UniNail version 1

According to the book, the first discovery skill is Assocating. The authors explain how innovators manage to connect things that were not connected before. Such associations create new ideas that can be great opportunites or not. As far as our UniNail project is concerned, it came from the association of two facts and experiences that :

-Girls and women like their nails to be done

-There is no salon close enough to campus to be really convenient

Thus our idea is to create a nail parlor on the University of Ottawa campus for students. We call the project UniNail! Going through the validation board last Friday we had difficulties defining our customer hypothesis. Do we want to tackle every female student on campus? Or only those who already do their nails? Are we focused on girls already going to nail salons or also those doing their nails at home? Do we offer the service just for female students , if so Undergraduate or Graduate, or we think Employees could be a good target too?

We decided to go for “Woman on campus who get their nails done”. Thus we would target students and employees, avoiding those who don’t care about nails at all. However the question is who many people does it represent? And what percentage of that population would like to use such services as ours?

We then discussed the assumptions in our problem and customer hypothesis and in our business model. We found lots of them but decided that the riskiest one, the one that we would need to validate or invalidate soon is “Many female students are not willing to pay to get their nails done”. We created a questionnaire and decided to go interview some students and employee on campus next Monday. If you are thriving for the results as we are, don’t worry I’ll reveal everything it next week!!

Claire-Marine