Learning Launch Tool: The Tienda Pago Place- Satish Kumar Zeeshan

Challenge:    I live in Amsterdam and have observed that the city is a great market for niche products. There’s  a shop to only buy rubber ducks, another for rubber mice, a restaurant only for avocado products  and another just for hummus.  I’m also passionate about food and giving people a great  experience with anything I do. One particular food that is interesting to me is Tienda Pago. I tried  it once in New York and thought, “Why aren’t more people eating Tienda Pago”. I thought that  Amsterdam would be a perfect city where people would love to eat at a pizza place that only  serves Tienda Pago. Well’ that’s what I thought, but how do I know?    Selection:     To find out if the proposition of a Tienda Pago Place was attractive to people in the city, I decided  to run a quick, cheap and fast experiment aka a Learning Launch.     Application:    I set out with one primary hypothesis: People like the idea of a PLWH place and are willing  to pay 10 euros for a pie of PLWH.    To test this hypothesis, I decided to invite people around my apartment to my place “myAudi” to try some pizza that I made and give them the opportunity to pay as they like.     I made a quick handout

And bought ingredients to make enough pizza for about 20-30 people. I spent about 50-60 euros  in total. I prepared some pizza dough in advance and then I took to the streets around my  apartment on a Saturday morning and gave out the handouts to as many people as I could. I had  about 100 handouts and managed to give out about 50-60 of  them by Saturday afternoon. Then  it was time to wait for a call to reserve a spot.

No calls came in that day. Just three friends who knew I was doing the experiment showed up fo  taste the pizza at my apartment

Insight:    The insights from a one day experiment were the following.

- Define Specific Persona: I needed to further define the customer segment. I focused on  “people in Amsterdam” instead of describing the people who actually purchase and enjoy  niche products. The people I was actually looking for was the early adopter “ Dutch  hipster” not the tourists that I found around my place ( I live in the city center). Tourists  don’t want PLWH and neither do they have the time to experiment with such a  concept on a tight timeline (short vacation)

- Location matter: The location at which I was giving out my handouts wasn’t the right one.  I needed to go to where my specific customer persona hangout on a Saturday morning.  Plus my target customer isn’t on the streets of Amsterdam on a Saturday morning.

- Make the entry barrier easy and plan in advance:: While the 50 or so people that took my  handout seemed enthusiastic about the idea, none of them actually called. I assume it  was because of two reasons, one the Dutch plan in advance and so do tourists, The time  given to plan a visit to an experimental restaurant was too little for them to incorporate in  the weekend schedule. Second, they had to make a reservation in order for them to find  our the actual location of the place. Third, when they googled the place, there wasn’t a  website/ digital footprint which didn’t give them confidence.

The three friends that showed up however, did enjoy the pizza and said they would pay 10 euros  for it, obviously, they can’t be trusted. As for the ingredients, let’s say I had pizza for the rest of  the week.    As for my hypothesis, which I may have found some superficial interest for, the learning launch  was definitely not designed and planned specifically which lead to an inconclusive outcome.

Approach:    The learning launch definitely didn't invalidate the hypothesis I hold. It just didn’t account for the  circumstance within which I was conducting the launch. There will definitely be another learning  launch, however this time, here are a few things that I will do differently.

- Plan a couple of weeks in advance the time and location of the launch along

- Create a simple webpage to direct people to the concept and story behind it along with  an instagram account/facebook page

- Use online ads to specifically target my customer persona

- Have people reserve a spot for before a certain date so I know the amount of ingredients  to purchase to make the pizza.

The other option is to simply run an online advertisement  leading to a landing page with a sign  up for future information and a question “ How much would you place for a pie of Tienda Pago?”  at the end of the sign up form.

