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This week we have really considered the design of the product! I have had to make sure it’s technically doable and source all the components of the product, to do this the power, electricity, reliability and safety of the product were all considered to find the right components and put it together.
The first step was to draw up the product and then it was designed in 3D on photoshop to create a ‘prototype’ design. I then had to find a producer of a silicone flexible rubber mat that would heat to around 180 degrees, this caused many problems as the multi-plugability had to be considered next and we found that a USB cable could not be used to heat the product as it would not transmit a high enough current to power the matt. To be able to power this we had to source AC/DC adapters with a 240v input/24v output and car chargers that have the same output and an ability to withstand the heat. Below you can see out prototype!
The base of the box is both collapsible and flexible so that it takes up minimal space when out of use, the inside is coated with an insulator to keep your food fresh and warm for as long as possible! Whilst the lid is a super elastic stretchy silicon to adapt to the size of your food and keep it securely in place.
To cost it, we source each component in quantities to create 1000 units each. We then added all the shipping costs (i.e. Air Rate, Fuel Tax, Insurance, Document Validation and Delivery).
These total costs came to 12.85 euros per item! Once we had this figure, I created a pricing model, including the margins necessary for all parties involved, and with this I understood that with the price we are charging (decided by the customers through surveys and landing pages) we did not have a large enough margin to allow us to sell through a distributor. Therefore we shall sell our product through our website and directly to retailers. We are however able to maintain the industry standard of a 30% margin, which is great!
By the end of the week the pricing model should be fully in tact and posted on the blog! Check back later to find an uploaded excel document of all the costing and pricing decisions!
Hypothesis validations: Surveys and A/B testing results
Hey guys! In the tables below is a recap of all the most important hypothesis (the ones that get the highest scores)that we had to validate. The first two tables of hypothesis could be done in the 2 upcoming weeks. The last table will be more difficult and we will only have an answer to them towards the end of the project. But in the meantime, we already did 2 surveys that brought us a lot of answers to our hypothesis. All the answers will be summarized in an upcoming post!
Hypothesis tables:
TABLE 1
Attention: We are still waiting for more reliable results for the landing pages, we already have 243 views and collecting more views on the other landing pages.The results will be uploaded soon.
| Hypothesis (A/B testing) | Conv.Rate With (A) | Conv.Rate Without (B) | Results | Who is doing it ? (Name) |
| Heatable influence buy decision | N/A | N/A | See Ulvin’s Survey | Manuel |
| Stylish influence buy decision | N/A | N/A | See Ulvin’s Survey | Manuel |
| Multi-Plug influence buy decision | N/A | N/A | See Ulvin’s Survey | Erick |
| How much willing to pay? | TBD | TBD | Result coming | Erick |
NB:
The heatability and plugability of the product has been already tested in the surveys below, so it is actually not necessary to test it another time in A/B testing.
Concerning the price of the TempBox, in addition to the A/B testing; we also added two question in the Ulvin’s survey (one open question allows people to evaluate freely the price of the product) to have an idea on what range of price we should do. Based on the costing calculations done by charlotte (see other post in this page), and the results from the survey, we expect the price to be around 30 euros = see results from costing and from survey in TABLE 2. However, we still need to know if the price influences the buying decision in itself, so we still need to wait until we have the results from the A/B testing.
TABLE 2
| Hypothesis (surveys) | Testing | Validation | Results | Who is doing it ? (Name) |
| Many workers & student face a lack of food choice | Survey(Post link to survey) | >75% agree | we have 67,74% agreed for the moment. | Ulvin’s survey |
| “the tempbox is a convenient product” | Survey(Post link to survey) | >80% agree | YES =(more information below) | Ulvin’s survey |
| People on the go appreciate the ability to bring their own food | Survey(Post link to survey) | >60% agree | YES (more informations below) | Erick’s survey |
| Heatability influence buy decision | Survey | >70% agree | >80% = more than expected | Erick’s & Ulvin’s survey |
| Price the customer is willing to pay | Survey | 25/35 euros | sum of evaluations 757/ 30 evaluations= 25,2333 euros1/3 evaluate it > 25 euros
almost 3/4 evaluate it <=25 euros |
Ulvin |
These Hypothesis have been tested this week thanks to our surveys, you can take it at the 2 links below:
Ulvin’s survey: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/6KV5R7W
Erick’s survey: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/27XNW6Y
Analysis of results from the survey:
1) Ulvin’s survey:
- First hypothesis : ‘Many workers & students face a lack of food choice‘
Conclusion: So here we clearly see that people have difficulty finding the food they really want to eat at their workplace. In fact, about 67,74% of the people that took the survey are not really satisfied with what they find to eat at their workplace.
