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MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY Legatum Center for Development & Entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurs

The Legatum Center supports entrepreneurs all around the world through the Fellowships and Grants

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Alba-app.com

2017 - 2017
Seed Grantee
From:
Chile
Sector:
Agriculture
Location:
Chile

Dan Stern, a 2018 MBA candidate, is scaling his family and home care services application. Alba-app.com has launched successfully in Chile.

Blog Post

Forget about customers, focus on non-customers

Over the past 2 weeks, my team and I have realized that talking with our own customers has been making us fall in a niche trap, truncating our growth in a dramatic way!

Guided by our team´s business background and influenced by startup trends to grow through exceptional customer satisfaction, since our incorporation in March 2016, at Alba we have developed a customer-centric organization. For us, this means to always think of our customers’ needs first and implement any strategy foreseeing its impact on our clients, which has allowed us to achieve a 95% NPS!

Naturally, we executed this vision by interviewing our own customers. Since Alba is a marketplace connecting parents with babysitters in Latin America, once the parent requests a babysitter through our platform, he or she must tell us his phone number. This has allowed us to interview almost every parent that has requested a babysitter through Alba, which has, in turn, given us incredible insight into how we can improve our product and communication strategy.

However, something didn´t completely make sense. We had developed a customer centric service and business model, but out of our 3.500 users, only 16% of them had requested a babysitter through Alba, and roughly 20% out of those 16% came back for a second try.

Guided by the Entrepreneurs in Residence at MIT´s Martin Trust Center, we decided to start interviewing our non-customers, those users that never gave us their phone number, and that we thought most probably faked their email address in the registration form. Anyways, what did we have to lose?

So I flew to Chile (our base operation country); we randomly picked 500 non-customers and emailed them an invitation to have a coffee chat with us. Surprisingly we had a 0% bounce rate in the emails and nearly 10% accepted our invitation to chat. We finally met in person with around 20 non-customers, and interviewed another 15 by phone. What we learned was so valuable that it has already shifted our strategy, changed our business model and changed our way of thinking.

So how about if you try to guess what we learned? Now it seems obvious, but 3 weeks ago it did not. We had created a tailored product for early adopters, and unfortunately for us, the largest market segment and many market influencers expected something completely different.

Just as one of the many examples I could share, our customers told us from the very beginning that one of the most important traits of a babysitter is the neighborhood where he/she lives and what he/she studied. Therefore, we showed our users exactly that. However, after talking with our non-customers and launching a survey to our 3.500+ users to confirm our findings, we understood that non-customers didn’t care about neighborhoods or study places, but cared more about the babysitter’s proven experience in taking care of kids, a trait that we never previously showed about the babysitter.

I guess that after all, talking with customers is essential to improve your product and service; however, for a startup the clue might be first re-thinking: are your current customers your target customers?

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