Questionner _ Interroger _ Ecouter

The disruptive innovator is someone who doesn’t stop to the need or gap in the market that he/she felt. The true innovator would not stop questioning. “Keep on being curious” was something I heard a lot as a young kid in school, but after a while teacher get bored or bothered with questions and tell you how inappropriate it is. Well, Innovators never stopped, they keep on with queries and it deserve them well since it allow them identify the best approach or solution to a problem for their (specific) customers.

With the intent to validate our business model and to know our clients better, we went to the university center with our small questionnaire and started interaction with women nearby. We had questions that were very specific and turned toward the direct validation of our model. The results were not exactly the ones we hoped for:

Among the 50 participants, we reached 48 undergraduates and 2 employee, who told us 59% of them never go to nail parlors and 38% go no more than twice a year, leaving 4% between 5 and 6 times a year. Although the ‘formal’ result is good, with 23/50 saying they would go to a nail parlor on campus, most of those yes were attached with condition like “I would go as a treat for my birthday” or “ if it is very cheap I would go once or twice during school time”. Thanks to those interviews we understood that undergraduates who do their nails do it themselves and are not ready to spend on something they can do at home. “I have a student loan that could almost buy me a house why would I spend money doing something that I do myself at home?” was a very powerfull statement from a student.

However, the talk also permitted us to identified a few need felt by the students: esthetic and hair salon was shared by 2 women, study rooms was also pointed out by 2 different students and  sleeping room and stress relief services were quite popular since spontaneously mentioned by 4 students.

Another important point that we identified through the survey is that the undergraduate population could not be our main target, but the 2 employees questioned were very enthusiastic about the idea. Thus we decided to follow up with our idea but trying to reach more graduate students and employee who potentially have more money and less time available!