Posts

#7 Let's talk finance!

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Hi everyone, in this post we will share our financial plan with you. Sounds exciting, right? :) Let's start with our Full Life-Cycle Use Case (FLCUC)! As you can see from our infographics, online marketing and online sales are the key points in our strategy. The reason behind this is that the use of online channels allows us to explain the functionalities of the Backjag to customers - which would be difficult to do in a physical store - while at the same time reducing the need to bear fixed costs. In the present absence of capital, we are forced to use bootstrapping methods as much as possible. Although we have never built a webshop and don't even have experience in e-commerce yet, after 4+ years spent in the university we know that we can learn literally anything. Especially if there are a plenty of online courses and other learning materials out there.. ( thank you Internet, our best friend!! ) :)  Revenue model Our revenue model is based on a single reve...

#6 Backjag on FIRE!!!

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Hi everyone, in this post we'll tell you the story of Backjag's debut on Facebook. As you might now, the official launch date was on Tuesday and we had to drive as much traffic as possible, as creatively as possible within a couple of days. As we didn't really have prior experience in growth hacking, our strategy was based on assumptions and our intuitions. We decided to measure our success in the number of likes on our Facebook page, so our main goal was to make the page cool and stuffed with useful information. So, what have we done? Content: although the original Backjag team has created the Facebook page a couple of months ago, there were no likes (Except for Sara's. :D) or content on the site, so we had to start with adding a logo, a nice background picture, some basic product description and a promotional video. Our world-famous promotional video! Our online marketing strategy was quite simple: We uploaded almost everything (inclu...

#5 Leaps of faith

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Hello everyone, it's been a while since our last post, but don't worry, we haven't been lazing in the meantime. :) In this post, we will give you an overview of the development of our leaps of faith and the insights of our online customer survey. We decided to conduct an internet survey to get some more insights about our product, the much-valued opinion of our potential customers, and to test our hypotheses. (If you were among our respondents, thank you again for taking your time! :) ) The survey was provided in two different languages - English and Italian - given the reluctance and the struggle that large part of the I talian population experiences in understanding and interacting with English content. At the end, we closed the survey with 127 respondents (70 male and 57 female). Besides our personal social networks, we also reached out to specific, travel-related Facebook-groups. As usual, we created some infographics to summarize our results: T...

#4 Customer survey with the prototype

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Hello everyone, we know that it might be a bit boring that we're going to write about another customer survey we conducted, but this is pretty much what we've been doing recently.  However, this time we brought the prototype with us to find out how much people like our initial design and to test how much time it takes to convert the jacket into a bag. Besides, we recorded all the 16 interviews so that we can make a video summary of the feedbacks and comments for the second challenge. But let's dig a bit deeper into our insights! The main findings of our survey: The average number of city trips per year was 8.125 . However, one lucky bastard  among the respondents is a clear outlier of the sample with 24 trips. Leaving out his answer, the average drops to 7.06 times a year. We are still happy with this number, as it still can be regarded robust enough. People seem to be bothered by carrying items during their city trips , as 7 respondents - out of the 12 ...

#3 Customer survey - tourists/locals

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Hello everyone, today we will introduce you the results of our customer survey. After interviewing fellow students on Woudestein Campus, we went to the city to find out what the people of Rotterdam think about Backjag. As usual, we summarized our main findings in an info graph for you: Further highlights of the survey: Most of people prefer taking as less items as possible during their short trips, with less than 15% using mostly their large baggage.  The biggest surprise was the fact that 17 respondents out of 49 claimed that they do not carry any kind of weather protection and prefer "traditional ways" of countering the rain, such as hiding under a porch or drinking a beer or two in a bar. However, the rest chooses umbrella as the most common rain tackler. Most of the respondents have a rain jacket or a water proof jacket at home and many of these were bought for more that 50€, giving therefore consistency to our pricing idea. Interestingly, most of the ...

#2 Customer survey - festival visitors

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Hey peeps, we hope that you are having a great weekend! As we promised, in this post we will write about our first customer survey on preliminary assumptions. Our business model solves a logically assumed problem (pain) of festival-goers having to deal with the hassle of carrying around a small bag/other small items in addition to a jacket. In establishing our business model, we incorporated several leaps of faith that needed to be verified before being further developed. Thus, this week we went out of the classroom, talked to people in order to test these. The following are the key initial 'leaps of faith' that we thought were crucial to test: 1. Most festival goers would consider it a hassle to bring festival necessities such as smart phones, wallets or water bottles. 2. Most festival goers would find rain annoying. We naturally assumed that if such hassle and annoyance indeed exist, festival goers would favour our product because it solves the problem ...

#1 The very first version of our BMC & VPC!

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Hi everyone, we are happy to share some good news with you: we have completed the very first version of our BMC and VPC! (It's probably only a small step for mankind, but a giant leap for us. :) )