Week 2: Getting Out of the Building (Virtually)

Hypotheses Formulation

At the end of last week’s brainstorming sessions, we assumed that Zuppify’s platform would serve two customer segments: “buyers” (businesses looking to find suppliers) and “suppliers” (businesses looking to sell their product/services to other businesses). In addition, we made several assumptions regarding Zuppify’s business mechanisms (e.g. key metrics and cost). Here’s what we came up with:

Based on that, we formulated leap of faith assumptions and hypotheses. The results can be seen from our first dashboards:

   

Among them, the three most important assumptions to test are:

1. Reliable information is difficult to find and is often insufficient.
2. It is time-consuming to find new suppliers.
3. Businesses perform initial screening for suppliers online.

These assumptions are the cornerstones of Zuppify’s concept-helping businesses find suppliers. We did not include any from the supplier side as one of the most important to test as we were not optimistic about serving that segment. However, among them, we believe that "suppliers are on the lookout for new ways to find partners and customers" as the most important hypothesis to test on the suppliers' side. We also assumed that SMEs and early stage startups would be our early adopters as we assume that they have not settled on long-term suppliers yet.

“Getting Out of the Building”

The next step, as Steve Blank famously put, was “getting out of the building”. With the current health situation where we can’t even go out of our houses, finding customers to talk to seems impossible.  Especially since our targets are SMEs and early startups. Not a familiar terrain for students.

We put our heads together and planned a way to acquire customer insights under those conditions. We decided to interview business owners from our own network and distribute surveys online. We aimed to get responses from 10 companies.

To our surprise, our strategy worked better than expected. We gained insights from 30 companies from 6 different countries!

The diversity of our methods (and team members)

Analysis Time!

Now comes the challenging part, making sense of the responses. With a lot of acquired information, it took us quite a while to digest everything. In the end, we were able to accept/reject our hypotheses and acquired new insights on our idea:

Buyer's Side

A few key learning. First, we learned that our three main assumptions are correct (regarding the buyers' problems).  We also learned that our target customers are most likely young companies. We also realized the possibility for users to post adverts for specialized products. 

Supplier's Side

In regards to the suppliers' side, while our first hypothesis is confirmed, the interviewees generally mentioned that the problem is "nice to have". Hence, due to the lack of perceived opportunity, we decided to focus on the buyers side.

With these insights, we're ready to move on to next week's prototyping session.