#customer interview

1.      What are your favorite places to purchase a meal?

Wisey’s – deliciousness and convenience. Convenient because of location to home. Can get something relatively cheap that will fill me up. Chipotle – cheap and convenient. Convenient because it tastes really good for how fast it is.  It’s casual but the food is legit.

2.      What would you change about these places? Wisey’s – Want them to get my order right, I would like for it to be cheaper, and I would like more small entrée options. Chipotle – mix the ingredients inside the burrito more Noodles & Co. – I’m very satisfied with them

3.      How often are you in environments where you don’t have much time to eat?

Airports are where I usually don’t have time to eat, but also inbetween classes and family vacations

 4.      What do you eat in these environments?

Snacks, fast-food, vending machine items

5.      Explain Juxtapizones; what are your thoughts and criticisms?

How long do they take to cook? I think it would be a great festival food.

6.      Can you recommend anyone I should talk to about this idea?

One of the most challenging things for a startup in my opinion is generating relevant content.  The main reason is because frankly, it takes a good chunk of time to develop the content.  It is also interesting when developing content for new markets vs existing markets.  

Content is king and I plan to spend some time over the next few weeks generating articles for the upcoming Q1 of 2016.

Have you ever created content before?

Do you have any suggestions on best practices?

How much time does it generally take to generate content?

My next steps are to now take this new idea, a result from multiple pivots, and really figure out how I want to monetize and advertise. Do I want to focus on the user experience of "creating a journey"? Do I want to just be a conglomerate of train/plane/bus, as per my original idea, and just incorporate what I've learned from all my customer interviews? What features do I want to incorporate?

I have many decisions to make in order to define this product at a more concrete level.

I want to learn more about behavior and how likely people really are to download an app like this, and how I can optimally serve their needs. This is similar to what I've been doing these past two weeks, but I'd like to now dive deeper into the psychology of it all.

I found people to interview mostly via classes I have and people I've networked with in the past. A lot of the time, I'll end up having coffee with someone and I'll mention that I'm working on an idea, and they'll be interested in hearing more about the product. Instead of telling them about it, I'll interview them instead and reveal the product at the end.

I started my interviews by asking about how often they travel, and for a story about their most recent trip. I asked about travel habits and how they build their itineraries. This would vary from person to person depending on their response, but generally I would next tackle the things that bother them, or take too much time. For example, many people hated delays and were stressed out by traveling in general. I tried to gauge emotion rather than what they were saying, because it tended to be a better indicator of what they may want.

I picked up a lot of new features just from complaints. "I wish there was an app that just could tell me if something was delayed!" Well, I guess I can do that.

The customer interviews were a success in that I've learned a lot about how people travel, their habits, and what bothers them while they travel. However, they were also to a degree unsuccessful in that I still am unsure about what would better serve them.

I've pivoted many times throughout this process, and I found it difficult to go through each iteration and ask people's opinions on each one. I would typically mention the original (price/time comparison tool) and the current product (total time/price/experience/reminder/etc.). It's gotten to a point where it's a little convoluted and the idea is a bit too complicated, and I'm not sure what I should simplify the product to.

I definitely found a lot of potential, and my idea was validated by some of the audience, but definitely not all. I found this discouraging at first, but I realized that not everyone uses the same apps and some will be more successful with different audience groups. I wasn't too surprised that even within the student interviews, habits varied tremendously.

Student, Georgetown University

Thoughts on app

She travels primarily by bus, mostly to home and back. She always uses megabus, because it's cheap and she is familiar with the company and prefers it to other bus services. She finds other services to be pricier and less convenient, though she doesn't know of too many other services.

It's faster for her to compare prices between companies in different tabs, and it's already pretty convenient. However, it could be nice to have a single interface for it.

She would like it if it were easier to put in her travel dates, she doesn't like the current calendar view. There can be a lot to scroll through before she gets to the date she wants. She would like something that might suggest dates throughout the year, like newsletters that would remind people that they should start buying their tickets.

The app can help people who tend to be late better gauge travel time, and it would be nice if it would point out food along the way of your travels, and perhaps take into account the amount of time you want to take to eat.

Would pay?

Student, Georgetown University

Thoughts on app

He usually covers short distances by car, but now that he doesn't have a car, he flies all the time. He needs to fly home because it's too far a distance for the train. He needs to go to NY in a month, and compared train, bus, and flight tickets. WanderU was a useful tool he used to compare bus prices.

He ended up using Megabus for booking the trip, and finds it annoying that he was redirected to Megabus's main page rather than just a checkout page where he could just pay and be done. Many sites do take you straight to checkout now, but staying on the same site would provide a smoother experience.

His travel also depends on how much baggage he has, and he'll decide to take uber or metro accordingly. He hates checking in at security, and would like to cut down on down time between flights. Long lines are annoying for him.

Interestingly, he doesn't consider getting to and leaving the airport a part of his travel time. He also doesn't care much about delays, and is kind of annoyed by notifications that tell him if things are late--the delta app and passbook already tell him that.

He would like something that would allow him to scan his phone as a boarding pass. It would be cool to integrate with Passbook. As long as he can scan the QR code at the gate, he would use it.

Would pay?

If he could book everything at once, he would definitely pay a $2 service charge. He probably wouldn't pay for the app, and $1 + 1% wouldn't be a bad fee.