2. Second Hypothesis: ‘the tempbox is a convenient product’
We tried to test this hypothesis by asking the 3 following questions on our surveys:
- What do you like most about our product? (open question)
For this one we had more than 1/3 people answering for heatability and 1/3 for design and the rest in plugability (which is almost the same as heatability, it just the way to heat the box)and the rest for the Design. So we can see here that people are really attracted by the heatibility function and the design. We can verify this looking at the 3rd question asked in this same section.
- What do you dislike most about our product? (open question)
Here we had a lot of concern about the reliability of the product, so we decided to change our business model and add a specific warranty and also we would ask for a european certification of conformity. This will ensure that the customer has no doubt on the reliability of the product.
We also get a significant number of answers on the size of the product. But this is partly balanced by the fact that people showed a lot of interest in the design, in the first question.
- Which of the following features of this product makes you want to purchase it? (Design, Heatablity, Multiplugability, Money saved, Time saved, Other (to specify))
The conclusion here is that, overall the porduct is convenient because of its design, heatability feature and also its design. Also, the last graph answers the latest hypothesis in the TABLE 2, which is :
3. third hypothesis: ‘Heatability influences the purchase decision’
Just like said above, we found in the surveys that the heatability is the most important feature for the customers. This means that we need to work on this part of the product to make it really reliable and really practical. This is our opportunity to enter the market of lunch boxes, and this will give us a first mover advantage.
In conclusion, the Heatability will dramatically attract a large amount of customer to buy the product (both customer coming from lunch boxes and new customers that havn’t use lunchboxes).
2) Erick’s survey
This survey is principally dedicated to the last hypothesis of the TABLE 2 which is the following : ‘people on the go appreciate the ability to bring food from home’. But there is of course some interesting information that can help us to know better the habits of the people.
RESULTS TABLE COMING THIS EVENING
TABLE 3
This table below shows the hypothesis that can’t be tested with A/B testing or with surveys. Those hypotheses results will be posted/updated towards the end of the project specially because of the nature of the hypotheses:
| Other Hypothesis | Testing | Validation | Results |
| Pop up shops/street sales increase awareness | See sales of similar products/researchws concern
Survey shows concern for safety and reliability. Conclusions from survey and interviews shows that this is not a low cost product. Street sales does not match our strategy |
Attract significant attention on street | Removed from the business plan:
Conclusions from survey and interviews shows that this is not a low cost product. Street sales does not match our strategy |
| We are able to raise financial resources | Pitch => at the end we will validate this assumption | Qualitative | Answer after pitch to investors |
| Different markets have same problems that can be solved by the TempBox | Data Collection/empirical Data | TBD | TBD |
These results were very helpful to create our business model canvas 2.0. It allowed us to realize what is the customer demanding for, and how should we change components of our business model in order to be as close to the customer needs, for example by changing our value proposition. In fact, we decided to focus our attention more on the important features of the product, so we removed the ‘freedom of choice’ from the canvas. We also put more emphasis on the ‘warranty’ and the ‘european certification of conformity’. Finally, we learned more about the price the customer is willing to pay.
Check out our webshop – The TempBox!
Link Posted on Updated on
Lessons learned in session 8
The focus of this session was on the revenue streams:
One can say that a direct revenue stream show that you actually have customers.
The direct streams are: Transactions, usage, renting, subscription, pre-pay, freemeium ( free + premium), and pay-per-use which are the normal customer sales. In addition we have intermediation (Selling other firms stuff on your webpage for instance), and advertisement, which do not involve the sale of the product.
The indirect streams can be renting out your excess capacity or sales by referrals by others.
REVENUE STREAM EXERCISE:
As always we did an exercise which ha importance for our business model and idea. We did a rather quick analysis of what our main revenue streams will be, and these are the ones we decided on:
– Transactions: We might sell the Tempbox through channels like our webshop and through retail stores. With time it might develop to be a box in different colors and shapes, and it can be sold with or without the plugs for heating.
– Intermediation: We are considering intermediation in our webshop. For instance we might sell books and accessories which complement a lunchbox like cooking books or preparation tools.
– Advertisement: We have a webshop and an internet community and will use some space on it for advertisement.
– Licensing: We might consider selling the license to the box to other firms in markets we are not able to, or willing to serve ourselves due to costs, uncertainty, too little knowledge of the market etc.
We also calculated the streams in price and quantity for the different streams, however, the numbers we got have to be done again, and we will post them when we have!
PRICING MODELS
What are the pricing models?
– Cost based: Cost + Margin à is not focused on the client
– Value based: Price based on the perception of the client. Can be used for high valued products or services. Not based on the cost of the resources à Depending on the value the clients gives the product.
– Competitive: You set your price close to the competitors because you are not too different. To high no-one buy, too low no-one buy
– Volume: price set to sell in a bigger quantity à Cost saving
– Portfolio price: Bundling services together, different products etc.
