What the hell am I doing?

Since the last article, I haven’t executed on anything. My mind is oscillating between two possibilities.

1. Continue The Current Vision

Until now we set up physical poll booths in restaurants to ask customers their opinions on a question as they enter. We learned that our booth caught the eye of 60–70% of the people entering the restaurant and it was intuitive for 100% of the voters. However less than 10% of the voters cared about the results of the poll.

When assessing our business, we need to provide value for 2 parties. For our voters and the places we setup.

Out of the 20 restaurants we approached, they all wanted something make them stand out in this post covid era since business took a hit. Nobody was interested in the data our booth’s are going to provide them. They saw this as a marketing fad.

We thought we provided value to our voters by making their day interesting, helping them share their opinion, and view other’s opinions on random questions. On the QR code landing page, we also showed what other locations’ questions and results. However our screen-time for each scan was 26 seconds.

So if we decide to continue with this route, these are the possible challenges and scope:

Challenges

• People are seeing us as a quick way to stand out in front of other restaurants. They don’t care about the data we provide. Since we are not providing true value for these restaurants, we’ll struggle to expand beyond a small set of customers.
• Our voters are coming to have fun and eat with their friends so regardless of the question, our booth is a conversation topic for just a couple seconds before they go inside. Our platform only works when voters are curious enough about the question and other people’s opinions to spend time on our online platform. We’ll struggle to identify what questions work, how to optimize voter experience, and how to bring them onto our opinion viewing platform.

Scope

• We can be a direct to public survey company. Our customers will be anyone who wants to run a public survey that goes directly to people in the most subtle way. Customers could make the survey on a platform we provide or we can tie-up with survey monkey and other existing platforms to be a distribution channel for their surveys. We can charge customers a fee for every survey they want to launch on our poll booth.
• We can be a subtle and anonymous communication platform between an organization and its people. Colleges, offices, or even apartments can set up our polling booths to effectively ask their students, employee’s, or residents to share their opinion about current issues both inside and outside the organization while assuring every individual identity is safe. We can charge the organization for each booth and a subscription fee for our mobile app which will give them control over the questions and analytics about the responses.

2. Make a Zoom-In Pivot Into A Guided Feedback System

We started PePoll as a physical platform to collect public opinions. We played around with questions, setup in different locations, and iterated through the booth design. We validated the attractiveness, intuitiveness, and have a strong target customer (businesses in the service industry).

Currently the feedback/reviews for any business comes from the minority of customers. These customers are generally household critics and people who loved or hated their experience. Restaurants are already trying to get reviews from all their customers using QR scan feedback or a physical printout/tablet to get feedback. But it’s not effective for them. We can empower the majority of customers to share their valuable opinion in the simplest way possible. In other words, Yelp on steroids.

Based on the location, we will cycle through a set of questions, asking only one a day. For example, if its a restaurant, our questions will be: How was the food? How was the ambiance? How was the service?. The customers will be able to rate it on a scale of 1–5 stars. As we get realtime feedback from all the customers, overtime we’ll be a trusted review platform that explains the performance of the restaurant in each category (food, ambiance, service) both currently and over a period of time.

If we make this pivot, these are the challenges and scope:

Challenges

• There are already physical feedback booths in some shops and airport restrooms that do the same thing as us. Many customers walk past that booth and don’t share their opinion. We need to figure out why customers are ignoring it and what will make them share their opinion.
• Since this is a physical feedback system we can’t limit one vote per person and we don’t know who is voting. Restaurants could cast fake votes in order to improve the rating. Voters could lie because its in the restaurant and they might not want to feel bad by giving a bad rating. We need to figure out how to get authentic and honest votes.
• There are many established rating platforms (Google My Business, Trip Advisor, Yelp, Zomato, OpenTable). We need to portray our online platform to see reviews in such a way that people understand we are providing more diverse and inclusive reviews than the existing giants.

Scope

• Out of all the customers that visit any restaurant, only a very small group share their reviews online. If our booth is effective in getting the reviews from all the customers, we will have the most diverse and fully representative reviews.
• This review system can be expanded from restaurants into theme parks, movie theaters, escape rooms, and other service based businesses.
• After our review platform establishes in the market, any business can buy a polling booth from our website. They will have access to their business’s analytics through our app in realtime so they can understand their customers’ experiences thoroughly.
• Since restaurants are already trying to get feedback from all their customers and we solve their problem, they will request the customers to give feedback on the way out. We only need to focus on providing value for our restaurants; they will take care of getting us votes.

By narrowing down the focus into a feedback platform for businesses, we can provide real value for the businesses, the voters, and for people looking for reviews online. We can make attainable milestones around this focused mission that validates our theories around all 3 parties we are serving.

However by sticking with our original vision, we are betting on this platform working once we’ve setup in many locations and can provide interesting opinion based content for people to view. We won’t be providing any true value for the locations we setup in or the voters. This is a chicken or egg problem.

Let’s make the zoom-in pivot into a physical, inclusive, and realtime feedback platform. 🐮