teamrockcca

[teamrockcca]

Week 13 - Strategy

This is what I learned, in any form including the classic, this is what I thought, this is what I did, this is what I learned, this is what I’ll do next. Include link to YOUR entry.

Last weekend we sent out our thank you email and gave early adopters the option to host their own playdate. 

This week we waited and waited for responses but none was heard! We were disappointed by the zero response especially since people seemed genuinely excited about the app. We took a look at all the possible reasons why no one hosted and we think there are several reason, besides the obvious one which is time. 

The first big reason we think no one hosted is because the word “host” may be intimidating to early adopters especially since no one wants to host something that they are not sure what the outcome would be. Its hard to prepare for the unknown both physically and emotionally. Second, people aren’t entirely certain what the terminology of playdate really means. To us the meaning of playdate is really clear but to the users this terminology have yet been connected with a concept. All in all I think the problem lies in having the right type of copy and pacing.

This Thursday we spoke about this as a team and decided to strategize a little more about how we could conduct user acquisition more effectively. We decided that we are going to invest in creating a community first. Which means holding back the option to let parents create their own playdate because that may simply be too big of a jump for early users to cope with and understand. Our strategy is to continue hosting the playdate by ourselves but pretend a specific family is hosting it. I think by doing this, parents will be more comfortable eventually at hosting their own.

We are still waiting for responses to see who will RSVP. We also gave people the option to invite their friends as a user acquisition channel. Our next step as of right now is to wait for responses from our emails. 

Personal learnings this week: Pacing and copy is extremely important. 

Elaine Chu(Yick Ping) - CEO

[teamrockcca]

WEEK 12

Customer acquisition is hard. Yes. This time I start with what I have learned.

Following our successful playdate last weekend, we decided to move forward: Creating our “Playdate” platform, and trying to get one of our early adopters to actually initiate a playdate on that platform (that will be executed by us, real-life wizards of Oz:))

We sent out a follow-up e-mail to the attendees of last week’s playdate, that included a short “it was great” and a call to action to create their own Playdate.

As for now, we still have not got any response. I want to hope and believe that it is a matter of time, but I have some doubts as for will anyone response to the email. I also have some theories as for the reason (I hope that I’m wrong here..) nobody answered our call to action.

As a start — we should have done it earlier. You snooze you lose. I believe we should have send the follow up e-mail a day or two after the Playdate, while the memory of the wonderful time they had and the scent of the coffee were still fresh (especially since we are competing with hundreds of messages a day, and we respect our customer’s privacy: we would not send/use/post pics of them without their permission…). For so many reasons and excuses that did not happened earlier, and that’s a shame. But it can be fixed… So in that sense, our next step would be re-gain the attention of our users: reminder e-mail, contact directly in other channels if we have them — just let them know we are still around. After all — we heard more than one user wishing to see where all this is going.

Second, and maybe more important: I believe we have not considered the entire process that a user should go through before he actually host a Playdate. On top of the usual difficulties in finding a “creator” amongst our users (see "social technographics score” above — we just discussed that this week, in the context of forming a community!!), there’s also the emotional-cognitive aspects: As long as we don’t yet have a real community and proven results, we are actually forcing a parent not only to admit publicly that he’s lonely (Oh!!!!), but also to take the risk that “nobody will show up for his party”… We ask people to trust us on the basis of a couple of fun hours and a good coffee...

We will have to be patient, and see what tomorrow (or the couple f days after tomorrow) brings. But my personal belief is that our next steps should be getting the word out there, trying as hard as we can to onboard more people to sign up for our mailing list, and for the first few months of “Playdate” existence, to just continue to artificially organize and host Playdates. Once we will establish a reputation and a habit, only them we can start thinking of calling it “community” and look for community leaders and creators.

Having said that — we should all keep in mind that there is a good chance that Team Rock and its Playdate will come to an end in less than three weeks. That being the case, I think it’s just great that we are moving fast forward, taking a quick, sweet taste of the steps to come after the next, tiring step of concierging and hosting more and more Playdates and setting the ground for a solid, widespread community.

