A case study of Customer Discovery
Design thinking can be applied in an early-stage startup to find product-market fit
1. Challenge for an early-stage startup
The startup that I worked with, Mitick, has proposed a business item, a hand-free leg crutch, which was an idea developed based on the founder’s personal pain point. We would like to find out if there are actual needs for this item in the market by applying design thinking methodology.
2. My role as a designer
I participated in an I-Corps program organized by the Korea Innovation Center Washington DC and funded by Korea’s National Research Foundation, which lasted 6 weeks. Following the program’s curriculum, I led the interview process, assisted by the founder, and the analysis of interview results. The final decision on business model pivoting was done together with the rest of the team.
3. Design tools
Semi-structure interview, Affinity diagram (analysis)
4. Research process
The process consisted of 5 main steps- examining the current business model, defining research questions, conducting research, analyzing data, and evolving the business model.
The focus here is about ‘Customer Discovery’, which is a method to determine if there are actual customers for a product/service and what they would want before actually developing the product/service. Customer Discovery encourages startup founders to ‘get out of the building’ and talk to customers.
During the process, there is secondary research that we conducted as well including customer workflow, market research, and competitor analysis. However, here I would like to write more about customer interviews which is the core of customer discovery.
Our initial business item was inspired by pain caused by using crutches for a long time and the inconvenience of climbing stairs. We developed a concept of a hands-free crutch alternative leg brace that would have the following features
- reduces leg pain with a weight-bearing function
- recycles energy to make walking easier
- detects motion and assists walking to make it more smooth and natural
- customized to each individual using 3D printing.
We then identified a broad customer segment as “Patients with leg pain or patients with leg injuries” and identified five key value propositions: ‘pain relief,’ ‘convenience,’ ‘customization,’ ‘natural walking,’ and ‘recycled energy’.
We then made a list of potential customers and approached them through phone calls, emails, visits, introductions, online community, etc.
Interview questions were designed to find out their pain points, not asking their opinions on our new item. We treat them as experts in their jobs and this allowed us to listen and learn from them.
Throughout the program, we recruited and interviewed 55 interviewees from different professions, including patients with leg/knee injury or chronic pain, veterans, doctors, physical therapists, trainers, physicians, professors, vendors, insurance brokers, etc.
Then I used Affinity Diagram to organize the results.
Each customer segment are presented with their own problems and the opportunity to solve the problem.
Later, I grouped them even further based on similarity and simplified customer segments into three big groups. The diagram below shows each segment along with their problem and corresponding value propositions.
5. Business Solution by design
After we identified three potentials customer segments, we now have to decide which one to target.
Based on SWOT and competitor analysis, we concluded that providing values to ‘early-stage osteoarthritis patients’, through telerehabilitation service is the most attractive business model for several reasons.
First, interviewing experts identified the problem that patients do not follow rehab exercise at home. Second, there is a significant market of osteoarthritis patients due to the high obesity rates among the US population or the aging population in Korea. Moreover, a telerehabilitation system could help patients, insurance companies, and governments save a significant amount on healthcare costs.
As a result, we pivoted from a hand-free crutch alternative leg brace, targeting anyone with leg pain and providing five different values propositions to a soft exoskeleton robot that assists early-stage osteoarthritis patients to do home rehab exercise.
We now have a much-narrowed down target customers and a clearer direction of what to do. Most important of all, the value that we want to provide is not something that we think is good for customers, but it is something customer needs.
Customer discovery is indeed a time-consuming and difficult process. Getting out of the building is not natural for many startup founders. Throwing away your initial idea and effort wasn’t easy either. However, it was indeed the best thing we have ever done as a startup, and I could not recommend more.
6. Deliverables
- Presented at the I-corps program’s closing workshop
- Published an article at Healthcare Informatics Research Journal
- Published an abstract and present at the 18th China-Japan-Korea Joint Symposium of Medical Informatics (CJKMI 2017)
- and the most valuable outcome — Startup pivot direction! It saved us time and resources to spend making something that nobody wants.
7. Reflection
- What went well — a casual interview style helps reveal more insights than a more traditional approach like market research. The pivot helped save time and a tremendous amount of money into developing something nobody wants.
- What could have been better? — The target was to reach 100 interviews, but we have only got 55 and we could have learned more if we had done more interviews. The nature of the topic ‘ health care’ which is sensitive, makes it difficult to recruit interviewees. It would be better if we could find a better approach to secure more interviewees.
Article written by: Punyotai (Louise) Thamjamrassri, Design Consultant at Undernamu
