casual spontaneous activities that people post online, to do with new people.
Considering the lower frequency of activity hosting, and higher frequency of activity attending, we decided to interview activity organisers and survey activity attendees.
Our key learnings:
Safety and comfort are critical when deciding to actually meet someone you’ve met online - organisers and attendees want to know they are real, and not dangerous. Users care about being able to verify who their meeting, through seeing their profiles, video calling, etc.
Who you are doing the activity with matters just as much, if not more than the activity itself - organisers and attendees want to know they are meeting someone who is like-minded, and enjoyable to be around. It’s hard to judge what someone will be like based on what you can see on social media.
Organising an activity with new people from the internet can be logistically challenging and overwhelming. It’s hard to find a central location, figure out schedules etc. When interesting activities are posted, sometimes they get more engagement than desirable!
Setting up passive methods of product validation
We realised early on that building a great product takes experimentation, feedback, and importantly time. Also, building a userbase is hard. So to make sure we are able to experiment we have launched a Facebook group for those in Auckland (to start). Our hypothesis is that by providing structure, better design, and a more controlled community, we’ll be able to have greater engagement and more successful activities/events.
Revisiting our pitch deck.
We originally pitched Chillsy focused on a university/student solution and had to rework our value proposition and problem statement to align with the wider target market and progress we’ve made.
Good, Bad and Ugly
Good
Mohammed safely returned from India unscathed 😮💨
Launched our website! Check it out here
Our Facebook group is steadily growing with over 250 members and some posts every week
Wrapped up our product discovery survey - new learnings and patterns
Bad
Although we expected it, we didn’t get as many survey responses as we’d hoped for 😖
Ugly
Spending too much time on our new pitch when we wanted to focus on the product!
Our Focus For Next Month
Doing some prototyping and testing with potential users
Launching our MVP at the end of the month
Continuing to build our passive validation channels!
Kudos
You - for reading this whole update 😁👏🏼
Asks
We’d love some feedback on our website, so reply to our email or leave a comment!