Once we have a better understanding of our customers' pains and gains, we can usually start thinking of a solution. In this post, we will continue with the topic of Lean Canvas that we touched on in the previous post. To see what we have come up with, check out our Miro board. The next section we will look at is the Unfair Advantage.
Unfair Advantage
Unfair Advantage is a tricky thing that might not always come into play. It's something your competitors would be hard-pressed to copy from you. Let’s say you possess some knowledge that nobody else does which takes years of research to gain. Or maybe you have patented intellectual property not available to others. Having an unfair advantage means you have a larger window of time to grow from a startup into a successful company. But if you have none, there is a risk that the competition will relatively quickly and easily learn from your failures and come to the market with something better than your product. Then the window grows smaller.
But not having any unfair advantages is not the end of the world. Many products just simply have none, and that is also the case with the GetSnack app.
Key metrics
To understand how we are progressing on our startup runway, we should set up some measurable metrics to show us whether we are fulfilling our goals or deviating from them. The metrics help us to stay on the right track and to understand the impact of our recent actions. Both the actual values as well as the trajectory are essential. That’s why it is a good idea to initially define those metrics to know what to measure and start collecting the data as soon as possible.
We have fairly basic metrics defined for the time being as we are just starting out. They can be fine-tuned later. Currently, we are fine with the following:
- Monthly traffic on our product web page - we need to know we are being noticed.
- Monthly client conversion rate - we want to understand what hinders our potential clients from finalizing their subscriptions.
- Monthly client churn - we need to know how many clients are leaving us.
- Monthly transactions per client - we need to know how much the subscribed users are using the solution. Underutilization can be caused by a bad experience and will surely lead to client churn.
We will work with those metrics as we evolve with the product. Some more can be added or removed as needed.
Channels
It would be a pity if nobody found out about our product. To prevent this, we need to have channels for our potential customers to get in touch with us and for us to deliver the right message--that we exist, plus what value we can bring them. For now, we will leave this box empty as we need to do some more research on our target audience and decision makers. We need to learn where to find them and what the best way to reach them is.
Cost Structure and Revenue Streams
If the product is not profitable, it will not work. Thus it’s key that we have at least a rough idea of the monetization model. Our vision is to sell the product as SaaS for a monthly subscription fee. We think that, on average, this solution can save about 4 - 8 hours per month for the person taking care of the snack bar and thus our initial estimate is that 49 USD per month is a fair price. For small teams up to 10 members, we would like to offer a subscription for 9.9 USD per month. Considering our development and operation costs, we have come up with the first draft of the cost structure in our Miro board.
You can find additional resources to read about Lean Canvas and how to use it here.
