Lessons Learned - Week 7

This week of classes was about which marketing and sales channels to choose for your entrepreneurial business and how to best develop customer relationships to ensure long-term customer retention as a basis for success. In class we learned about different marketing and sales channels and about their advantages and drawbacks. Following we choose the channels we believe are most suitable for fload considering the channel´s impact, ability to target specific customer groups, and effort, time, and costs associated with the respective channels. We believe that for fload our website, email-marketing, and social media are the most suitable marketing and sales channels. The decision for these channels was largely influenced by consideration of our limited resources, especially our limited manpower, time, and monetary resources. Nevertheless, we believe that in a later stage of the project partnerships could play a great role. We could partner with organizations that send out administrative documents regularly and via these organizations reach out to end-customers and convince them of fload´s benefits. Check out an overview about our ranking of the different marketing and sales channels following.

We also learned in class about the importance of customer retention – when thinking about sales and marketing channels one should always keep in mind how to get, keep, and grow customers effectively. Nevertheless, without a significant customer base for fload at this moment in time, we are most focused on how to get customers and how to keep them with us by convincing them about fload´s benefits. Growing customers will become more and more important in later stages of the project.

Apart from classwork we had the following lessons learned:

Tradeoffs need to be made considering limited resources – make the best out of it!

When discussing which marketing and sales channels to use for fload, we quickly realized that we had to lower our sights considering our limited time and monetary resources. At first we were hypothesizing about an extensive partnership network as the core of fload´s marketing and sales channel strategy. However, we quickly realized that this would not be feasible. While this realization was a major drawback at first, we are now concentrating on reaching the best possible solution. We believe that this approach should be followed during all stages of an entrepreneurial project. Decisions that need to be taken often include tradeoffs. Therefore one should not strive for absolute excellence every time but try to reach the best possible solution considering the given constraints.

Sketching an MVP for fload needs to be based on well-defined processes!

Next week we will start sketching an MVP for fload meaning we will develop a first prototype of how interfaces of the app could look like. To gain experiences in app prototype development we started discussing and thinking about how an MVP for fload could look. However, we quickly realized that sketching an MVP is only possible once the in-app processes are well defined and clearly outlined. If this is not the case the different app screens will remain mingled piecework with an unclear customer journey. Consequently, we started outlining the in-app processes for fload individually and will join our individual ideas next week to provide us with the perfect foundation for next week´s MVP development.

Excellence comes at a cost – we had to rethink our value curve!

Considering last week´s reading about the cost of excellence, we realized that we would need to further think about our value curve. Successful business are not doing best on all dimensions but they focus on specific dimensions that are most relevant to customers while disregarding others that had been considered as important by competitors but they are actually not. Consequently, we have rethought our value curve to give it more specificity and focus.

An update on the survey

Our survey has now reached more than 200 participants. While our goal was to acquire even more participants, we realized that we have reached a threshold for participant recruiting and that 200 participants are good enough for a first analysis of the survey´s results. We will conduct this analysis soon and we are excited for the results! So stay tuned!