Business Research
In order to achieve the product-market fit which was mainly to achieve ongoing happiness score of Bindfolks (BF) social app customers, there was an important category which was “service providers” to be added which could support to accomplish our objectives. Those services were necessary to accomplish a particular task by the society member, hence it was utmost essential to integrate them into the BF platform. As a result to get the best and efficient suppliers who would provide good quality products and services was complementary and crucial and my next step of our market research. There were 35 different categories of businesses which were shortlisted for sampling for testing this segment. It was from a small business retail shop, tent suppliers, event organisers, meat shops, automobile workshops, general merchants to high end supermarket giants as Reliance and Tata retail chains.
Challenges and Advantages
Though a quality market research was crucial to develop the right product which consumer would rely on and use regularly, however the challenge was to narrow down to the essentials, to the bare minimum, for the development of the initial MVP. Dealing with the range of categories of products or services offered by the nearby suppliers, were immense within our densely populated suburb, let alone from the entire region or country. Local suppliers were stretched from sole proprietors, startups, right through to larger firms as hypermarket chains who were all in the vicinity of these societies. I realised there was an advantage of having severals suppliers to choose from, weakening the bargaining power of suppliers and to avoid monopoly or duopoly, which may result in low price and more options for our end user. This would bring in more users to the platform. Fortunately we had few experienced market researcher in our team, including me who had worked on previous similar projects to gather quality data using SPSS tool, which was really advantageous in this project. In short we had to get quality results faster without loosing too much of our limited resources.
Strategies and Resources
In order to achieve quality results within the due course, with our team I had to design series of open and closed ended questionnaires. To gather relevant data I took help of survey apps like Microsoft Forms and Surveysparrow which helped gathering relevant information faster and minimised fluff. However the quality of data was mostly achieved by personal face-to-face interviews with suppliers at their site and by seeing them conducting their day to day task operations. This helped me develop their persona and for building trust with our company for future strategic relationships.
Bang on results !
For this project to complete, gathering of relevant data was arduous, however worthwhile. The prototypes was built with the help of Figma, whiteboard and lots of brain storming and iterations. Finally a greater clarity was achieved by communicating with our potential business partners. The designs were incorporated keeping human-centric design principles and simplicity. The results me and my team achieved was within the timeframe and was outstanding. Those were finally handed over to the software development team for production and testing. This app is currently in the development and testing phase.
