The thought process behind designing a minimum viable product (MVP) involves focusing on the essential features that validate the product concept while minimising development time and costs.
As a solopreneur, it can be liberating to think you can create a product without compromise or input from others. And so it was for me: I had a little money behind me, an idea for a product that would solve a problem, and a desire to bring manufacturing back to Australia.
As a product owner, I knew the steps:
Define the founding principles: Dark Forest Beverages would be founded on quality ingredients, innovative manufacturing, and sustainability principles. Our commitment to using natural ingredients (no stevia or weird ass sugars) and eco-friendly packaging would set us apart.
Conduct Market Research: identify soft drink industry gaps and opportunities and analyse consumer preferences, emerging trends, and potential competitors to refine the product offering.
Develop the product: develop a range of high-functioning soft drinks that could replace traditional flavours like lemonade and dry ginger using only natural ingredients designed to reduce the desire for sugar and alcohol. Make the product look like a conventional social beverage.
I knew the target audience and the top three competitors in the market. I knew they all used natural sweeteners like stevia and ethynol, and I thought if I could produce a product that taste better, people would buy.
The core features included traditional soft drink flavours, served in amber glass bottles with a twist-top crown seal, sold at hospitality venues and delivered in eco-friendly 6-packs and 24-bottle cases.
Branding and packaging would be simple and cost-effective, communicating Dark Forest's ethos: "packaging ain't product", we would use kraft brown boxes and packing tape made from vegetable gums.
The goal was to create a viable option for social adults who wanted to lay off sugar and alcohol but still wanted something that looked like they were at a social event.
Clear right?
Mistake # 1. Using Friends and Family to gather market research.
Get them to distribute the survey, ask the questions, and pour the drinks, but don't under any circumstance use them to complete the survey, answer the question or respond in front of you to your product and think their data is a good representation of the market......... nope. They love you and should be there to cuddle you when strangers who fit your target audience tell you that the product tastes like dishwater.
Mistake # 2. Not analysing the competitor's product.
You see, there is a reason why all the large kombucha companies use stevia and weird ass sugars (even though they taste like chemicals) because it makes the drink shelf-stable... Shelf stability is the number one criterion for getting stocked. If supermarkets could avoid selling perishables like bread, they would. This is why supermarkets have brought their bakery needs in-house - we digress.
Mistake # 3. Remember, first impressions matter.
We can agree academically that packaging is not a product unless we are discussing a Porsche. The look of a TV box doesn't matter because you are more interested in the item the box protects, right?
If Dark Forest Beverages were only delivered to hospitality venues, our packaging would be perfect because the less packaging venues have to remove after stocking their fridges, the better. Unfortunately, that is not the same when selling to consumers who experience your product for the first time in a non-descript brown box.
By committing to our ethos of "packaging ain't product", we inadvertently closed ourselves off from the "gift-giving" market and limited our opportunity to capitalise on endorsement marketing. Look around and see drinks designed for gift giving; they are beautiful, for example, Monday.com.
Retail is detail, as they say.
Until next time, when we will discuss sales and distribution.