A card game, a city guide and 30 discounts to discover new bars, clubs and restaurant in the city center. The discount pushes people to get out of their comfort zone and try out new experiences.
After failing with my first startup projects, I have spent a lot of time learning about the Lean startup process. I have been reading some of the best books about the topic, I summarized all my key learnings into one blog article. I couldn’t wait but to find a project on which I could apply the methodology. After my summer holiday, I got an idea that I wanted to try out as a side project.
After having an idea, it is easy to fall in love with it. If you ever tried to build something new you know that you simply can’t stop thinking about it. The more you think about it, the more confident you get. Eventually you start talking about it to your close ones. If you read the Mom test, you know that you shouldn’t ask if your idea is good to your mom, because she loves you so much that she will always say that it is great even though it is the worst idea ever.
You got an idea? Great, write it down and put your ego on the side. I started by writing the idea as a note. Then, later I used the business model to map it quickly. The goal wasn’t to fill up each and every boxes on the canvas. Rather, to take a quick shot of what was the starting point. As you’ll see, the business model will constantly evolve over time, but it is great to keep a copy of each version to see the progress later on.
There is a great sheet made by Strategyzer in the book Value Proposition. It allows to test quickly the business model. I used it to assess in a few minutes how good was the idea, and if there was any tweaks that I could already make to improve it.
Then, I started to look for potential competitors. There are two types of competitors:
Since I live in Slovakia, but I am not speaking fluently Slovak, I was handicaped to run a thourough competitive research. Therefore, I was not able to identify any competitors at first. However, once I started to interview students and to visit bars to build partnerships, I discovered that there was in fact three main competitors.