The past couple of weeks in Venture School have been incredibly eye-opening. We have done about 20 of the 100 customer discovery interviews we have to do before Thanksgiving. In that time, the ideas we had about what people are looking for in a restaurant have been completely turned inside out.
When my partner originally designed the idea for this new restaurant concept, he thought that people would come to a new place specifically for the food and beverages. What we have found in the last couple of weeks is that the ambiance and style of the restaurant far outweigh what is on the menu. As long as the place is clean, well decorated, and relatively quiet, people will come – good food and drink are just expected. People aren’t going to show up just because you have 24 craft beers on tap and a few high-end and middle range wines, because so many other options already exist that offer that. People will come in and come back if the place is clean, well kept, and comfortable. We are calling this “the cocoon.” We have also found that people want to have their own space within the restaurant, where they are not bothered by other patrons – what we are calling “the cocoon within a cocoon.”
So, who makes the decision to eat and drink at “the cocoon within a cocoon”? Women in the majority. Are men less picky, or is it just easier to let the woman decide? I’ll leave that question to you, the reader. Personally, it’s easier to let my wife decide where to eat, not just because I will eat almost anything, but because I am the decider when it comes to most decisions. We have found that women, both with their significant other and with friends, can both function as the promoter and as the saboteur in decision-making.
What are the biggest pain points when you are in a restaurant? We have found three main points: waiting for food, waiting for drink refills, and waiting for the bill. The great thing about this is that we can fix or remedy all three of these pain points through technology and staffing. Great wait staff will both decrease your wait time and will make the time pass more quickly when the kitchen is backed up with orders. In addition, if you are comfortable in the “cocoon within a cocoon,” the pain points may not be as noticeable.
So, what’s next? What questions do we need to ask the other 80 interviewees? This is our conundrum. We have been digging a lot, but we don’t think that we have hit bedrock just yet. Our interviewee sample has been skewing slightly older, so perhaps we need to bring in more young people with disposable income to verify or disprove our findings. Perhaps we need to focus more on pain points with current restaurants and what we can do to solve these problems in our own establishment.
I wanted to get some of my thoughts on Venture School written out before I am busy again – tomorrow is launch day for the Iowa Startup Accelerator teams, and it sounds like the party is going to be pretty amazing. Also, this weekend I’m taking the California Zephyr west and finally getting out to Denver to visit friends and hopefully visit a brewery or two. We drove to Fort Collins last year when I visited to see the New Belgium brewery and sampled some of their wares that don’t usually make it outside Colorado. I’ll be taking plenty of pictures along the way, and I might fire up Periscope for the first time ever…
Monday, it’s back to the grind, preparing for more Venture School on Thursday. I’ll have more on Venture School at some point next week, and I’ll talk a bit about Startup Weekend, which starts two weeks from Friday.