Dana Silberberg Sahar, VP Community and Engagement

[teamrockcca]

Week 12 - Regroup for Concierge 2

This is what I learned, in any form including the classic, this is what I thought, this is what I did, this is what I learned, this is what I’ll do next. Include link to YOUR entry.

Last weekend we ran our first concierge MVP which turned out surprisingly successful and I was proud of everyone in our team for pulling that together. We had user acquisition on site and some parents even emailed us to ask us when this app was going to be released so they could download it. 

This week we prepped for our second round of concierge. The concierge we ran last week was to prove that parentsl have a desire to meet other parents and were not afraid of meeting complete strangers. Based on the reactions and responses we received last week, we wanted to run our second concierge because we believe this will really help us validate our app. This week we focused on a thank you email that included the option of letting parents host their own playdate. 

We created an thank you email to all those that came to our playdate last weekend through our RSVP and our onsite sign ups. In the thank you email we gave parents the option to host their own playdates. We sent the email yesterday and also offered the option for parents to let us provide coffee and snacks for them so a successful playdate is made easier, which could potentially validate our potential sponsorship/feature opportunity. 

Since the email was sent out last night, and based on the frequency and patten of hosting playdates on weekend we believe that we will be receiving responses some time in the middle of next week. We may email again some time in the middle of next week to remind parents of this since people usually forget, especially when an email is sent on the weekends. 

Through what we learnt from the responses last weekend we felt that this second concierge service was crucial because there is a clear distinction between a playdate hosted by Playdate and a playdate hosted by a parent. By proving that parents weren't afraid of meeting other parents we proved that parents have that desire. However, thats a fairly passive interaction. The second concierge service we are trying to run is our attempt to prove that parents will more "aggressively" approach their need to meet others. The results will influence the way Playdate as a service will structure itself. 

Our next step as of right now is to wait for responses from our emails and see if we could really prove parents will host playdates on their own. 

Personal learnings this week: I need to chill out sometimes and make sure that I take less control and reassures the team that I have faith and trust in their ability and discipline to carry out everything I've constructed. This learning is mainly based on the fact that I spent the entire weekend moving and finding myself worrying about how everyone in the team is doing or not doing. Letting people take responsibility for themselves is risky yet absolutely necessary, for them and for me. 

Elaine Chu(Yick Ping) - CEO

[teamrockcca]

If you build it, they will come…

This week was all about concierging our service.

I believe I have already mentioned how exciting and weird  it was for me to have my personal life and school work merge.. at times I felt like I’m just planning a un-birthday party to my kid (hoping that people will RSVP and come to my party…) at times I felt like I’m organizing a meet up for my parents-friends (hoping they would not be the only one coming.. I would not consider THAT decent concept validation…)

The planning/organizing part was easy. It has been a while now that we, My family and I have been exploring SF parks and playgrounds, and surely the Upper-Noe was the perfect venue for us. Google shopping-express came to the rescue of the us too-busy-with-thesis people. It was actually also pretty easy to figure out our realtime user acquisition methods (“put a sign and blow some bubbles”). Even the sponsorship part was clear (go to Martha’s Brothers Brewing Co., get coffee, ask them if they heard about us and if they want to sponsor our event, as in — get some advertisement, give us discount or perks for our customers in return..).

The hard part was the anticipation, the thrill of “how is it going to work?"

And it worked great!

I was actually surprised by how different my teammates’ schedule is than the one of the average parent of a toddler/infant (“Really? Sunday 10:30 am?? I’m never up that early" Errrrrgh…). But there we where. At the park. Sunday morning. We built it. and they came.

So our first question - will they come? is there a real value in creating this space where parents can come and meet other parents? The answer to this question is YES. all caps YES.

What surprised me a bit (though probably should not have been so surprising if we’d looked deeper into our data collected in previous stages of our market research and the e-mail MVP) was the age of the kids. It seems like our target users are parents of infants and young toddlers (0-18 months). Apparently, older toddlers and kids are more opinionated and decide who do they want to play with, which serves as an ice-breaker and allows parents to start a casual conversation in the playground. Younger toddlers and infants are less opinionated, and less mobile, so the parent of such a child who’s looking to find parents in a similar status, will still have to face the awkwardness of approaching strangers in the park, asking for their friendship… and that’s exactly where Playdate comes to the rescue.

