Reflection – Learning Launch

Francisco Ferreira

Challenge

I take part of a social enterprenuership group in my university. We were in contact

with Capão das Antas, a rural Community in the suburbs of São Carlos (SP-Brazil). We had the  intention to criate, with the local producers, a project that wold improve the quality of life in  the neighborhood. For that, in the first two months we begin to listen each farmer of Capão  and try identify the principal issues of the place and their residentes. After some visits we  concluded that the principal problem was selling the products that they plant in the local  farms. Therefore, we had the objective to make and test a business model that would increase  their rent.

Selection

In order to build a sustainable business model with the farmers, we made a first test

were we delivered the products at the costumer’s door. The action had a good result but we  want to increase even more ours sales. So we used Learning Launchs to test new ideais and  then improve our business model.

Application

After we analise all the data we had and build the business model, Its was far from be

the most sustainable and profitable one. To improve our project, we made a plan to test new  ways of seling. So every week, after we analise all the process from the farm to the costumer  door, we propose and teste the improvement in the current business model.

In order to give examples of how it works, after some weeks we notice that the

farmers were having problems in separate the orders. The costumers were ordering with na  app called whatsapp, but the person who was responsable for taking note of the orders was  messy with the conversations feed. As soon as we notice this problem we proposed a new app  that automatically cluster the orders in a simple feed. Therefore we tested this improvement  in the next week and got zero mistakes in separating the orders.

Insights

The application of Learning Launches showed me how testing is importante in building

a solid business model. Therefore, I learned that the more you test possibles ideias, more  chance of sucess you have. Testing a lot of improvement and ideas is not the fastest way to  achieve a better scenario but is cleary a certainly strategy to get there.

Approach

During all the improvement plan that we act every week we propose changes based on

what we were seeing during the deliveries. I think that we could have achieved better results  by analysis more sources of data, like feedback from all the stakeholders. Besides that we  could have made a better knowledge management of the changes proposed for the business  model.

