Business Roles 

In order to have a smooth sailing business we choose to create a manager system which will help with the delegation of tasks – having a Head of department (Manager) allows for better accountability and delegation. So here is how we will divide the work up:

 

Head of Sales/Marketing/Customer Relationships

Alfie with assistance from Alba 

Head of Operations

Egle with assistance from Lynn.

Head of Finance (CFO) 

Alba (for UK Bank reasons registered as Alfie) with assistance from Alfie. 

Head of Product Development

Lynn with assistance from Egle

 

Our Effective Working Plan: 

 

1.     Understanding each other's skills, we have divided up different roles of the business to work more effectively. 

2.     We will maintain regular weekly meetings to discuss ideas, problems and anything relevant to the business. 

3.     Each person will be in charge of a certain part of the business and will be accountable for getting the work done reliably and to a high standard. 

4.     We will make sure that when a problem occurs that everyone collaborates to work out a solution by holding drop-in meetings to just talk through where we are with our tasks.

The RADAR activity was a great starting point to sorting out a plan for effective teamwork. It also allowed us to look at each other’s weaknesses and strengths, which in turn allowed us to collectively set up a teamwork plan that would play on each of our strengths.

Alfie:

While going through the RADAR activity I learned that I am more of a strategic thinker, which I feel will benefit most in product development. Additionally, strategic thinking can help with sales/marketing. However, I found that my weakness would be having no experience in operations and finance but as I am quite organized and resourceful, and have a strength in math’s - I am willing to take up the challenge.  

Alba: 

Before the RADAR activity I wasn’t sure exactly which tasks I would take up. However, when looking at the profile of each section I found out that I quite enjoyed managing the business process, which lends itself well to operations. I also knew I was quite good at handling money and have a lot of experience with excel but it wasn’t something I was particularly interested in taking care of.

Lynn: 

Before starting the RADAR activity, I knew my strengths were in Art and design. I enjoy exploring different creative ideas in order to achieve a collective goal. However, the RADAR activity helped me find other areas which I could help with. I can be helpful if our team needs procuring resources, anything shopped from China, I’m confident with my Chinese way of dealing things/people.

Egle:

I find producing ideas (even the most outrageous and ridiculous ones) highly enjoyable. Even though I lack the drawing skills, I am very handy with most of the editing software. The RADAR exercise showed me that operations is something that I am good at. I am a hands-on person, and I pick up new skills quite easily. So, if anything needs making – I am your girl! 

Sales and marketing are where things get a bit tricky. I do not mind getting the message out there. But facing people and landing contracts is not my cup of tea. 

Over January, we meet up a few times per week to get to know each other and brainstorm initial ideas. The result was 25 different ideas! 

 

Looking into the factors like trends in the market, the possibility to make the product, and, of course, our passion about future star-up idea we narrowed it down to 4: Charity greeting cards, food protector from seagulls, non-alcoholic drinks, and cocktails for dogs. 

 

We delved deeper into secondary research. With each product, we found new and trends. The ones that stood out the most were: 

·      The charitability of millennials. 4 in 5 millennials donated to charities during the lockdown. As well as the rise of socially conscious consumerism amongst younger people. 

·      The increase of popularity in non-alcoholic drink market. Over the lockdown consumers (mainly younger generations) started looking after themselves more. Around 66% of millennials are trying to reduce alcohol intake. Which leads to people looking for tasty substitutes.

 

With this information in mind, our team had to decide which idea to choose. Weighing pros and cons, and considering other factors, we have picked the path of sobriety drinks. 

 

In the upcoming week, we are going to conduct primary and secondary research regarding our target audience. And find out what do people want and need from a perfect non-alcoholic drink.

 

https://www-lsnglobal-com.ezproxy.falmouth.ac.uk/micro-trends/article/25238/social-elixirs

·      Our age range is too broad now. We will get more information and narrow it down. We will do so after we conduct the interviews and review our insights. 

·      We need to investigate people who don’t drink or are trying to cut down alcohol consumption. They still go out, socialise and have fun. Sometimes, they might feel peer pressure to drink. 

·      People who don’t drink see themselves in specific ways. They might be sporty or might have underlying health conditions. Or maybe they are just responsible individuals who take care of their friends and are designated drivers.

In the next few days, we will each undertake secondary research as well as an interview. We will investigate:

Sobriety groups on social media

Non-alcoholic drink reviews on Amazon/other retailers

Finally, find more articles and research papers relating to the consumption of non-alcoholic drinks.

Hypothesis: We believe that people who don’t want to drink alcohol will consume sobriety drinks and expand their drink options.

After hours of racking our brains, multiple typos, and loads of second-guessing, we came up with eight questions that passed the test:

• Why don’t you drink alcohol anymore?

• Is there anything that you miss about drinking alcohol?

• What do you usually drink on special occasions?

• What do you drink when you go out on the weekend?

• What do you enjoy about the said drink?

• How much did you spend the last time you went out?

• Where and how do you buy non-alco drinks?

• Tell me about non-alcoholic options when you went out last time?

Rating: ★★★

Insight: People want strong, exotic flavors not the generic ones found in soda form.

Rating: ★★

Insight: Options lack consideration for dietary restrictions. Such as sugar free, vegan and gluten free.

Rating: ★★

Insight: There is a lack of options for special drinks like J20s in Supermarkets, specifically drinks that are not targeted for a younger audience. 