If anyone had a doubt about the need — (I know I did at times…) — the amount of people that approached is the greatest validation — some RSVP, from our earlier lists, some just saw our last e-mail and decided to check us out, and some just saw our bubbles and came to see what are we all about. And Moreover: hearing from more than one family the actual words: “this is great, this is our only way to actually meet other families without it being creepy or awkward” was super exciting and empowering. Made me realize that if we just continue to have those playdates, even without an actual platform, that’s a great start for a community.

One major concern that came from this learning would be narrowing our market, and future retention of our users:

We discussed in the past the “what happens after you find new parents-friends? what would make you go back on the app?” and figured out the specific value for a returning customer by providing a stress-free and spam-free quality (cyber and real) space where you can meet people of the kind you want to meet. Going back to our comparison to dating services, you might only be in search of one spouse, but it’s always fun to meet new drinking-buddies :)

But what if your kid got older (as they usually do:)) - what will we have to offer then?

I have some ideas, but that’s in my opinion surely something we should consider and have some answers to.

Our concierge Playdate made it all very real. People asking where do they download the app. People asking when is the next Playdate. People telling us they are intrigued to see where it is going. People asking for features in the app (!!!). Talk about building a persona. Talk about building empathy! Concierging is really a great tool!

What's next? I believe we are heading to building the actual platform. Our talented CTO took upon himself to try, and we all agreed to support and aid as much as we can. Reading Elaine’s blog below, I believe we are also looking for a “professional builder” :)

On a personal note, building on Elaine’s post about Playdate being a digital sign saying “Hey, I’d love to meet new people.” - I could not help stopping myself from thinking of a previous project I had the pleasure of doing with that same Elaine, in which we started with trying really hard to connect people by (accidentally!) forcing them to admit they are lonely… I am glad that it turned out, after all the searching, researching and pivots, that by the end of the day, it comes to us connecting people. (check out the project I am talking about. it’s really cool: http://www.silbius.com/ixd/#/urbanhack/)

Ending with another personal note: Our concierge Playdate made it all very real. Maybe too real. So when we were asked when is the next playdate, none of us could really say that we’re graduating in less than a month, and Playdate will fade into the cyberspace of our portfolios and will retire to the land of past-projects… Or is it???

[teamrockcca]

Team 11 - Concierge

(Picture of Leigh blowing bubbles. I know. So. Cute.)

This is what I learned, in any form including the classic, this is what I thought, this is what I did, this is what I learned, this is what I’ll do next. Include link to YOUR entry.

Just to recap a little on what we did last week. Last week we put together the first pitch deck together as a team. As a team I think we definitely all learnt that there is definitely a time for minimalistic presentations, just not during a pitch. We revised our pitch deck and this time clearly stated out all crucial number and data related information. 

This week we started off a little slow but situation escalated and got interesting very fast. We began this week by sending out our first Playdate invitation to those who signed up previously. We also posted on parent groups around the bay area hoping for people to RSVP.  By Thursday last week we received plenty of responses and started planning out banners, food, beverages, sponsorship and on site user acquisition techniques. 

We hosted the concierge service because we decided that it was time to test our our meta hypothesis which is basically: will parents really hang and chill with families they don’t know. Judging from the event today I think we’ve definitely validated the service. Not all who RSVP came, I think mainly cause we forgot to send out a reminder. Definitely a growth hacking reminder and something that should be well integrated into the eventual platform. However, people who were already at the park, just hanging out, were extremely interested and many signed up to our service on site. SUPER EXCITING!!! Clearly, I am overwhelmed by the surprising success of our concierge service so bare with me usually I am more composed. 

There were 3 main large take aways from today:

First, our service is basically a digital sign that people can put up that says “Hey, I’d love to meet new people.” so parents can avoid the assumption. I think this is crucial to remember as the team progresses; to remind ourselves that our service is an initiation process and should be something that facilitates social interaction so it isn’t so awkward. Keeping that in mind would also help us gain some insights into potential features to incorporate into this service such as on demand bubbles, food, beverage and blanket orders. 

