How to turn our business into a solid one?
We are back this week, stronger than ever! After defining our canvas business last week, this week was time for us to define the key activities, resources and partners.
Thus, after analyzing our strategy, we concluded that our main activities are in the first place, website related. Buying and lending products are the most profitable activities for us, or via connecting customers through our platform, or via us, UniRental buying and lending products to customers.
In order to achieve the biggest amount of consumers, we will invest in marketing in the most diversified ways as already mentioned. Thus, marketing will be a very important tool for us, as well. Since our target customers are youth people, probably it will be more efective to do it via facebook and other social networks, rather than investing a lot of money in physical publicity across Lisbon.
Another important activity for us is stock management. After analyzing our options, we concluded that having a warehouse to store products that clients want to sell or to lend but do not have a customer interested yet, would be another important activity to obtain more revenues.
Finally, our service of pick and delivery, is also an important activity that is being discussed if it will be outsourced or not. On one hand, if we do this service by ourselves, we will have an extra service to charge clients and receive extra revenues. On the other hand, this can be costly in the beginning since we will need to acquire vehicles, thus outsourcing this can be better for a start-up like us. Anyway, in the long term we are still discussing this options so do not miss our blog with updates!
We worked on our hypothesis, being the first one exactly about this, if outsourcing is cheaper than having our own vehicles. We concluded that in the short term, since we are starting our business and it is really recent, it is valid.
The next hypothesis we tested was about platform users. We tested whether people would be willing to rent or lend products through a platform such as UniRental. Our results were very positive, having 81% of the people answering positively, thus hypothesis was also valid.
Afterwards, we discussed our key resources. We subdivided them into finance, intellectual, human and physical resources. The main question we asked ourselves was: which resources will we need?
Well, financially speaking, we will need capital, which we will obtain via crowdsourcing since it is the most advantageous for us. Partnerships will also be very important and valuable, since costs are low when compared to a bank. Venture capitalists and angel investors will also be important in this begining.
Intellectually, our human resources are very important! They are the ones responsible for the positive work that is done and are the "face" of the company. If consumers are happier or if they have something to complain, they are the ones that give "the face" to it, for the good and for the bad. Thus, it is a very responsible job and in the beginning it will be constitued by the six of us. Later on, after UniRental starts to grow and expand, it will be enlarged. For now, take a look on the head of each department:
In terms of physical resources, it was the major discussion we had. In terms of warehouse, we will rent it, since it is the chepeast option. This will be very important to store products as mentioned in the beggining of the post.
However, in terms of vehicles, as metioned previously, we are still not sure whether to outsource it or to have our own transportation means. In the beginning, at least, we will outsource it probably, since is less costly. In the long term, is something we will further analyze. So, once again, do not miss our news!
We also tested some hypothesis, being the first one about the capital and how would be the most attractive way to obtain it. We decided to test if crowdsourcing was preferable rather than getting a loan in the bank and we positiely concluded it is true.
Then we tested if the pick and delivery service was important for customers. After interviewing 120 people we concluded that around 25% referred transportation as being a problem when buying an item, which sometimes lead people to give up buying it.
Finally, in terms of key partners, we decided that the most important partnerships we could establish would be with universities, real estate agencies, product suppliers, insurance partners and possibly, distribution if we decide to outsource it.
We could not validate yet our hypothesis, however we would like to infer if universities, student networks and real estate agencies would be willing to partner with us. We are still waiting for a positive answer.
Also, this week we updated the "about us" part of the website since we changed our business model canvas last week and it was not meeting our true vision. You can check it below:
To sum up, we once again finish with lessions learned of this week:
Through the improvement of our business model towards the sharing economy approach, we could lower our calculated fixed costs;
Potentioal partnerships are the key in order to facilitate and effective MVP, so a good basis for further development;
We though about a possible outsourcing of business activities, namely the pick-up & delivery service.