– Shaver price: The machine is sold at a low price, and then the cost of usage like the cartridge for a printer, is very high.
– Feature pricing: adding features like our customization increase the price – we can let them customize their own designs, share them with each other in the community.
THE MINIMUN VIABLE PRODUCT –MVP 3
In previous sessions and group-work we have been through the MVP 1 & 2, now it is time for 3. The MVP is a version of the product which gives the team the opportunity to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about the customers with the least effort.
We have decided to make a 3D design version of the product. We could make a box with a plug in it, but it would not represent very important features to our product like the design and flexibility. Hence, the 3D version will be the best MVP for us. With this version we will set up a fake sale and build a new landingpage to test the viability.
Thank you for reading, and until later!
The TEMP-BOX marketing outline
<div style=”margin-bottom:5px”> <strong> <a href=”https://www.slideshare.net/MartineUlvin/the-tempbox” title=”The tempbox” target=”_blank”>The tempbox</a> </strong> from <strong><a href=”http://www.slideshare.net/MartineUlvin” target=”_blank”>Martine Ulvin</a></strong> </div>
Internet marketing
Hey guys, we just began to market our project over the internet (through websites, forums, blogs, social network pages).
This will increase awareness and will also allow us to test the attractiveness and popularity of our product.
So we are currently trying to market it through 6 different websites (of course this is not the full list of website we will do,we will continue posting more and more on other websites and update the blog when it’s done) :
- Scoop.it
- Slideshare
- Lean startup circle
- The Hacker News
NB: websites in bold means we already began to market our product on it.
So we posted information & explanations of the Temp Box, but also links to blog/landing page/facebook page/scoop.it page, on each of the website in bold. We will be posting more on the other website as soon as possible!
Just below you will find the links to the pages/articles we created on each of the websites:
Lessons Learned – Session 7
Hello again!
So this week we had another class with Joao and again, it began with each team presenting their work from the past week. We presented both our landing pages and the Values Curves, it was really helpful this week because we gained lots of constructive feedback from the professor, and from this, we understood that we needed to improve our landing pages to make them more effective. By the time of this weeks class we will have perfected our landing page and will be well on our way to gaining 200 views! Other than that, our presentation went well and our value curves were a hit!
Session 7 focused on channels:
We discussed their roles, for instance: Marketing, Sales, Distribution and After-sales Support. We discussed the various different means of marketing our product and the most affective ways of raising awareness and attention. We also differentiated between free and paid marketing channels. We carried out an exercise, picking the six most effective channels for our product, three from the free segment and three from the paid. For the free channels we chose a website, of course. Our professor stated that everybody needs a website in these times to be successful and it can be considered the most important marketing tool! The second free channel we chose was social media, social media has become a large part of many peoples lives and because of this it just makes sense to gain exposure by marketing our product through this channel. The final free channel we picked was SEO (Search Engine Optimization), being that we’re selling a product, it adds credibility to our brand, but also the earlier our page appears in the search results, the more visitors it is likely to receive from the search engine’s users.
For the paid marketing channels, we picked PPC (Pay per Click), SEM (Search Engine Marketing) and Direct Mail. We chose SEM because it is a way of promoting our website by increasing its visibility in search engine results, this is likely to increase traffic to our website and as a result may increase sales. For that reason we also picked PPC, as it is also a model of advertising that directs traffic to our website. Finally, we chose Direct Mail because it is a good way of increasing awareness, particularly if we use it to advertise in student and professional areas of both residence and work.
We also decided that our sales channels would mainly be online through our website and others such as Amazon but that we would also sell some through retail stores, such as El Corte Ingles and other smaller retailers, but for this we may need the help of a distributor to get our product placed.
In the second part of the class
our professors taught us about developing and maintaining relationships, we feel that our product maintains a transactional and fairly automated relationship, however we hope to retain customers so that we can sell more lunchboxes to them and their families.
The final part of the class was all about how to raise awareness online:
This started with a presentation about AdWords, I didn’t know that much about this before the class but having listened to the professor, they sound really useful and I’m excited to start using them for our project. For the remaining part of the class we discussed Facebook, Linkedin Groups and Blog Posts. We were once step ahead in this respect, in previous weeks we created a Facebook page for our product before the professor mentioned this as a marketing channel! He also discussed “Fake Sales” through the likes of Amazon or Ebay. Through this we can both direct people to our Facebook Page/Blog and gain feedback on our product to understand better our customers needs and if it will sell.
We then completed one final exercise before the end of class. For this we picked our most important channels (as discussed earlier) and decided upon how we could test and validate them. We decided that a fake sale on Ebay would best to test if online would be our main channel. We decided against using Amazon for the single reason that do not have a finished product and with Ebay, there’s many more points throughout the process where we can pull out of the sale before it is finalised and is therefore less likely to cause any problems. For the retail channel, we decided it would be most efficient to approach retail stores and distributors to see if they would carry/distribute our product. If some said yes, then it would be a success!