Second, our target users are definitely parents whose kids are still in their baby stages. Due to the babies’ lack of ability to run around, they become the middle man in some senses that helps parents connect with one another. Babies usually don’t have a preference on who they are hanging out with since they don’t really know what is going on. Thus, conversations and interactions between parents are much easier because babies take away awkward moments. 

Third, we have to figure out a way for parents to easily get the app, sign up to the service and be rewarded if they met at a Playdate facilitated event. User acquisition today was surprisingly easily. People saw lots of people and a sign that says Playdate and were immediately curious. If we as a team could somehow figure out how to utilize that sweet touchpoint to acquire user through word of mouth, this could potentially be one of our biggest growth drivers.

Fourth, the user retention rate may actually be much higher than we had originally hypothesized. This is a hypothesis but from today’s observation, the turn over rate at the park is quite high and human interaction is unpredictable. Just because today you didn’t meet the right parents to hang out with it doesn’t mean you won’t next week or in a few days. As long as the Playdate platform is stress-free and awkward-free people are going to be willing to try to keep using because it doesn’t hurt. This is still a hypothesis though. 

Our next step for is definitely talk to Christina and try to build it. Aaron is on top of learning coping and hopefully we find a superb co-founder. If not, and people are reading this blog and you know how to code please do not hesitate to email me at elaine.c910@gmail.com 

Personal learnings this week: Concierge it as soon as you can. If I had known how rewarding it would be to just concierge and test out our hypothesis I would’ve made us do it a long time ago. The reward is tremendous. So much to learn from actually seeing it happen. Physical observations that occur really helped me understand what should and shouldn’t exist in the app. All the major learnings from today all came as surprises. 

Elaine Chu(Yick Ping) - CEO

[teamrockcca]

Week 11: Setting up our First Playdate

This week, we made a RSVP invitation Email to inviting the 30 parents who already signed up. I learned that commitment is a real issue. Even if 30 people did RSVP, we would except 1/3 people not showing. One of the reason why the ‘Sharing Economy’ is also known as the ‘On-Demand Economy’ (Or any two-sided platform economy)mis because of our commitment issue. It’s an instant yes or no question, and it's easy for us to instantly committee. Thus, in the future Playdate, is less RSVP orientated and more spontaneous ‘Play Now’ event in your neighbor/community.

So… I learned that it is not my fault that I am bad a committing, it is our laid-back culture...

BRian - Head of Product

[teamrockcca]

Week 10 - Pitch Deck

This week we worked on creating and refining our pitch deck. We followed the templates with the 11 slides as tight as we could. It was helpful to narrow down our concept to its core. We also took another look at our TAM SAM and SOM and we looked at how much parents are spending on birthday events alone (2.3 billion). It also helped us really work out how much money we should do. The general. My role in creating the deck was creating the content for the outline.

[teamrockcca]

Week 10: Our First Pitch

After getting together with my group and consolidated all our insights into ONE pitch deck, I learned that Playdate has the solid foundation to become a real business.

As for the Pitch Deck structure.. it is hard to find the sweet spot of ‘just enough’ information in a 5-10 minute pitch. But we did it, beautifully. However, after presenting it in class, I learned that in order to have a convincing pitch, we must have the big numbers, consistence brand story, and leverage real world partnerships.

EX) ‘We have partnered with Martha and Bros. Coffee to cater Playdates hosted between now and end of May.’

Brian, Head of Product

[teamrockcca]

Week 10 --PITCH!

This week we have presented our 1st (ever!) pitch deck.

Figuring out what should really go on this deck was not an easy task: so many advisors, so many ways to present each point, so many ways to understand (or misunderstand) each point… made me wonder if you ever get really good at that, or is it a rare combination of luck and presenter-presentee-presentation fit :)

I know that I had in mind something a bit different, counting on what I’ve seen outside of class/school, but the core ideas were still the same. I think at this point of our pitching career, we’ll probably be better off “playing it safe” and sticking to the cheat-sheet our teacher posted on Google Classroom ;)

On a personal note — it was nice to find out again that working in a consistent way pays off when it comes to not having to work too hard later. And so does having the right co-founders.

