Process
Viktor his first weeks...
During the first week of class, we got the assignment to come up with a business idea and pitch it in front of the group. The pitch could take maximum 1 minute. For this assignment, I started with a brainstorm concerning possible business ideas.
First, I wrote down the different aspects of design since I am a product designer. Next to this, I wrote down several trends that came to my mind, I found on the internet, … After this, I decided to select the most interesting trends to narrow down the subjects to brainstorm around.
After I brainstormed about innovative ideas, problems in society and others, I connected them with the trends that were brought up earlier. This combination brought us to the second canvas.
In the third phase, the feasibility of the different ideas was looked at and compared. The result of this was 2 ideas that stood out; One of them is about the redesign of the infrastructure of the airport of Barcelona. The second one responds more on a need in the contemporary society; A product, service or product-service hybrid that makes it possible to secure your personal belongings when you go surfing, skating, or when you lay on the beach by yourself and you want to go take a swim.
The last idea seemed most feasible, according to me and several other sources. Therefore I continued with this one. After numerous in-class sessions and other classes, the idea kept on evolving.
Later, we got the opportunity to do a speed-date with the objective to explain your idea brief, your needs, your skills and listen to those of your partner. This event caused some crucial changes to the idea and even resulted in a collaboration with another idea of one of the participants named Felix…
Felix his First weeks…
My initial idea has been inspired by my recent travels to Japan for backcountry skiing. Whilst I had been planning this trip it had been a real nightmare to find a proper accommodation as the language barrier wasn’t easy to overcome. Finding local guides had not been easier. After a rather long time of research, we had booked a room at a guesthouse close to one of the ski areas. To our surprise Kimi, the owner and our host, was a Japanese skier which could speak English fluently and gave a tone of very useful tips at our arrival to his guesthouse. For instance he had told us the cheapest tickets to buy, which area it was strictly forbidden to ski (something none of us had known before) and even went skiing with us every other day and showed us the best local spots. I don’t want to imagine how much of a disaster or expensive this trip could have had become if we would have picked another accommodation. So my idea was to build upon the concept of Airbnb and create a platform where extreme sports enthusiasts can host others which share the same passion for the sport. Go skiing together, share useful tips and learn from each other. The main focus here is the person renting out the room itself, and the added value you get from living with a local.
Another Idea I had been thinking of was a platform where strangers can travel together to a destination suitable for practising their sport. For instance you want to travel to Bali to surf, but you can’t find anyone to go with. Practicing sports such as skiing, surfing, mountain biking can be very dangerous when practised alone. Through the platform one could join existing groups which are travelling to a specific location, making it easy to connect with locals and other sportsmen to enjoy the sport together.
All these ideas shared the same goal of making it easier to practice your sport, aiding sportsmen around the sport itself from the logistics involved getting to the spot all the way to security.
Merged Idea…
The merged idea resulted in a platform that provided a meeting point for travellers and locals so they could make an arrangement concerning housing (sort of Airbnb concept). Only now it was combined with sports, since the ‘local’ could also show the good spots for the sport, give hints about the surroundings, etc. Like this, the travelling sportspeople are more paying for the experience, rather than the housing itself. The sports we were aiming at were skiing, snowboarding, but also summer sports like skating, surfing, etc. True this change, the platform would be useful in a lot more scenarios during the whole year.
The development of the merged idea…
After finding each other, we decided to zoom out of the idea and start brainstorming around the common subjects we had, extreme sports and travelling. We started looking for problems, new trends that could influence this combination and possibilities.
As soon as we mapped out a lot of possibilities, needs, problems, and inconveniences of the sporters, we started seeing a lot of links in between these subjects. And then the idea of a ‘members club’ was born.
With the idea of a membersclub, we wanted to create an exclusive group of extreme sport enthusiasts with a certain level. They would be able to come together in physical clubhouses, pop-up clubs, etc. The group would be provided with workshops, storage rooms, events and a platform to exchange information concerning the sport, find travelling buddies, …
We brainstormed about the different possibilities we could provide the group of talented athletes which evolved in a lot of features, both physical and virtual.
