Getting started!
In the previous week we defined UniRental business. This week, our main goal was to define our hypothesis and test whether they were true or not.
The hypothesis we wanted to test, were all targeted to our future consumers in order to validate if UniRental has a promising future.
We performed a survey online, which was answered by 96 persons (our sample), from ages between 18-30 years old, where 56% were females (44% were males).
The first hypothesis we tested was if gender influences our renting strategy. The results were very positive, since if students had the opportunity to rent a product instead of buying it, 77% of them would do it.
The second hypothesis we tested was if our target group is actually interested in our services. Once again, the results were in our favor: we wanted to validate that at least 80% of people were interested in our services and we got 98% of positive feedback, claiming that renting products is a good solution for students who plan to spend a short period of time in Lisbon.
The third hypothesis we tested was if people would be interested in renting products rather than buying them. We wanted to validate that more than 70% of people would prefer this startegy. Again, we achieved positive results: 76% of people would do it.
Finally, our last hypothesis was to infer is our target group was missing furniture or electronics in their flat. We would like to validate that more than 60% of people that missed a product at home would actually bought it. The results were close to the validation: 62% of people interviewed were missing a home product.
These results were very positive for our team, since we proved that there is a market for our brand. It is more than a concept, more than an idea! It is a gap in the market, which is possible to implement. Nowadays, we live in a globalised world, where internet enable us to reach everyone and everything just in a few seconds. Our product not only fullfils customer' needs, but also adapts to the changes of our economy. Consumers think more before buying, they do research and enjoy to compare different products. UniRental allows them to do that, since it is a plataform available for everyone!
Each week that passes we are more excited and believing our product. We learned several new concepts, ideas and definitions. We finish this post, once again, with the lessons we learned:
1. We managed to deal with uncertainty and evaluation of the risks through the test of hypothesis and validation of them;
2. As we are still in the begining, we adaptate our Business Model to a better one;
3. Due to the survey we performed, we aknowledged about customer needs and willingness to pay;
4. Formulating and testing the hypothesis are very important for the value proposition we propose
5. Finally, formulating and proving the hypothesis helped us finetuning and verifying the different segments of our Business Canvas.