I can only assume that if it was actually “the real deal”, we would all be way more nervous and way more rehearsed on our presentation, but here too, I guess the hard work of the past weeks paid off; after all, we all know what we are talking about.    

I still have some questions and concerns regarding our product and (mainly) our revenue model, and I’m not always sure all of us Rockers are exactly on the same page with the vision and direction of our company... I guess getting back to those who signed up and showed interest in Playdate, as well as continue to reach out and talk to more future-possible customers, will provide more answers and assurances.

On the calendar for the coming week — concierge a real playdate event (where we are the hosts). For me it’s actually one of the very few times that my personal life and school life (thought-of) meet. Talk about Worlds Collide :) (and about loving your target audience…)

[teamrockcca]

Week 10 - Pitch Deck

This is what I learned, in any form including the classic, this is what I thought, this is what I did, this is what I learned, this is what I’ll do next. Include link to YOUR entry.

Recap: Spring break was last week but right before spring break we were working on our BMC. It was a really great learning experience for everyone and it's helped a lot with the work I'm doing in thesis. During spring break we worked on our pitch deck.

This week our team finished the pitched deck and really made the deck sexy which is something we haven't done before this week. I think the team struggled a bit between the ratio between sexy and info orientated. Since non of us has really ever seen or created a real pitch deck before we realized there was still a lot to learn. 

In terms of our version 1 of pitch deck, we focused a lot on what we thought was suppose to be the pitch deck. In the past, pitch deck was simply that sexy deck with qualitative information and beautiful visuals of the product. After presenting this week we are realizing that numbers are so so so crucial and one should never sacrifice information for the sake of making the deck look more glamorous. 

Between Tuesday and Thursday we revised the deck. We made sure to incorporate more market size related number without sacrificing too much of the beauty component. Props to Brian on making the deck ultra sexy. We also refined our financial and Ask slide a lot more so it is clear why we are asking this much money and how far this amount will get us. 

Another thing regarding the presentation that I think we should really have focused on was practice. We do a fairly okay job winging presentations as a group but I think there is definitely more room for revision. Two things I wish to change is definitely refineing our story and making sure we are properly conveying our number.

Our next step for Tuesday is to create the concierge email to send to all the parents whose signed up to our Playdate service from the previous MVP. Once we've response about time and location connivence we will send out an invitation regarding the event via email. We will be hosting the playdate event next weekend. 

Personal learnings this week: Thesis is becoming crazy and I can tell everyone is extremely stressed out. I wanted to do the Playdate event this weekend but it was simply not feasible. I definitely need to keep in mind the schedules of other teammates' lives. Flexibility is something that I think the team really needs right now. All in all, I just need to make sure we have more wiggle room in terms of scheduling progress so that people aren't super worn out but at the same time making steady progress. 

Elaine Chu(Yick Ping) - CEO

[teamrockcca]

Week 8 - BMC

I just realized that the reminder of “do your blog” assignment on spring-break was for week 8 — I believe I missed posting that one:

Week 8 was mainly about completing the BMC and figuring out revenue streams and cost structure. Personally, I found this part to be extremely hard:

Looking and reading what “others” do can provide some sense of what your “thing” should be like, but only some. Actually figuring out who and how much people should and be willing to pay you — that’s impossible. The math part is the easy part. Getting a genuine authentic answer for “will you/how much will you pay for this?” evaluating and putting a price tag on your value prop - that’s where I struggle. And yes - struggling with the philosophical question of “are we all individuals?” and after talking to how many future-costumers will I actually be convinced that I have the right thing in hand? I know the research. I know that the mere idea of “free will” is romanticized. I know people’s behavior can be quantified, predicted, evaluated and even manipulated. I just hope we’re doing it the right way.

All and all — completing the BMC and seeing “the whole picture” was a positive experience. Seeing how flexible it is, and how much of it we can change and probably will — is actually reassuring. I believe that as long as we keep asking questions rather then thinking we’ve got all the answers —  we’re good.

