My thoughts on how to best approach this Google product launch question.

Scope/Assumptions

• An application to order for barber service is needed to get the parlour service at home in a hassle free manner. Even after having appointments in the parlour shops, users needs to wait in a long queue. In local cheap parlours/barber shops the ambience is also not good. All sort of labor class, uneducated crowd tend to visit the shop cause poor user experience. Sometimes the servvices are good and less expensive in these shops. Large queue in big parlours also forces the users to visit the local barber shops/parlours. Users do not get the freedom to select the products of their choice in either of the parlours (local and branded) Branded parlours like jawed habib will use different sub brands that user is not even aware off and they try to discourage the users to select the products of their choice for some reason. Local shokeepers uses very low quality product. Even scissors, razors and blades are rusted in certain shops which is unhygenic. The shops are also not able to maintain hygiene level as many people visits at the same time. Chances of spreading covid is also high in the physical shops.
• Users are males, females of all age group
• Does it provides all the services of a parlour like facial, body massage etc or only hair cut and cutting plus having for men. Assuming barber service includes all the services of a parlour. Parlour=Barber shop
• Does it provides booking only for barber shops or do they visit at home as well to provide all the service. Assuming it provides booking for services only at home. No online bookings for barber shops. Else it will end up creating competition amongst each other.
• Where do we want to launch this app?

We want  to launch this app within the boundaries of India first.

• Are there specific regulation to be followed?

Assuming asking for parlour/barbour service at home includes all the activities and as per the regulatory framework a female user can get the service from a female service provider and so is the case with male. Only for haircut a male service provider can give service to females. Kids aged less than 15 years this rule is not applicable and they can select anyone.

 

Value Proposition

The main benefit of using this app is to ensure the parlour service should be provided with ease and flexibility to the users. This will save time and cost. Goal is to genrate revenue but as it is in the inititial phase of Product lifecycle so will focus on customer adoption and awareness

Goal- Is to increase Adoption, engagement and followed by revenue

Eval- The nature of two product is totally different and hence we should tie it together in one app. Instead of it we should develop another app for the water canes. The complexity in building the application will also be high as the same set of features are not needed for the user segments for the two products in one app. This may lead to poor user experience as well. The chances of losing customer engagement may be high on account of availability to features which might not be useful for the users of one product. They might lose interest and leave it. The time saving will be reduced owing to the reason that a user might end up performing multiple steps that are not even required to get the desired one product. Objective of one product might be totally different that the other. Hence, we should keep to separate app for the two different products.

 

Strategy

I would like to launch the app separately for parlour service in a developing country like India with a initial sample launch  in the top 4 metro cities like Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore and Chennai considering the crowd is urban and tech savvy with high disposable income. A high percentage of people are rich class and upper middle class who are either industrialists or corporates followed by government servants. They value quality, time and freedom to chose along with the advice by the experts.

 

Prelaunch

Partnerships

We can do a tie up with the various multi national companies who provides goodies and coupon to their employees so that employees can avail the parlour service at a much lower rate. We can sell the coupons to companies as well at a good discounted rates to be shared to their employees.

 

We can also do tie ups with the maternity homes for promotions and awareness and can add it as a part of the delivery package where hospitals can provide complimentary coupons for free baby and mother massage service at home. The reputation attached with the hospitals can help us in branding our product.

 

Advertisement in social media as most of the crowd is young who will use the product and Media like FB holds strong network

 

Organizing games shows and small contest at the public places like mall and sharing the one time free complimentary coupon for the less expensive trial services. Public places like mall is flooded with all type of crowds during weekends

 

KPIs from customer side

1. Average number of sign ups in a day
2. Average number of people utlizing the services just in 5 minutes of sign up
3. Click through rate between sign in and sign out
4.  Average number of booking made in a peak day like weekend
5. Average time taken to complete one transaction and the frequency of making the next bookings
6.  % of cancellations in the next 10 minutes of booking
7. % of transactions left incomplete or failed with respect to the successful transactions
8. average number of downloads in a day

 

Compare the % increase between prelaunch, during launch and post launch of the application.

 

The services can be booked directly or an yearly subcription can be bought to get premium benefits like free expert advice, discounts on premium products if you want to buy from the service provider, discount on the services after regular subcription, Advance booking for big events like bridal/groom make up. Advance reservations during peak days or festival seasons.

 

During Launch

 

1. Focus more on partnerships and marketing as stated above.
2. Pricing of the product

Services can be divided in three main categories

 

Basic- To be used on regular basis and the users does not have an option to escape from it

This includes hair cuts, shaving for men, hair colour for grey hairs etc and a somewhat similar list goes for females as well

 

Cozy- I would say little above basic where the users should use the services but can skip for some days if needed

This includes Facials, head massage etc

 

Premium- Body massage, facials with premium products, spa etc

 

The estimated price is per person per service for each category. Just for the simplification of calculation, I have taken same price for one service for a male and female. In reality it might differ.

Merits

1. The app will provide home based door to door service. Hence, there is no expense on the maintainence of physical shops, electricity bills that will be born by the customer. In physical shops these are additional expenses.
2.  No need to maintain staff as needed to maintain a shop. The service provider can go and give service receives the demand.
3. No need to pay monthly salaries to the service providers as they are the partners and charge on per service basis. Otherwise in shops are getting paid even if there are no customers for a single day.
4. No need to maintain heft stock of the products that get expired if there are very few customers. We can manage it as per the demand.
5. No need to pay hefty advance that is suppose to be given before taking a shop on lease or rent. Indeed, the app as a platform should charge an initial subscription money to the platform so that they become partners but that is going to be far less than the physical shops. The app platform can charge 8a%-10%  of fees on every bill and transaction to the service provider considering the fact that the actual cost of the product is very less and the margins are high on the services.

