EUSendTheBox

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  Clickdummy as pdf viewed as an event participant looking at event

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  High Level Wireframe Joining Event

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  Sample Personas to showcase our customer segments

EUSendtheBox is an online marketplace to help anyone seeking interaction in times of corona by connecting those looking for new customers or revenue streams with people seeking experiences through the combination of a literal box filled with trinkets supplementing an interactive online event.

Inspiration

Many areas of everyday life are affected by social and physical distancing. Especially in terms of real life interaction. This has consequences for businesses as well as people required to stay at home.

For businesses it means omitting a significant portion of revenue, especially in gastronomy, travel or services industry. Analysts expect 75% of restaurants in the US to not survive the crisis. Travel volume is close to zero with significant impact on tourism expenditure, e.g. a minus of around 20% in France or Italy.

Besides the impact on businesses all across Europe, every human beeing is searching for social connections. But due to the crisis the options are rather limited and pushed to digital channels - without attracting other senses. But how to experience your summer vacation digitally?

What it does

Our market place connects those looking for new customers or revenue streams with people seeking experiences through the combination of a box filled with trinkets supplementing an interactive online event.

These experiences could be:

• an interactive online wine tasting where participants get a wine tasting set in advance (in a box) and can ask questions to the hosting winery during the event
• a crafting project for children offered by a kindergarten teacher, who sends the materials before and allows parents some free space in the meantime
• a clown workshop offered by a professional clown for kids and/or adults, with a box containing red noses and clown makeup
• a city tour anywhere in Europe with a (professional) city guide, who sends some spices, food or other items specific to his tour to engage with the participants
• the octoberfest in you living room with a big beer stein and an authentic bavarian Helles

But of course, there are no limits or borders for creative ideas - only requirement is that they bring together an interactive event with something that comes in a box.

How we built it

With focus on the technical aspects of this projects we focused on building the prototype and a variety of mockups. This was done with Sketch.

The video was created with flex .

For team organization and collaboration we utilized Slack, Whatsapp, Zoom, Creatly and dropbox papers.

For task organization in an agile way we relied on the Kanban functionality of workstream.ai.

Challenges we ran into

While doing so we faced a couple of challenges in different areas, e.g.:

• Starting from scratch: As we developed a fully new idea starting from zero Friday afternoon, timing was of course a bit of challenge, because we not only need to "code something" but rather align internally on what we actually want to do.
• Scoping: Identifying the things we really need and want to develop, while also considering what we can achieve in these 48 hours.
• Many many first times: Having a lot of “first times” such as first time creating a pitch video, first time creating a website, first time making a business plan while using so many different and new collaboration tools at the same time was challenging on the one hand - but also a lot of fun.
• Feedback from businesses: Reaching out to businesses on the weekend in a short time frame to get more feedback, survey results and statements is quite challenging. If you want to interact with businesses, address them during the working week might improve the response rates.
• Date: As this weekend was also the first weekend of Ramadan, our muslim team member hat a double load and therefore it was difficult to fully participate.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are especially proud of the fact, that we concretized a vague idea resulting from a brain storming on Thursday evening to a business model plus a tangible product components and first steps of operationalization of the business idea.

Further, we are proud of all the big and small steps we achieved in the various areas we touched during the weekend:

Business model & Strategy

• Narrowed down our business model in business model canvas
• Defined a market entry strategy
• Defined a high level target operating model incl. potential roles and required resources
• Developed a first impression of financial requirements for setup and operations for this type of business

Product

• our strategy is mobile first (so few stationary devices for so many people per household), so for visualisation purposes we started with the app screens and flow, but in a responsive context
• designed the user flow, so that we can easily set up the user stories for the different process steps once going into detailed development
• Designed high level wireframes for most of the screens included in core processes of the platform incl. booking, event creation, user profile management, etc (see attachment).
• Created a clickdummy to showcase the core functions of our marketplace (see attachment - due to network issues, the sketch cloud upload is not possible, and we added the a document showing the interactions)
• Developed a detailed process flow for all core processes of the market place
• Specified core data objects required and defined their components

Marketing

• Defined, verified and detailed our target group by developing personas for our two large customer segments (host, participants)
• Developed a high level marketing strategy and communication concept:
• We have set up a website at www.eusendthebox.com to explain the platform and use the blog to ispire people through posting about past and planned ideas for events.
• Also, Instagram, Facebook and Linked In accounts have been set up, so that we can spread the word and gain reach through communication on these platforms, again by sharing the stories and inspirations. We have also already posted the story of the platform with surveys in some groups on facebooks (e.g. the Digital Nomad community and the Freelancing Females).
• Planned media measures are the following: Social Media Marketing through hyper local targeting Social Media Collection Adas showcasing the workshop types Social Media Story Surveys to gain reach
• In addition, we have reached out to potential clients (wineries, and even a clown who is doing her job entertaining kids in hospitals through social media).

• And, last but not least, of course everyone on the team is already spreading the idea through our own existing networks - and the hackathon of course as well.

• Requested and analyzed feedback from our target groups and included it into our approach and product

• Created a pitch video from storyline until final product, which can also be used for marketing purpose

What We learned

Of course we learned a lot during the weekend. But there are a few things we want to emphasize:

• The community is amazing!: Just being able to approach people from all over Europe with different backgrounds to get their impressions of idea or certain things you developed is unique and really great!
• New ideas can turn real quite fast, especially when the whole team gets really passionate about the idea and the approach.
• Virtual working needs to be well organized when people are working from different places and different personal time schedules.
• There are great tools to organize virtual work and simplify software development: Everyone of us found some new favourite tools for certain things and we will benefit from this knowledge also in our future work.

What's next for EUSendTheBox

The next big milestone is to actually launch the platform.

In order to be able to do so, we have to address several aspects including:

1) Business Setup: Found the actual business

2) Product: Proceed with product development

3) Marketing: Spread the word and make people and businesses aware of the platform

4) Partner Management: Closely work with our launching partners to tailor the platform and support them to create amazing experiences for the participants.

In detail, this means for the respective areas:

1) Business Setup In this area, the major aspects are founding the actual legal entity and setting up all required administrative structures (e.g. bank account, insurance, etc.), as well as securing the funding of the business.

2) Product After finalizing the concept and validating the prototype with more potential hosts and participants, we will reassess the features and the phased approached and we will use an agile apprach. The resulting decisions will be followed by an implementation phase including sourcing of developers and the respective validations and tests with partners and users.

3) Marketing In regards to Marketing, the foucs is on growing the awareness for the platform - on the business and the private side. Therefore, we plan to mainly utilize our already existing social media channels, e.g. by hyper local targeting, social media collection ads showcasing workshop types, and story surveys to gain reach. In addition we will reach out to further potential clients (wineries, entertainers, cafes, bars, travel guides, ...). Further, everyone on the team is already spreading the idea through our own existing networks - and the hackathon of course as well.

4) Partner Management To ensure that the platform has value from day one, we need to work together closely with our launching partners.