customer discovery

Before my Grandpa passed away, he taught me two things. One, be a person of action and two, do things bigger than yourself. With this sprit in mind, I recently volunteered for Junior Achievement, located in the Chick-fil-A Foundation Discovery Center at the Georgia World Congress Center in downtown Atlanta.

I was absolutely blown a way with the JA BizTown setup. The gist of it is students applying and getting jobs with Atlanta based companies and having to run a business successfully. Each student earns a paycheck which they use to buy their own lunch and go shopping. It’s basically a mini economy that comes to life for one day for each group of students. Students learn the basics about what it’s like to earn a paycheck, manage to a budget, and try to earn a profit.

There were a few eye-opening moments when the students realized that they had to buy their own lunch for the first time or when they saw taxes taken out of their own paycheck.

Here is a link to a short video that highlights the experience:

I was assigned a group of students who were going to work at RockTenn for the day. There were certain suggested products and services that we could sell but it was encouraged to be creative about how to attract other students to come to our store to spend their paychecks.

Cooleaf_at_RockTenn_Store with_JA

The big hit was not on the script at all. My group found a sliding door in the back of the store. They came up with a plan to charge other students to be able to see what was in the ‘secret room’. They then hid in the room and would jump out to scare students who paid to see the room. The results were that kids would yell out a scream that generated a bunch of buzz and curiosity from other students to see what was in the ‘secret room’. Before too long, we had a line of students waiting to get their turn to see the room and what all the commotion was about.

I would have never thought to come up with this plan but it worked. It made me realize that my group of 6th graders were easily able to come up with this plan because well, they think like other 6th graders.

So often I find myself sending an e-mail or having a conversation with a prospect without really putting myself in their shoes and understanding their specific interest or problem. Moving forward, I’m going to take the time to ask myself with each prospect, why they should take the time to speak with me and why should they care what I have to say. I will try to better understand my prospects and try to think like them.

This simple lesson stuck with me and I owe it to a group of 6th graders who brought to light something so simple but so powerful at the same time; the importance to think like your customers!

Cooleaf is constantly evolving. We are learning everyday from customers. I truly believe in that as part of survival. I also believe there should be fundamental principles at your core as a company that guide you. These principles can be difficult to learn and I think we are just now starting to really understand them. I think you really don’t know what you stand for until you have stood for a little while. Because then you get tested, rejected, and ignored. That’s when you really see what you believe in.

Here is our story at Cooleaf to finding our core.

The initial product launch for Cooleaf was a web app. that allowed consumers to pick and choose fitness classes from health clubs and studios without having to be a member of the gym. Our idea was to give people more flexibility, get a discount, and earn rewards for signing up for healthy classes. We got some traction but it wasn’t sustainable.

We found that what we thought was our target market, active people who liked getting fit, actually didn’t really need our product because they already felt good about the gym or studio they were in. They were fine with their current routine. We weren’t solving a critical problem for them. There was also a segment of the market that did like trying new things and not being locked down into a membership but at the same time they were getting e-mails from Groupon and Living Social with deep discounts that we couldn’t offer.

We started evolving into the corporate space by allowing the HR Director for example to offer all their employees a corporate discount to the Cooleaf partner network based on a corporate rate we negotiated with health clubs and studios. We started to get more traction because the communication was going through a trusted source, being the company a person works for. We found this as a much more efficient marketing strategy for acquiring new users to our platform. However, it still didn’t change the fact that we were not solving a problem for people.

Around the same time as we were starting to work with employers for distributing the ‘corporate perk’ we called it, or employee discounts, we started organizing group events open to anyone to join. The first one we did was a kickboxing class at Atlanta Kick back in April of 2012. We promoted the event to our user base where we charged $5 for the class and then set up a happy hour afterwards. We figured we might as well have fun with this. People started showing up and bringing their friends. I remember thinking, ‘where did these people come from?’. It was a cool feeling to see people showing up to our event and having a good time.

We found that doing things as a group made more sense for people to try something new. Even if the class wasn’t great, at least they were with friends to have a good time. It became more about having a fun or good experience as opposed to just a fitness session. We got feedback that people liked the idea of being able to meet others who also shared their passion.

As we continued with the group events, we started testing the idea of setting up group events that are private to the employees of a company. This meant for example, bringing in a chef to do a cooking demo at a company’s office, onsite yoga classes, or taking groups of employees to rock climbing outings. We found that employees loved it and employers were willing to pay for it. Based on the traction we were getting, we started focusing on offering awesome group experiences for employees at our employer clients.

Alere Pilates1

Typically the conversation with an employer client would start around offering a wellness program that their employees would actually want to participate in because it was based on fun activities that employees gave feedback on that they wanted to do. We would also get feedback from company leaders that they would use our program as part of their new employee onboarding process to get new hires introduced into the organization and start meeting others. The idea of organizing awesome group outings become much more about team building and making the company a better place to work rather than trying to improve the health of employees. People getting healthy was more of a byproduct of what we did.

We believe the best way to have a strong, innovative culture for a company is by creating an environment that fosters employees to have authentic relationships with one another. We help make this happen for a company by organizing fun group activities that allow employees to connect with other employees based on common interest and having fun.

By no means do we have it all figured out. We’re not even close. We are still constantly evolving how we position ourselves and what we can offer to maximize the value to a customer based on understanding and solving their problems. From all of this customer discovery and self discovery, we have come to put a stake in the ground on the following core guiding principles.

Enabling people to connect with others through fun, active experiences resulting in authentic relationships based on common interests, goals, and affiliations.
Creating more fun, collaborative, authentic, and positive cultures in organizations through engaging experiences for people.

Startup Lessons Learned

Work hard. Be Humble. Listen.

What I Learned from a Group of 6th Graders

Finding Your Core as a Startup Company