Happy Spring!

[teamrockcca]

Week 8 BMC: Revenue stream.

I learned that once people are convince a platform could work, brainstorm for revenues streams is easy.   

This week, I talked to 5 parents on ‘Playdates’ as a platform [again]. This time, I came them a quick story and journey of ‘Playdates.' I had a lot of fun chatting/brainstorming with parents about how money could get involve, because I didn’t even have to ask. People from left and right are already suggesting ways to make money. 

- One entrepreneur even suggested the business model of the ’sharing economy.’ Pay to join a playdate and get paid to start a playdate, then we take a 20% cut. [haha uber-playdays] 

Sponsorships/partnerships with family-friendly restaurants and venders eventually surfaced in our discussion. Because we hear parents saying - ‘we don’t know where to hangout other than the park, it’s almost like we’re vegetarian.’ ‘we are conscious of the snacks we bring for our child - if we forget to bring the healthy ones, then it’s a challenge to not buy chips.' 

Ads/Partnership from family friendly places Sponsorships with healthy snacks for kids and adults, even local brewery.

All in all I learned that we have platform. I just need to speech confidently about it.

- BRian, Head of Product

[teamrockcca]

Week 8 - Build Plan

This past week I looked heavily at implementation strategies. I leveraged my community to see what are the best ways to do what we need to do. I met with Colin Roache to discuss the best implementation strategies. 

The optimal way is to combine the Meteor framework with a bootstrap structure and deployed on Heroku. After messing with this stuff I realized I really have no idea what I am doing and Arduino is a whole different game to fullscale web development. I considered trying to build it on wordpress but its likely that the outcome would be pretty lame. 

The next steps are going out and looking for a real technical cofounder and playing around with whether this is something we are capable of building. 

Firstly we are going to create a looks like, behaves like prototype so we know what we really want. 

[teamrockcca]

Week 7 — Price Testing

This week we decided to see what features were most important for parents. I developed a set of cards that we could use in our price testing game. I did this activity with 5 parents.

Here is my raw data.

advice from prof - 0, 3, 0,  0, 0

shopping, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0

Connection to community - 10, 9.99, 20, 10,20

background check - 10,0,0,25,10

Babysitter Swapping - 0,0,0,50,10

Advice and support - 0,0,5, 8, 0

Pets - 0000,20

Find Playdate partners - 0,0,10 as barrier

Marketplace - 0000,5

Nannies Reccomendation - 0000,5

Connection to school - 20,15,30,15,10

Interest Activity- 5,5,5,3,10

It felt pretty clear that community, authentication and recommendations were the things parents would pay for. 

TAM, SAM and SOM

I went through our TAM, SAM and SOM for this new market. Here are the findings:

INSIGHT 5.8 million market for Elementary schools and neighborhoods 290 million market for selling directly to parents

TAM

Total Parents in USA: 29 million families x $10/month = $290,000,000

Elementary schools: 67,086 = $40 = $2,680,000

Municipalities: 19,429

Neighborhoods (low est): 77716 = $3,100,000

SOM

71% of parents use portable smart devices = 20.3 million

4,117,036 parents with kids in California who use smart devices = 2.8 million users

$28 million

SAM

772,586 parents in Bay Area

$7,000,000 market

SOURCES

http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2012/tables/12s0064.pdf

http://www.slideshare.net/profimercadeo/forrester-ustoa-dec-2010

http://www.bayareacensus.ca.gov/bayarea.htm

http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/06000.html

http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=84

http://www.cde.ca.gov/ds/sd/cb/cefenrollgradetype.asp

[teamrockcca]

Week 6 — Competitor testing

This week I went out and tested out comparative sites like circle of moms, match.com and meetup.com. I sat down and talked to 5 different parents. 

Circle of Moms

With circle of moms I learned that it felt to kitsch and that the content did not feel relevant for the given community. I heard from at least 3 parents that they gained relevant information from their own community through other forums. 

I also found that parents with kids under 5 wanted to find other families to hang out with while parents with kids over 5 were more interested in having a general community network. 