Rating: ★★★

The current backstage of our business model is primarily driven by our key partner, Lovely Drinks, which is the supplier of our base product. This is supported by our key activities of customer service, effective website management, marketing, distribution, labelling and packaging of the base product. In order to fulfil these activities our business needs to have a consistent supply of unlabelled lovely drink bottles, printing, labelling and packaging services as well as a strong brand.

The name is inspired by a Chinese saying “千杯不倒” (qiān bēi bù dǎo) which means to not fall down (get drunk) after thousands of cups of alcohol. I tried to translate it to English to see if there were any interesting words that could be used for the name. I found that people translated it into “hollow leg” which means an ability or inclination to drink large quantities of alcoholic beverages, especially without evident drunkenness. 

 

Branding & design 

We created few Mood boards based on the target audience’s pen portraits to see which would fit our brand best. (Mood boards) After few group discussions we decided to go for the colourful, funky and a bit rebellious tone of voice. (Mood board1 and 3 below) 

 

Hollow legs branding is focused on colour along with a funky tone of voice. When it comes to the packaging and printing the design it became a bit tricky because our logo consists of two colours, yellow and blue. We tried to use a different colour for different elements of the packaging design, but it seemed a bit inconsistent. Each drink has a unique colour, and we believe the customer can tell the difference in flavour by the colour. Therefore, we decided to stick with the logo’s colour scheme, and put different design elements for different flavours. 

 

Packaging Personal preference
I prefer the label to not fully cover the bottle, so that I can see how much I drank and how much is left. That’s why the label for hollow leg will not fully warp around by the bottle, for customers like me to look at the drink.

Finally, our revenue streams will be from single bottle retail and bulk selling. The single bottle will have a fixed price of 2.95 while the price of bulk selling will depend on the quantity purchased.

Nevertheless, we were been able to sell some actual product in week 8, it allows us to perform some more in-depth customer research. The goal of the research will be to understand further what the drink is used for and in what circumstances. We will try and reach out to our two-existing customer, either by phone or an email exchange, depending on what they feel more comfortable with. I believe this approach to defining a more concise customer segment, is a very good one. Considering we will be using the mom test, when creating the interview questions, the interview will be accurate and unbiased. In the future if we face a similar challenge, we will use a similar solution, directly approaching customers to gain the most insightful persona of who they are.

 

This started becoming an apparent problem in week 3-4, as quite a lot of work had been left behind. That’s when we decided to come together as a team to draft out a new strategy for teamwork. We realised that it was better to focus one week at a time. Each meeting we would finish off writing a to do list, and each of us would state what we would be working on. This allowed us to have a level of accountability as well as diversifying the type of work we were doing. As the weeks progressed, we had quite a clear idea of who would be working on what without having to touch based together every other day. We started working homogeneously Alfie would deal with supplier and keep track of finances, Egle and Lynn would work on building the website while maintaining the social media platforms, and I would be in charge of blog tasks PowerPoint presentations and assisting anyone that needed a hand. This system gave each of us peace of mind that everything was taken care of without having to specifically designate anyone to do it. 

 

It is entirely possible that we could find our team in the state that we did in week 3, however we learnt from this experience. The reason it got to such a dire state was due to a lack of open communication, some people were taking on more tasks than they should have as it was technically under their role title. If any such situation were to rise up again, I believe we would rearrange the workload even if it means taking on tasks that are not in our specific expertise. Having a weekly outlook also helps with this as task are dealt with immediately. 

 

The biggest takeaway from our teamwork was realising how unpredictable starting a business is. There is always something coming up that was not anticipated. Having a strong team is crucial to go over these bumps, especially in moments of disagreements.

Each piece goes through a process of hypothesis, testing and learning. The end result is a piece of the puzzle that will help you learn more about your business, from who your customer is, to how to sell your product and its price etc...  The end result is a clear picture made up of all the pieces gathered, creating a startup completely based on validated learning. This will ensure the startup will not fail when it is officially launched.

However, testing our assumption brought us some of the richest insights that really allowed us to pivot/understand more about our product. For example, we found out the actual end use of our product was different than our value proposition, which meant the value of the product was different than we had been marketing it as. This insight really helped us pivot but most importantly it allowed us to understand more about our customer and how they interact with the product. The process of reaching out customers is very daunting, but we found that people are generally very open to help out. 

It was vital for us to purchase this stock of drinks, as it was at the center of our business. It specifically helped develop our product as the labeling and packaging was left up to us. This blank sheet allowed us to effectively pivot without having to fully repurchase a new batch. Furthermore, as our business model is taking a ready-made product in one drink sector, sodas, and repositioning it to another, mocktails, having unlabeled stock at our disposition was imperative. 

Reflecting back on our expenses, there are definitely areas in which we did not use our money effectively.  Specifically, we purchased 21.98 pounds worth of labels and sticker, of which Egle and Lynn cut out individually. The labels ended up not being used, as our product pivoted and thus our labels and brand. Looking back on it, we could have made half a batch of labels, and kept the other sticker paper for other MVP’s, instead of wasting money on labels for bottles that were not sold. 

Finally, we believe that we could have probably spent more as we had around 30 pounds left. This money could have been used to launch a fifth MVP, however in order to keep all variables equal and gain more reliable learning on price.