During this time, we were following a workshop concerning business partnerships, entrepreneurial skills, and the business plan. For of the assignments of the workshop we had to plan the next few months. For this assignment, we used a technique which we learned in a former class from Jorge and Daniel, where we started at the goal and go back in time to plan every step more detailed. Finally, we came up with the first draft of our plan for the project, which we split up into different phases where steps like ‘testing’ were repeated several times. Obviously, this plan was not going to work for us to follow it up perfectly, but it gave us the motivation and idea to update it once and a while for ourselves to have a better overview, some time management and notion of the necessary steps we needed and will need to make.
This made us realize our idea of a members club might be a little bit too ambitious, so we decided to zoom in on one of the bigger problem/need of the extreme sports. Especially with the social media trend we are experiencing, photography and video is a huge part of our lives. With the people practising extreme sports, this isn’t any different. Therefore we started looking how we could connect these sportspeople, helping them with the need of decent footage whilst sporting and make a profit out of this as a business. This took made us thinking of developing three different parties finding each other; the sporters, photographers and companies.
This made us realize our idea of a members club might be a little bit too ambitious, so we decided to zoom in on one of the bigger problem/need of the extreme sports. Especially with the social media trend we are experiencing, photography and video is a huge part of our lives. With the people practising extreme sports, this isn’t any different. Therefore we started looking how we could connect these sportspeople, helping them with the need of decent footage whilst sporting and make a profit out of this as a business. This took made us thinking of developing three different parties finding each other; the sporters, photographers and companies.
However, we were not 100% convinced since the photographers will be a lot smaller audience, they would have to be able to do the sport to be able to make decent videos/pictures, etc.
We struggled with this idea for a while since it would also be interesting to include the art influence of photography into extreme sports like skiing, surfing and skating since they are as well extremely creative sports and is considered an art form as well.
_____________________________________________
What we started seeing is that we are trying to help extreme sports people practise their sport easier and better, without influencing the performance/practice of the sport itself.
That is when we realized the spotlight needed to be fully aimed at the athletes finding one another, and not finding photographers. Photographers, events, workshops, meetups, carpooling, etc. would be present at the platform, in function of the sports audience.
We started meeting up daily to brainstorm, adjust and finetune our idea. We decided to take our idea back towards the members club, but without the memberships. Instead, we want to create a virtual environment for these extreme sports enthusiasts. The service will be location-based and will something like a forum, combined with other possibilities. All these features that are mapped out for the idea have one common purpose; to break down the barriers for practising these extreme sports. This will help the athletes with everything around the sport without changing anything about the practice of the sport itself. In the picture below, a first overview of the features was made with the profile of the user in the centre.
User Research: MACBE/Parallel – Skateboarding
Yesterday we decided to go to two skate spots in Barcelona to observe and ask skaters some questions regarding our startup idea. We had chosen the spots at MACBA and Parallel as they are two very well-known skateboard spots and there are always skaters around. In general, one could say that the level of skateboarding at both spots is very high indicating that these individuals properly have been in the skating community for quite some time and aren’t beginners. First, we observed the skaters behaviours. We had noticed two very interesting things about both spots which stood out to us. Firstly skaters would arrive in pairs or in groups. Hardly any would arrive by themselves, and if it was the case, they would wait for someone else or join people who are already there. This shows that there has to be some sort of interaction/planning before going skating, it may also be due to the fact that at MACBA and Parallel are lots of locals skating which are familiar with each other. You could really see that most of them knew each other as they greeted one another upon arrival. Secondly, smartphones were everywhere! Skaters where filming each other- no professional camera equipment was used. Skaters would just skate behind each other and take turns filming themselves. This shows that, contrary to what we had expected, the smartphone is very-well used during the sport in regards to skating. We had asked the skaters where they would post these videos, and they all said Instagram. Skaters would film their friends or people they would meet at the spot. It was a fair exchange between them, as one filmed the other and then they swapped. Nearly all the skaters we had questioned said that they had no trouble going to places to practice skateboarding, as Barcelona is such a perfect city to skate. But they seemed very keen on having someone to film them, a “photo buddy”. This, however, might be different for sports which need more equipment to practice the sport than skateboarding, eg. mountain biking, Surfing, BMX.