I also found that the quality of the content on circle of moms was very off par, this put a lot of parents off. It needed some sort of quality threshold. 

It was interesting to see how others dealt with different challenges parents come up against. 

I heard consistently that there is definitely room for a high quality forum for parents and that they would pay for one if it was good enough.

Care.com

Care.com appeared to have nailed the babysitting business pretty well. They have a huge user base and have diversified into other spaces such as elderly care. I talked to 2 parents who had already used it and I heard only good things. I did hear that they would always take a personal recommendation over using the site. 

Meetup.com

Meetups leads the net in creating impromptu meetups around different needs including for parents. Events based within social media will always be stronger but for a public facing event that is regular, Meetups leads the market. There are appears to be no real threat. Most parent meetup groups are already based around a neighborhood community, so it clearly reinforces the need we discovered to these based in a community.

[teamrockcca]

Week 8 - BMC

Revenue stream

I learned that once people are convince a platform could work, brainstorm for revenues streams is easy. 

This week, I talked to 5 parents on ‘Playdates’ as a platform [again]. This time, I came them a quick story and journey of ‘Playdates.' I had a lot of fun chatting/brainstorming with parents about how money could get involve, because I didn’t even have to ask. People from left and right are already suggesting ways to make money.

One entrepreneur even suggested the business model of the ’sharing economy.’ Pay to join a playdate and get paid to start a playdate, then we take a 20% cut. [haha uber-playdays]

Sponsorships/partnerships with family-friendly restaurants and venders eventually surfaced in our discussion. Because we hear parents saying - ‘we don’t know where to hangout other than the park, it’s almost like we’re vegetarian.’ ‘we are conscious of the snacks we bring for our child - if we forget to bring the healthy ones, then it’s a challenge to not buy chips.' 

Ads/Partnership from family friendly placesSponsorships with healthy snacks for kids and adults, even local brewery.

- Brian, Head of Product

[teamrockcca]

Week 8 - BMC and Build Plan

This is what I learned, in any form including the classic, this is what I thought, this is what I did, this is what I learned, this is what I’ll do next. Include link to YOUR entry.

Recap from last week. We played the innovation game with parents to try to figure out how different features could make us money. By last week Thursday we decided as a team that we are going to build playdate out with just the feature of matching parents with other parents who are interested in hanging out, in hopes that organic relationships will eventually form from this interaction. We are also heavily focusing on the community aspect of this app because we’ve found that, through our interviews, parents are sensitive to the communities they and others belong to. 

This week our teamed focused mainly on our BMC in order to figure out how our cost structure and revenue streams are going to play out in the future. This was quite difficult to be honest; especially since none of us are particularly good at math. However I think we did an amazing job are predicting.

As you can see in the photo uploaded above, we will be giving people free trials until we reach a threshold of users then we will begin a subscription based model. We hope that this will really help with the initial user acquisition. We will also be making partnerships with snack companies, family friendly places and other related companies so they can advertise on our platform. This will help us secure another stream of revenue which in the long run will really help us grow. 

What we learnt this week, if I could speak for the team, is really how to complete a BMC. We’ve learned as a team on how to predict how much money we will cost, how much time before we run out of money, how much will it take for us to break even and how much we should we should be asking in our first round of funding. I think we all learned a lot this week because this type of thinking is very new to us. 

We have also been planning on how we are going to build out this platform. Looking at different ways this can be done with the amount of skills we have our options are relatively limited. Thus we’ve been looking into how we can find an engineering co-founder. 

Our next step is basically to figure out to build this platform out by ourselves while simultaneously looking for a technical co-founder. This will be a tough one but if we secure a co-founder this will also be extremely exciting because, once built, this platform could potentially survive on its own. 

Personal learnings this week: Having more patience has definitely worked out a lot better this week for me in terms of managing. I’m sometimes too authoritative, which is good if we wanted to get things done quickly but I need to learn to pull back from that type of mannerism sometimes if the team isn’t on the same page as me. Anyways, go Team Rock :)

Elaine Chu(Yick Ping) - CEO