Blog 3: Pivot
For gate 2 we realized our business model had some issues. For the Last Call idea, monetization was a problem since we would only be making 50% of the existing discount. We thought of some other potential revenue streams, but decided that pivoting was the best option. We wanted Last Call to be apart of our new idea which is a centralized platform for restaurant promotions. Our new app where you can see restaurants nearby, their menus, specials of the day, happy hour times and other promotions would be useful as currently there really is no software that does this. So far, our team has gotten along really well. We are communicative and rarely come across conflicts about ideas. One thing we can improve on is time management, we sometimes get sidetracked while working and staying focused would accelerate our time spent.
Some feedback we got was initially to focus on the difficulty comparing promotions problem and not the food waste. We plan to do so since that problem is our main focus after the pivot. Something else we didn’t mention in the solution is customer relationships would be bolstered with restaurants because of this new form of communication. Another comment Rick made was that we should use Food for All as validation for the problem and market. We mentioned them briefly, but they are a great form of validation to show there is market for our idea on the West Coast. We thought having competitors with similar ideas was a bad thing, but competition validates the problem which we overlooked. Our competitive advantage doesn’t need to show prices since that is not our differentiator. Alina talked about how being “cheaper” than a competitor is not the best differentiator. We decided going forward to focus on our centralized promotion platform as the differentiator since that is something new we can bring to the table. To improve our presentation for the future we need to add more data. We need more numbers to get our idea across. As for target restaurants, we were unclear what defines a small to medium restaurant and need to emphasize this more to the audience. It is unclear what our criteria is, and we need to decide on some factors that highlight our target restaurants. For our marketing messages, we need to provoke more emotion. We are going to do so by specifically marketing to the users hunger and asking questions that relate to our users demographic. Our sales funnel needs more numbers such as conversion rates. Our sales model needs a better attack plan for city by city when expanding. We agreed with all the feedback we got and plan to implement changes this week as we validate more.
The next steps for us are to edit our slides to better fit our pivot. Currently, our gate 2 addresses two problems and we need to be more specific. We need to come up with a new name that better fits our new idea. Including more data seemed like a reoccurring issue with our slides which we will fix. Also validating the problem of customers not being able to find promotions is important.
