Confessions of a Serial Entrepreneur – Start in a Small Place and Grow
Today’s article is called “Start in a Small Place and Grow”. I am sort of picking it up where we left off on my last post. Now everything you read about a start up says start small, make mistakes, fail quickly, make changes and learn how to get the flywheel going. So, we picked where we were living North Bay as the place to start small. North Bay is a city of 52,000 people so it seemed as good as any a place to start, plus we thought we would have the hometown advantage.
We launched One Red Maple in August of 2022 in North Bay at the Bay Block Party, the annual largest party that the city has. We had a team of employees that talked to people in the crowd about ORM and encouraged them to download the app. Talking to strangers is a gift and one that I wished I had developed better earlier on in my career. I am neither an introvert nor an extrovert, I have both tendencies. I am equally comfortable being alone as I am in a group and need both in certain doses. I am the type of person when you first meet me you will think I am somewhat reserved (my friends will tell you different), as I always wanted to understand the lay of the land before I opened my mouth. I have always seen this trait as somewhat of a weakness. I am sure it kept me out of trouble on a few occasions, but it also limited the opportunities available as I let people come to me as opposed to going out and expanding my network. Your network is the most valuable asset you can have in your career. You have no idea how many times I have been stuck, and I looked into my network to find the person I needed.
One of my recent adages that I follow is “never, ever, let your pride or fear of rejection get in the way of your success”. By this I mean two things one is to do the work that needs to be done – clean the bathrooms if they need to be cleaned – even if you are the President. The second which is also liberating, if you have no pride and no fear of rejection – it is now easy to approach a stranger on the street and talk with them. Your pride and drive are not hindered by rejection. I guarantee you that if you live by this adage while at a trade show, party or at any event your results and outcomes will be so much better. And when you talk to strangers you need to get beyond weather, everyone has something they love to talk about. Find out want it is (i.e. kids, sports, pets, work, etc.) and have a real conversation. Oh, and by the way most people arehappy to talk with you, and you may just make a new friend.
Okay, so back to the Bay block party where we are engaging with potential consumers and having moderate success. The idea of One Red Maple is altruistic so who is not going to say they like the idea. But just because the consumer says they like the idea does not mean they will act on it. Consumers do not act in a rational manner. You can only understand consumer behaviour by watching what they are doing, and in the world of apps that means statistics about their behaviour while using the app. What they were doing was downloading the app but not using it much. Now we had to figure out why?
We had focus groups and talked to users. We had many internal discussions, and we came up with some hypotheses to explain this behaviour. The first was we needed to understand if we saved the consumer money. Price is one of the top reasons that drives consumer behaviour. Delivery came up a lot, Amazon is about convenience and choice and not savings. Local small businesses do not deliver. We also looked at the extension/app to see if a redesign was required. And we looked at the market. North Bay is a small market, and, in many categories, North Bay is missing items, so the matches were not great, not because of the technology but because there are no good matches. For instance, there are no independent online men’s stores in North Bay, so if you are looking for a tie and a suit there are no products to match against.
One thing I kick myself for when looking back at all of this was that our approach was too narrow. Our mission was to support independent retailers which we defined as “ownership must be local”. While this included independent retailers it also included locally owned franchises, but it excluded many stores including, Home Depot, Walmart, The Bay, branded stores (i.e. Nike) and most stores in malls and plazas, etc. I should have included anything local and allowed the consumer to filter out local options such as corporate stores, franchises, etc. because in the end the consumer was going to make or break us. Give the consumer the options and let them decide. It would have increased our matches thereby increasing our usage. But when your goal is to help save local retailers and they have the greatest need, your view gets narrowed. When you think about it you really need a blend of retailers to make a shopping area hum. The brands like Lululemon draw the consumers into an area while the other retailers benefit from the traffic. I do think the pendulum has swung to far into the branded outlet store world. Walk into a mall anywhere in North America and you just see the same brands. In the end I still think if we had included everyone, we still would have been challenged to get the usage up high enough, as our pockets were not deep enough to change consumer behaviour. There is a saying “leave evangelism to those that can afford it” and we could not afford it.
So, we huddled and thought “we got this”, we just need to figure out why the users are not using the app. Next post I will talk about what we did to test the above hypothesis and how all of that worked out or didn’t.