Splinch - Telepresence Robot Rental Service Startup
Pitch
The robotic technology is advancing at a rapid pace. Though there is rapid adoption of robots in the industry, but on the consumer side we have still not seen any major product(other than quadcopters and iRobot ) which has penetrated the mass consumer market. I wonder if this is because of the fact that most robotic companies are trying to make robots and then come up with a problem which that robot can solve. Thus they are not solving any actual real world problem (http://mega.startupweekend.org/2012/04/05/being-robot-startup-shoes/).
Think about -
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A time when you wanted to attend an event overseas but were worried if you will have enough money or time to attend the event, or if will you be able to take a leave from your work.
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Or about a time when you had to travel or send an employee thousands of miles for one or two business meetings and spend thousands of dollars on the arrangement of trip.
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The time when you had all the right documents, invitations from the event, a paid trip but still could not attend the event or meeting due to immigration issues.
Thus I created Splinch, a telepresence robot rental service. Splinch enables you to have a physical presence at events through a telepresence robot, when you cannot attend an event in person due to time, money, immigration or mobility issues. Thus it not only helps you in saving money(airfare, hotel room rent, taxi ride charges etc), time(air travel etc), hassle(no need to find and book air tickets, hotel rooms, fill visa applications), but also helps you in reducing your carbon footprint.
Lean Startup Method
The first method I tried to validate the idea was to build a landing page and spread the word about it through Reddit, Google Adwords, forums, HackerNews. I did all this before I came across the Lean Startup Method. I had 200 users visit the page in the first 15 days. Certainly this is a very small number since one part of the startup is a web service from which people could book telepresence robots for rentals. But the striking thing was absolutely 0% conversion rate. This could have been due to a couple of factors. After first 5 days I had realized that my landing page was not designed properly. I read blog posts from Peep Laja and made changes to the landing page. The final landing page I used can be seen here. Other reasons could have been not reaching relevant audience or that the idea actually does not solve any real world problem.
I came across Lean Startup Method after about 15 days into my journey of validating my startup idea. For the next couple of days I delved deeper into the Lean method and learnt various concepts regarding it from the Udacity's course How To Build A Startup and Steve Blank's blog posts.
In the business model canvas I listed all the core assumptions under the sections the following sections -
The step of getting out of the building and talking to the potential customers for the next couple of days not only highlighted flaws in my core assumptions but also taught me valuable lessons about the importance of getting ideas out fast as soon as possibly and understanding needs of customers, how basic psychology like confirmation bias can blind you to some very obvious mistakes right in front of you and also got to learn why it is a bad idea to use friends as a way of validating the idea. From June 6 to June 15, I was able to conduct about 15 interviews over email and majority in person. From Customer Segments I concentrated on Conference Attendees because I thought I will be able to cover professors, researchers as well as some portion of the segment Business Executives under this section.
I conducted interviews with professors at my university including the director of robotics engineering department. I barged into an international conference and was able to conduct interviews with programming committee member of the conference, researchers, PhD students, professors from Holland, South Korea, some other parts of Netherlands, and US.
In brief the feedback obtained from interviews is as follows along the core assumptions from the Value Propositions segment -
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Value Proposition - Save Money
Feedback - Not really an issue, since all the people in the don't have to pay money from their own pockets. Their departments or companies pay the expense. Also there was a resounding belief that the fact of being under a single roof in person with people from same industry motivates them to look at their own knowledge and skiils, and evaluate them in terms of impact and how much more they need to learn and work to bring it in par with the world. -
Value Proposition - Save time
Feedback - The travel to conference venues is seen as a perk of their job by all the people I interviewed. Even the people who said they hate travelling in general, look forward to attending conferences overseas. -
Value Proposition - No hassles of planning trip
Feedback - Since travel for conferences is seen as a perk, people didn't mind the time and energy they had to invest in the process.
During last phase of interviews when I explained the idea almost every interviewee said they would like to use such a service but instead of paying themselves they would want the conference to provide the robots. Also the social stigma of attending the conference through a robot was a concern, as some people thought it could be socially awkward and disrespecting to people travelling to attend conference in person. Similarly for business executives who travel for short term business events the same things mentioned in the feedback above apply.
While most things I learnt from customer development interviews were very basic and I knew about them in some form but always neglected them(could potentially be confirmation bias). Also the friends who attend conferences and travel for business I talked to never raised any of the things mentioned in feedback. Thought this could even be because I just poured my idea and thoughts in front of them without even asking any of the questions I asked to other interviewees while trying to learn about customer pain points.
Currently I have put this idea on hold due to other commitments. Though the telepresence robot rental service business model for the customer segments mentioned above is possibly not a viable option, but I believe telepresence robots are here to stay. With schools and colleges starting to use telepresence robots( https://goo.gl/mA1JpP ) and companies experimenting with telepresence robots, it is clear that telepresence robots provide solution to some pain areas for customers.