Sunday, April 12, 2015

The First Idea

Scrolling through Facebook one day over the summer, I saw an advertisement for an app called "Push for Pizza." A funny video following the thought process of a group of lazy, stoner friends who wanted an easy way to order pizza got me excited. Wouldn't it be fun to press a button- just one button- and order food? Avoid the annoying phone call to a restaurant, or dilemmas of scrolling through a website with 60 restaurant options, each with dozens of items on the menu? Sure it would.

So we wanted to do the same. Lets make delivery fun, and lets make it easy. The same "one click ordering" that Push for Pizza promoted, combined with vibrant colors, cool prizes redeemable by loyalty points, and surprise free gifts would make our app the most popular tool for ordering, ever. We can even expand! After connecting to your favorite local pizza places, we can have a tab for the best sandwich spots (with just two options for your ordering convenience, of course), your favorite coffee shop (choose between black or two sugars only), and a dozen other establishments. We were thrilled!

We spent a few weeks talking about it, excited. How do we make ordering fun? What would it look like? I'd stay up late, drawing preliminary wire-frames, designing the future of our app. What would be the process, what page would the pizzas be on. How do we make this the easier process EVER.

And then we pitched our idea for the first time. The first person to hear it was Jim Kitchen, founder of 1789 Venture Lab, and one of the heavy hitters of UNC entrepreneurship. And, though I'm confident our excitement for the idea was palpable, Jim frowned. "I don't know if delivery needs to be any more fun than it already is. I don't know if I'm annoyed by the ordering process. I honestly don't think this sounds like something that would be solving any of my problems."

Well, a little disappointing. But what does this guy know? Nothing! We don't need him to tell us its a good idea, we know it is! "Go talk to customers," Jim said. A big promoter of Lean Start up methodology, that was Jim's answer to everything. Talk to customers, and everything will become clear.

So I went out there, and started talking to restaurants. But we'll save that for the next post. I'll tell you about what its like to talk to a customer, how I prepared, what I learned, and how the idea changed. Until next time!

Much love,

A

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