Customer Interviews No. 2

1) Fine tune your opportunity. 

I started with a problem I’ve been facing for over 2 years now, ever since I’ve been at The University of Florida. When I moved away from home I brought my car with me with the idea that I would drive to school. Well I wasn’t aware of U.F’s limited parking, let alone Gainesville’s limited parking. There’s a reason why the Regional Transit System of Gainesville exist. Because if your not one off the few who qualify for a U.F decal that’s actually close to campus and if you don’t own a shooter, chances are you are taking the bus to get to school. But the buses take forever, if you have a class between 10:00am-2:00pm, one good luck finding a seat and two there’s no way you will make it to class on time unless you leave about 40 minutes before your class even starts, even though campus is only max 10-15 minutes away from all major apartment complexes. So my idea, although it might be impossible, was to build underground parking garages to maximize space and minimize crowding. After my first round of interviews it seemed like I had overwhelming support. So I believe that if I were to implement my idea I would have support.

2) Fine tune the "who."

I think I did talk to the right customers last time. My problem and solution is mainly focused on students and I only interviewed students. This time I’m going to try and get more females. My first round of interviews consisted of only males, this could lead to misleading results. So this time I’m going to try and offset all those male interviews with females.

3) Tweaking your interview questions. 

So I’m proposing building underground parking garages in polluted areas around Gainesville mostly around campus and I just have a couple of questions regarding my idea.

My originals questions were as follows:

Why is this a necessity more than a luxury?

How would this affect your everyday life?

Should everyone have access or only certain individuals?

Should it be free or should we charge for this service?

Do you agree with this idea even if it affect the environment negatively?  

This time around I will be asking the same questions and just a few more:

Do you think this idea could have any negative consequences?

Is there anything you would add to my idea to make it more appealing to consumers?

Do you think there’s a better way to eliminate Gainesville parking problem?

4) Go talk to customers! 

Videos are bellow. 

5) Tell us what you learned about the opportunity. 

There are many lessons you can take from this exercise, for one, the more people you interview the more precise the answers to your questions will be. Second, when you are providing a service or a product, it doesn’t matter how good of an idea it is if you don’t have customer support. Business must realize that customers are the ones that will be spending their money and time of what the business has to offer, without them you don’t have successful business, because without consumer spending, business wouldn’t make money. That being said it’s important to target consumer needs and it’s important to keep consumers happy. This also ties in to the importance of marketing. In order for customers to try your product or service, or even for them to have an opinion about it, they have to know it exist first.

6) Tell us what you learned about interviewing customers. 

Some tips for future entrepreneurs is first to be confident and try to not come off as nervous. If you’re all silly and nervous the individual you’re interviewing will find it hard to take you seriously, and then, in turn you would have just collected bad data that could have been potentially useful. Another tip when interviewing complete strangers, is to try and find mutual friends so it’s not that uncomfortable. I for one am really bad at talking to strangers so when I had to interview random people I actually did it at a friend’s get together. I interviewed everyone that was there that I didn’t know. So this way my friend would introduce me and she would practically ask for me and before I knew it I had done all 10 interviews.