Nike Box Barcelona
Nike Box Barcelona is a space curated by Nike to spark collaboration between athletes and artists. In a sense, this physical space embodies certain aspects of our virtual space. Nike Box gives individuals, and in Nike’s eyes potential and existing customers, possibilities to take part in exercise events and workshops. We had visited this space to take a closer look at how Nike approached this topic of connecting people through sports and art. The physical space features a “store-like” area when entering from the side entrance. Very much what you are used to from any other Nike store. However this space also features a surf area, this in our opinion is an attempt to adapt to the spaces environment thus being Barceloneta – a well-known surf location. On the second floor is a workspace, used for workshops. We believe Nike’s approach to connecting people is very effective as it has a very local ‘touch and feel’.
Mountain biking in Barcelona
We also checked out a mountain biking location very close to Barcelona. Unfortunately, we were unable to meet a lot of mountain bikers. We had the opportunity though to speak to a man in his early 40s, his main problem with mountain biking was taking his mountain bike by car, as his wife is using their car on the weekend. So he either has to take the public transport (slow and unpractical) or go with a friend (which never has time). This might be a hint for us that the sports have very different problems concerning the transport of equipment. He also said that he does not use forums or apps, but he is open to it.
Pop-up Biz 3/11
For this first pop-up biz, we were supposed to show the results of the testing of our idea. The presentation we had to give could take 10 minutes maximum and respond to the following questions;
– What do consumers say?
– What do competitors say?
– What do experts say?
– What do potential investors say?
– Who are our potential partners?
– Who are our potential investors?
We started the presentation after introducing ourselves by a one-sentence description of our idea;
“A VIRTUAL SPACE WHICH ENGAGES LIKE-MINDED PEOPLE TO BREAK DOWN THE BARRIERS AROUND PRACTICING EXTREME SPORTS”
Afterwards, we briefly explained the idea by showing an A3 on which we mapped out the different aspects.
Going on, we showed our target audience, which is ‘extreme sports enthusiasts‘. Thanks to the feedback after our presentation, we realized it is useless to mention an age-range.
In the following slides of our presentation, we explained the observations we did of skaters at Macba, skaters at Parallel, mountain bikers at Sierra de Collserola and the physical space called Nike box Barcelona. We substantiated these observations with a quote of ‘The lean startup’ from Eric Ries; “We must learn what customers really want, not what they say they want or what we think they should want.”
Later we briefly mentioned the results of our survey we did earlier:
– 85% practice their sport with 2+ people
– 90% is interested in meeting new people
– Everybody is interested in carpooling
– 2 out of 5 people post on social media often-daily
– +50% rely on others to take their pictures
– +80% use their phone to take pictures
– Rating of picture quality is 3/5
We also mentioned we went to several networking conventions to pitch the idea in order to get new feedback so we could reconsider the way we pitch, the idea itself and other aspects of the startup.
A brief overview and analysis of the current concurrence was also given. It contained 8 different companies where we looked at their mission statement, their strengths & weaknesses and the popularity of it on social media. The eight different companies are Timpik, Bvddy, Meetup, Redbull playgrounds, Adrenaline hunter, Leap, Shakabookings and Swap & Surf.
Finally, we finished with several possibilities of monetarization for our idea, the mentioning of potential future partners and the way we would like to find investment. The monetarization focused mainly on the use of premium accounts, the gamification of the location-based space, advertisements and possible in-app pop-up stores. The potential partners, we picked by looking at companies with a corresponding mindset. These are Red Bull, Nike, DJI, Vans, GoPro and Canon. Next, to these companies, we also scanned social media and discovered a lot of young local photo-/videographers and enthusiasts who practice their sport daily in the streets of Barcelona with 20k to 60k followers. These are interesting contacts for the future to give our startup a boost. Our last slide showed we want to find investment true crowdfunding. We want this since our targeted audience is very active online, which makes us believe it will bring the virtual space closer to the user by looking for investment and meanwhile get us more intel on the interest and customer value of the idea.
Interview with Tim Drost from Blacksheepsports
“Blacksheepsports is a true core shop for freeride enthusiasts in the heart of Munich. Every year we spend a lot of time carefully selecting the best freeride equipment from around the globe and we are stoked to be the only European reseller of brands like ON3P and Caravan Skis”
Tim is a brand ambassador for the US Ski Company DPS, works at Blacksheepsports and has been in the ski scene since a very young age. We were able to ask him some questions regarding the skiers in Munich.
