Marketplace testing without development: “focus, speed, result”

We are a startup. And it already says a lot. Our goal is to create a global marketplace for extreme sports; community of people interested in action sports. We started work on the project within the framework of Tolstoy Startup Camp, Yandex.Start program. In this article we will try to tell you what limitations we encountered at the beginning of the journey and how we got around them.

Existing restrictions

• Time is probably the main limitation for most startups. In our case, it is exacerbated by seasonality. If in the winter we were able to work out a snowboarding business model, by typing groups to the pro-riders within the framework of Quiksilver New Star Camp. But the snow has melted and it's time for us to test new sports - roller skate, skate, BMX, trampoline, etc. And the second point - Tolstoy Startup Camp lasts only 2 months, and the results should be shown every week.
• People. The specifics of the marketplace implies that if there is no supply, then there can be no demand, and if there is not enough demand, the coaches will not want to use the service. And, of course, the team itself. There are only four of us, and proper allocation of resources is crucial.
• Money. They are needed by everyone, and especially by startups. In our case, to compensate for seasonality, as a result of time constraints. We need to manage to fly into one niche, debug business processes there, fly out of it before the door is slammed and then fly into the next one. Can you imagine how many extreme sports? And there you also need to scale something and make a product.

Our rake

• Trainers Our first hypothesis was that if we get a lot of coaches, we can easily attract clients for them. We spent a total of one and a half weeks searching for instructors: we went to the thematic communities in social. networks, attracted third-party people to search for contacts. Having gathered about 3000 contacts, we realized that we did not know these people, that we would not be able to communicate with everyone. Quality control is also impossible. Yes, and from a geographical point of view, they are distributed throughout the world.
• Locations and spots. The hypothesis with the base of trainers was not easy to refuse. Therefore, we decided that we would find the most popular spots all over the world, plot them on the map and assign instructors to each of them. Quickly abandoned the spots and moved to larger locations, which may include several spots. Having found such locations throughout America, parts of Europe and Asia, we realized that this did not improve the situation. We do not have coaches in most locations, there are no agreements with them either, it was not clear how to attract clients for them, because there is no money for a large-scale advertising campaign. And most importantly, the focus is completely blurred. As a result, all the work done had to quit, perhaps temporarily.
• Design. Very controversial issue for a startup. A startup designer is a rare bird and we don’t have one in our team. And in the XXI century packaging and supply of the product is one of the criteria for the success of the product. We have to somehow reckon with this. First of all, we spent 5,000 rubles on the design of the application for Quiksilver New Star Camp, which we never needed. Then they developed a landing page all for the same camp, but without design at all. Trust, of course, caused such a site a bit. So the design issue remained in limbo.

Decision

There is a special mantra on the camp - “focus, speed, result” . It is applicable to each project, although in each case the implementation may be completely different. At some point we found how to implement this mantra in our project.

• First of all, we refused to develop a marketplace until we understand how our business model works and what sports we want to cover.
• Quiksilver New Star Camp. On the wave of generated interest, it is easy to find people who are already going there and who definitely love snowboarding. Also at such events there are famous pro-riders who can conduct classes. Initially, they created a landing page for this event without any design at all - only photo instructors and the opportunity to submit a training request. With the growing interest from customers, we wanted to provide them with a better and more beautiful website. We rushed about looking for a designer, but in the end, time and money constraints led us to buy a template with layout. As it turned out, at this stage, this solution allowed us to implement all the necessary functionality in the shortest possible time and satisfied the needs of our customers.
• Summer sports. Snow, unfortunately, melted, and we had to very quickly find new sports that are in demand from customers now and bring us profit. And here again we were rescued by a ready-made template used at Quiksilver Camp. We have created about seven landings in various sports. On the landing pages there was only a description of the service and the opportunity to leave a request for the selection of a coach. Information about the trainers themselves was not at all. Moreover, the creation of one such landing takes about 4 hours, for the most part it is the work on the content. Then we used a certificate presented by Yandex for contextual advertising to attract traffic. In a week we could already tell which areas are the most promising and the business model for them. At the same time, in order to test niches in this way, it was not necessary for us to have preliminary agreements with coaches. And then you can go with selected sports to other channels, which we do and get measurable results.

Only after we have passed all these stages, we began the development of a complete product with a good design. A few days ago we posted the first lightweight version - skillsup.pro.