PLOT TWIST!
This week was really intense for us! We did more progress in our project during this week in comparison to the last 3.
After thinking deeply in our model, we developed a new one! We will be a platform that meet the needs of students who want to lend, rent or sell their products. Our platform will be the main channel to reach us, besides telephone, facebook and instagram.
Of course we had to update our Business model Canvas but we believe that with this improvement we are able to enlarge our customers target. Thus, basically, UniRental will be a platform where students sell/lend their products to other students that are lack of them. This can be done through the website or through a pick&delivery service that we will provide.
The main reasons for this plot twist in our model was based in some questions such as: how are we getting customers? How will be our channels to reach them? How will be our revenues and how to increase them in the future?
Well, we interviewed almost 20 students personally in order to understand better our target customers and what they actually need. Since we already performed a survey to almost 100 people and it is quite costly to interview personally people, in one week 20 students (portuguese and non-portuguese) was a good result for us.
During interviews we managed to understand the best channels to reach them (or via facebook, e-mail marketing, website and so on). Marketing is really important for our business, it can be free (through facebook, instagram, viral marketing, e-mails) or paid (posters, universities' advertisement, sms, telephone) and we really gave very importance to understand how to target portuguese and non-portuguese people, how to reach new clients and how to maintain them. These differences are based in the fact that it is very different to reach a new client than to maintan an older one. Actually, we are still thinking on how to reward usual customers in order to have a better relationship with them.
In terms of revenues, in our new model we will charge a fee for each sale performed (we are not quite sure about charging a fee to our customers just for them to post their adds; however, we achieved surprising results in our interviews, having almost 50% of the respondents saying they would be willing to pay around 5% to 10% of the price just to post the add). Also, we will gather more revenues through publicity of other companies into our websit.
Thus, to sump up, what we have learned during this week was mainly:
1.Redefinition of our Business Model;
2. Roles of channels, customers and revenue sources;
3. Hypothesis verified are very important for the sustainability of our new model, since last week we were having some difficulties on how to define the channels, relationship with customers and revenues;
4. Development of new and innovative communication means;
5. Interviews were an essential part to redefine our Business Model.
