#5 Leaps of faith

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 Italian 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:

The main points were the following:

• We found extra support to our assumption that people are going to city trips regularly. The average number of city trips was 4.85 per year, which is in line with the result of our prior interviews and surveys (5.65)
• This time we aimed to understand the number and the specifics of the items people were carrying during their city trips. You might remember that we have already asked a similar question during face to face interviews, but we believe that these results are more likely to give a representative picture since giving multiple possible answers facilitates the ease of response for survey participants and a large sample is more reliable for a statistical purposes.
• The average number of items carried during city trips is 4.77. Our hypothesis was that 75%+1 were taking less than 6 objects, which was not verified. However, the percentage of people carrying less than 6 items was only slightly lower than hypothesized (71.65%), and we are quite satisfied with the result since the average number of carried items was lower than 6.
• As we expected, the most popular ways of carrying items were backpacks (47.24%) and bags (31.5%).
• Not so good for us, but people didn't seem to be bothered by carrying their belongings as only 11.81% claimed it to be a constant struggle. However, 42.52% answered that it actually depends on the circumstances, thus we still have hope. :)
• Weather seems to be a real concern since 41.61% of respondents always check the weather forecast before going to a city trip. The weather checking might be motivated by the fact that the majority (51.18%) of the respondents are taking a jacket or an umbrella only if rain is forecasted. And, more importantly, carrying these "rain remedies" seem to be rather bothersome since more than half of respondents (50.4%) reported it as a struggle.

• Most of the respondents do have a waterproof jacket at home (only 29.13% does not) and the average price paid was 63.33€. We are very happy with this result, as it is above our target price of 50€. The fact that 36.22% of people paid less than 50€ for their jacket is only partially concerning, because people who consider their raincoat as an only functional and not fashionable garment are not part of our market segment. Additionally, given a brief and general description of the functionalities of Backjag, most of the people seemed to be interested in the product - 42.52% answered yes, while 41.73 answered maybe.
• Our prototype has to be improved:
• Given the peculiarities of the product, most of the respondents feel that they’d have to give it a closer look/touch it by hand since they’re unsure of its value and efficiency (47.24%). However, the percentage of those that are interested in the product (24.41%) is higher than those that can see problems at the first sight and that are not, thus, interested in the present version of the product (21.26%).
• According to survey participants, textile (64.57%) and design (74.80%) are the main areas which we should focus on in product development that corresponds to our expectations. To our surprise, thickness (28.35%) and gender diversity (31.50%) were also among the most popular factors, although they didn't seem to be that important during the face-to-face interviews.
• We also asked people about their expectations regarding the final product:
• The expected price of Backjag (51.46€) was close to the price that we set (50€). Also, cross-filtered analysis confirmed these numbers, showing a relatively normal distribution of the willingness-to-pay (WTP) of consumers. Those who showed interest in buying the product had a WTP of 53.58€, while those who answered that they might be interested in it had a somewhat lower WTP of 48.62€. However, around half of each of these two groups were willing to pay 50€ (or more) for our product, more precisely 54% of “yes” and 45% of “maybe”. This gives support to our assumption that our target selling price of 50€ will be reasonable.
• The large majority of people prefer basic colors over bright ones. Although we expected that bright colors will be more popular among the younger audience, we didn't find any evidence for this assumption.
• Last but not least, we also checked the Backjag's potential value for festival visitors. The participants of the internet survey confirmed their interest in the product since 59.21% would bring our product to festivals, and more than one out of four (28.95%) might consider doing so.

Let's continue with our leaps of faith! In the table below we collected all of our leaps of faith in chronological order. As you can see, we managed to verify almost all of them during our offline and online customer surveys. However, some points have been verified only in part:

• People are annoyed by rain when walking around the city during city trips. We overestimated the percentage of people annoyed by rain, but the vast majority of people (66%) is still bothered by walking around with rain.
• People are annoyed by carrying items around the city. The possibility to have access to items is seen by some people as a necessity more than a hassle. However, around 54% of people is at least sometimes annoyed by carrying items around, partially confirming our assumption.
• People are annoyed by carrying with them an umbrella/coat. Although this assumption didn't appear to be verified during face to face interviews, our online survey, tested on a much larger sample, proved our hypothesis to be true. 
• People would not pay more than 20€ for the prototype because of its poor design. We couldn't test this hypothesis since people were not even willing to formulate a price for our prototype. As expected, we definitely have to improve the design and quality.

Sorry for the small font size, you can also find our dashboard HERE.

And what's next? First of all, we hope that you have a cracking Easter with heaps of treats and fun (in case you celebrate it)! :)

Second, we are busy preparing for our upcoming challanges, so stay with us! :)