Do you have the feeling that a lot of your customers travel during winter to go skiing?
I would say about 20% of my customers really get on a plane and fly somewhere. The rest stay around 3 hours away from Munich.
How do your customers get their information (or not) bevor they come to your store?
The majority is through recommendations and experiences from their friends. Some also refer to the ski magazine “Bergstolz”. But I would say 80% are influenced by recommendations from their friends.
What do you think about carpooling to the mountains? Do you see a need or is everybody well off?
I don’t think people have a problem getting to the mountains from Munich, also not when I look at my friends. There is/was some kind of carpooling for skiing, I don’t remember its name at the moment. But for me, this is not an option as I have to be flexible to go when there is good snow.
What role does social media play in regards to the store and yourself?
Social media is getting more and more important for us. For our shop, and personally, its all about delivering a certain lifestyle to the customer and to invite the followers to dream. In my opinion, social media will be more important than traditional advertising.
Are your customers open to meet new people or do they stay in the same group?
Meeting new people is not a problem, in reality on the mountain you’re are usually with your known group of people.
Which 3 apps are on every skier’s phone?
Bergfex (snow report), Instagram, WhatsApp
Observation Parallel
A new and more intense observation of the skateboarders was made at Parallel. On 8/11 I went to the skate spot for 4 hours to look at the behaviour of these athletes. It was quite an active day despite the grey weather. There were 3 groups of skaters, some younger kids with scooters and some skaters by themselves. The biggest group was a group of English-native speakers. All of them skated, but not all of them were at the skatepark for this reason. Two of them were there for the graffiti wall, four of them were practising their skate tricks and two others were recording a skate session. The others remained on the bench looking at the skaters, talking with each other and the skating friends that took a break once and a while.
In this group it was possible to kind of distinguish the different roles each one took in the group:
The loud one which liked to be in the centre of attention, making a lot of jokes, skating with his friends and challenging them, engaging very quickly with other people,…
The more introvert skater who wasn’t talking a lot, he mostly observed his surrounding, skated a lot on his own and had a calm and peaceful appearance.
The artistic one/ the stoner. this guy had a broken wrist and was at the skatepark to do graffiti with the other artistic friend. He was clearly under the influence of marijuana.
The other artistic one. He was also spraying with the stoner at Parallel, he was a talented young man who was really into his work, not engaging a lot with others unless they came to him, but he did not have an approachable appearance.
The Inbetweeners, a couple of guys just there to skate, regular behaviour, never really leaving the group really far to go skating in the skatepark, they always did it near the bench where they were sitting.
The other group was speaking Spanish and were higher level skaters. They were being filmed by photographers and filming each other. They checked the footage after every attempt together with the photographer to check out their style and what they did wrong. The third group of skaters were also Englishmen and varied in level in the group. One of them, the one with the highest level and clearly a lot of experience, broke his board on purpose out of frustration because his trick would not work. He then went away and came back 10 minutes later with a new skateboard from the shop.
Concerning the clothing there was one very remarkable thing; everybody had a cap, hoody, hat or something else on their head. Most of them were dressed in black or grey with some white. Only one guy was dressed a bit more colourful; a big yellow/green jacket. Out of all the observations concerning skaters we have made, we saw a couple of different styles coming back which I will try to generalize now.
1. The Hipster skater sneakers, rolled up pants, t-shirt/shirt of a known brand like supreme, a cap.
2. The gangster skater sneakers, oversized clothes, plain colours and often black, Trasher clothing, a cap.
3. The alternative skater; Very hard to generalize, a lot of variations, colours, types of fabric like cotton, knitted sweaters, vintage look, slipper skate shoes, they have often a more arty look & feel to their way of clothing.
Note: the pictures are examples of the style and do not represent all these people.
"While there are differences between the individuals, in general, they share the same philosophy of life. In this sense, this group can be considered as having a shared culture: the skate culture, which conditions their preferences, tastes and activities."
And last but not least a general note that was clear on the three observations of the skateboarders in Barcelona; in this environment, everybody is extremely respectful for one another. For example, if somebody lands a hard trick, everybody congratulates the skater by clapping, tapping with their board on the ground or even giving him a high-five. The skaters also have a lot of the time short moments of contact with one another; whether it’s asking for something or just a friendly nod when arriving/leaving the skate spot.
