#host_a_playdate

WEEK 12

Customer acquisition is hard. Yes. This time I start with what I have learned.

Following our successful playdate last weekend, we decided to move forward: Creating our “Playdate” platform, and trying to get one of our early adopters to actually initiate a playdate on that platform (that will be executed by us, real-life wizards of Oz:))

We sent out a follow-up e-mail to the attendees of last week’s playdate, that included a short “it was great” and a call to action to create their own Playdate.

As for now, we still have not got any response. I want to hope and believe that it is a matter of time, but I have some doubts as for will anyone response to the email. I also have some theories as for the reason (I hope that I’m wrong here..) nobody answered our call to action.

As a start — we should have done it earlier. You snooze you lose. I believe we should have send the follow up e-mail a day or two after the Playdate, while the memory of the wonderful time they had and the scent of the coffee were still fresh (especially since we are competing with hundreds of messages a day, and we respect our customer’s privacy: we would not send/use/post pics of them without their permission…). For so many reasons and excuses that did not happened earlier, and that’s a shame. But it can be fixed… So in that sense, our next step would be re-gain the attention of our users: reminder e-mail, contact directly in other channels if we have them — just let them know we are still around. After all — we heard more than one user wishing to see where all this is going.

Second, and maybe more important: I believe we have not considered the entire process that a user should go through before he actually host a Playdate. On top of the usual difficulties in finding a “creator” amongst our users (see "social technographics score” above — we just discussed that this week, in the context of forming a community!!), there’s also the emotional-cognitive aspects: As long as we don’t yet have a real community and proven results, we are actually forcing a parent not only to admit publicly that he’s lonely (Oh!!!!), but also to take the risk that “nobody will show up for his party”… We ask people to trust us on the basis of a couple of fun hours and a good coffee...

We will have to be patient, and see what tomorrow (or the couple f days after tomorrow) brings. But my personal belief is that our next steps should be getting the word out there, trying as hard as we can to onboard more people to sign up for our mailing list, and for the first few months of “Playdate” existence, to just continue to artificially organize and host Playdates. Once we will establish a reputation and a habit, only them we can start thinking of calling it “community” and look for community leaders and creators.

Having said that — we should all keep in mind that there is a good chance that Team Rock and its Playdate will come to an end in less than three weeks. That being the case, I think it’s just great that we are moving fast forward, taking a quick, sweet taste of the steps to come after the next, tiring step of concierging and hosting more and more Playdates and setting the ground for a solid, widespread community.