That’s all for this week! See you in week 8.
Presentation Session 7
<div style=”margin-bottom:5px”> <strong> <a href=”https://www.slideshare.net/MartineUlvin/the-lean-explorers-session-7-pp” title=”The lean explorers session 7 pp” target=”_blank”>The lean explorers session 7 pp</a> </strong> from <strong><a href=”http://www.slideshare.net/MartineUlvin” target=”_blank”>Martine Ulvin</a></strong> </div>
The value curves
To understand our product’s position in the competitive marketplace we have done an analysis of the Tempbox’s attributes. We look into which attributes in our Tempbox the customers appreciate the most, and how we are compared to our fiercest competitors. This analysis is called the value curve. Underneath we will present our analysis.
Value curves:
Firstly we will talk a little about the attributes. We chose the attributes based on an analysis of our product benefits, the competitors product benefits, and the customers’ problems. Following, we had a discussion among us based on the information we have been able to retrieve so far in this course in addition to some new information concerning our competitors. The result of the discussion where the attributes we believe to differentiate us from our three main competitors: Compleat, Tupperware and the Indirect competitors (restaurants, cafés, kiosks, and canteens).
We had 15 attributes on the table, but as we should only choose the ones we believe to be most important to our customers, we ended up with nine.
The resulting attributes are: Price, Heat-ability, Multi plug-ability, design, Flexivity, Dish-washer safety, Environmental, Variation in selection of boxes, and Food community. These attributes are developed based on the assumption that these are the ones where we are most different from our main competitors, and which we believe our customer segments emphasize and appreciate.
In the following sections we will describe each attribute and scale them and compare them for us and the competitors.
The Heat-Able Lunch box/ Tempbox:
As we can see from the chart we expect the Heat-Able Lunch Box to be comparatively less preferable regarding price. It will be more expensive due to the technology of heating and plugging, and also the design. As we have the heating and plugging system which we expect to be the major selling points due to the solving of important customer issues, we score the highest on these. We have plans for the design to be sleek and stylish and fit our customers’ needs and expectations. In our opinion the need for a lunch box to be dish-washer safe is an important attribute, hence ours will be. Further we are not confident yet that we are able to make the material sustainable and we are not planning on making several selection variations of the lunch-box. However, we are planning on making a community around the box. There will be an internet web-page to sign up to where the customers will find recipes for suitable lunch box meals, the opportunity to cooperate on making the food if working at the same place, forums for feedback on the product, customer service etc.
Competitors:
Compleat:
Compleat is the company which sells lunch boxes like Foodskin, Foodbag, Gourmet etc. These are boxes which have really neat designs for every need. They are mostly flexible, environmental and Compleat delivers a broad range of products for different needs. They also claim to have the world’s most flexible lunchbox. They are comparatively expensive, but will probably have a lower price than us. They do not have a food community surrounding their products.
Heat-Able vs. Compleat:
Tupperware:
Tupperware is a solid brand most people know. They make everything from potato peelers to boxes to different uses. In their assortment they also have lunch boxes. As we noticed after making the chart on Tupperware they have some few advantages compared to us which is of course the brand name, but when coming to the attributes: price and variation.
Heat-able vs. Tupperware
Indirect (Restaurants, cafes, kiosk, canteens etc).
In this value curve analysis we faced some problems. Restaurants and similar places are not directly comparable to the heat-able lunch box. However, we will use the same attributes for comparison reasons, and then we will explain the line of thought.
As we can see from the red line the indirect competitors score quite high on many attributes. However they also have a few disadvantages. In addition to the more expensive service, the are often not so attractive on “design” like the appearance of canteens and kiosks, and on the environmental side. In addition, not shown by this chart is the inconvenience presented by waiting time for the food or in lines, and the reduced opportunity to self-selection. For the attribute regarding heating we have given them the highest score due to the food being prepared at the purchasing time. Plug-ability is rather low due to the inconvenience of having to leave your car, work-place, the building etc. to get access to warm food. High scores are given to flexivity, dish washer, and variation due to respectively not having to carry and prepare food in a box, no need to dish wash and the variety surrounding a work-place can be quite extensive if one have time to go there.
The concluding curves:
In conclusion
To conclude we see that the Tempbox is fairly good positioned in the market compared to the competitors. Our main strengths are the attributes linked to the innovative function of being able to heat the food. The other attributes like sleek and stylish design and the flexibility are attributes we score high on, but relative to the competitors they are not too impressive. Our main weakness is the price aspects. However, we believe the ability to heat and plug will offset the higher price.
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