 

The  population in the country like India is 130 crores

40% population stays in rural areas

10% in the small towns and tier 2 cities

Remaining 50% in the top 4 metro cities which is 65 crores

Out of 65 crores 40% falls in the target user segment who can afford our product that is 26 crores

For the application we can go for membership package for an year or 6 months that will provide additional benefit

Trade offs

In order to avoid the transaction fees the service providers can start contacting the customers offline and can provide same service at a lower price. Customer can also get the benefit of lower cost as there is no in app intermediate platform in case of one to one deals between the service provider and the customer. Service provider can charge little less than the application.

Post Launch

Measure the success based on KPIs and metrics and retrospect.

Clarifying questions:

• What are the core services offered by this app? (People can request a salon specialist to come to their home and give hairstyling services.)
• Is it only for hairstyling services (Yes)
• Are we planning of expanding the service range horizontally? (No we were just thinking about adding the water bottle feature)
• What is the user journey like on the current app? (merchant login/ customer login/ user sees a variety of hairstyling services/ selects one and adds it to cart/ goes on the checkout page and fills in relevant information like address and time slot and selects a professional basis on the availabilty and personal choice and goes to the payment page. For professional selection we are showing customer reviews and experience of the professional + type of services offered)
• Where is this app currently servicing? (India)
• What stage is the product at in the PDLC? (early scaling / recently launched)
• Why and how did we arrive to the decision of ordering a water bottle service (20L) for the app? we are planning to slowly expand our core services)
• Where would we be sourcing the water bottles from
• Where will this service being planned for? (same region) (Tier 1 Urban cities)
• Do we have any tech / budget constraints? No
• What is the end goal that we are trying to achieve with this new feature? (expand our offerings, acquire more users, and also diversifying revenue streams)

Overview:

Internal:

Goal of this product:

To build an app for the consumers where they have ease of access to hairstyling services. Our goal is to scale an early stage product, acquire more users and add to our revenue streams.

Factors to consider:

• Does this new service tie in to our goal?

willingness to buy (acquire more users ? expand our revenue streams) ? (is there a genuine need for the product / is it a large and a genuine usecase to solve for.

expand our offerings ?

So this service somewhat ties in tour goal

• do we have the scalability to onboard water bottle vendors? ? (high effort but it will be very similar to the current flow)
• is it consistent with our core offerings? ?
• how will we maintain the inventory / sourcing of the water bottles? (new domain) and not our specialty ? (we don’t have logistics / supply chain / inventory capabilty that this model would require)

External factors:

TAM: people who use smartphones have access to internet and live in urban areas 70% of 400M ~ 280M

SAM: people who need water bottles delivered (20L) and have a repetitive usecase (approx 10% of this population – who don’t have access to potable water) ~ 28M

SOM: People who can afford to pay for our services ~ approx 30% ~ 9M

Average ATV per person ~ $1

Total revenue: $9M (check whether this is a substantial addition to our current revenue streams)

• competitors (New + industry rivalry): Many last mile delivery services in India like Blinkit/ Zepto and Amazon Fresh etc who have the logistics / warehousing capability needed to pull this off ?
• suppliers / buyers: (we will extremely dependent on third party vendors for warehousing/ logistics as we don’t have this inhouse. They have a lot of bargaining power here. As for buyers, this product is a not a unique product and available on multiple platforms so we don’t have a USP/ upper hand here as the switching cost is low. ?
• substitutes: 20L of water bottles can be sourced from your local vendor, they are available every where in urban towns, plus its a niche usecase as most people have a potable water supply. ?

 

Basis on the above analysis: I would not recommend launching this new service within this app. To validate this hypothesis I would conduct a more thorough user research (both current users + potential users) and try and identify whether this is a genuine and a big usecase. In case this research validates this hypothesis I would do the following:

• Launch this on a separate app
• Reduce our third party dependency (for eg: onboard local vendors and build our own logistics, eliminate the need of a warehouse.)
• do competitor research and try and identify gaps in their offering and try to improve upon that.

Google product launch question framework.

Clarifying Questions

Who is designing this app?

Lets assume Google in this case

What is the mission of the company?

To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

Who provides these services? barber service or delivery of water bottle

Lets assume we allow partners to register with google who can provide these services. 

 

Analysis

Lets look at pros and cons based on various criteria and pick a winner.

PROS (of single app)

• It aligns with the Google’s mission of organizing the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. In this case, both sets of information and associated service will be available through one single platform.
• Having both features within a single app will allow users to accomplish multiple things using the same app.
• Need to reach the next billion users – Google can combine multiple services through one single app.. say Google Assistant or Maps to solve multiple use cases such as grocery delivery and barber service/plumber service/carpenter service and get next billion users.
• In both cases, a service partner has to be assigned to complete the service – whether its purchasing water bottle from a nearby store and providing barber service.

CONS (of single app)

• The user personas for these two use cases could be completely different and also their needs could be completely different. That may become a problem when solving it through one single app.
• Barber service is more of a home service where as the delivering one water botte is associated with grocery delivery. Hence the app design to support each service needs to be siginificantly different if we want the water bottle to be purchased from a nearby store and we show the inventory on the app.

• In terms of operations, there is less friction to onboard someone as a delivery partner vs offering barber service.
• For barber service, you need to train the partner to maintain service standards plus provide equipment.
• Entry barrier for someone to try out ordering a water bottle is much lesser than trying out a barber service specially during global pandemic.
• The user has to schedule a specific slot for availing the service but delivery time for water bottle can also be scheduled. But we need to manage rescheduling requests in case of barber service hence rescheduling option should be there for barber service.

My overall assessment : 

• If we can design the app well to provide both services within one single app through different features, there are more pros for having both services within one app rather than build a separate app.