While still in Nairobi, and building on learnings from their first prototype, Robin Bigio and his IDEO.org team set out to determine how the business model they're designing might really work. Along the way, they sell products door-to-door and from a functioning kiosk rented for the day. 

While still in Nairobi, and building on learnings from our first prototype, our IDEO.org team sat down to figure out how our business model might really work. For our second prototype, we needed to learn if the individual models from our first prototype could work together as parts of a larger business. With this in mind, we designed our water, nutrition and health business to have three components: a door-to-door salesperson who would advertise the water subscription and products; a local kiosk where people could subscribe and purchase the health and nutrition products and, finally, a delivery service that would bring people clean and safe water to their doorstep.

Here are some of the key questions we asked ourselves:

1) Do people only want drinking water, or would they like enough clean water to accomplish other tasks as well (such as drinking, washing, cleaning, cooking)?

2) Will people subscribe to a weekly service, and are they willing and able to pay for a whole week's supply at once?

3) Are people willing to pay for something in advance without being able to see it (i.e. paying for water that will only be delivered the following day)?

4) Does it make sense to sell health and nutrition products alongside water? What is required of the brand we’re designing to keep all of these elements tied together coherently?

Getting ready

To answer these questions and develop our second prototype, our team did a one-day intense synthesis and concepting sprint while on the ground in Nairobi, dividing into three teams focused on the following: the consumer, the business, and the experience.

Consumer Team

The consumer team went out to interview more people, with a specific focus on testing our ‘product mix'. We created two extreme product baskets as a means for eliciting feedback from the potential customers we spoke with. The first basket of products was clearly health oriented, containing products like vitamins, nutritional powders, and fortified baby food. The second basket was all about “Fast Moving Consumer Goods” (or FMCG for short), with products like shampoo, margarine, and laundry detergent. By understanding the sentiments that these products evoked in people, we came to understand that these products could happily live together as long as, overall, they had a positive health slant to them.

Based upon our consumer team sessions, we developed three categories for our products: Strong Kids, Germ Free, and Be Fit. These terms were directly drawn from our customer interviews. This helped us reframe products in a way that communicated their benefit to our customers.

Business Team

We knew that an integral part of our business was to supply clean water. Doing this meant that the price of our water had to be competitive with the other sources where people were buying from (tap water, water kiosks, boreholes, and mkokoteni (pushcarts that sell water)). So the business team brought out their Excel models, populating cells with data supplied by local partner organizations and telephone calls to experts. After a long day of discussion and modeling, it turned out that we could sell our water at a competitive price. This meant that we had a really strong value proposition!

Experience Team

The experience team worked on figuring out the “design bit”, seeking to create a comprehensive series of customer touch-points that would help overcome the barriers that we had identified. Building on our previous week's prototype, the experience team designed six different pieces of collateral to arm our local sales team.

As an example of what the experience team was up to, we had previously learned that people were extremely interested in “how” our water was processed. To answer this question, we added a simple diagram to the back of the business cards distributed by our local sales team depicting all of the steps that went into the clean water they were buying. Other collateral created by the experience team included: diagrams showing people how the overall service worked, 50% off coupons, a “menu” listing the products that we would be selling, and a visual diagram explaining our different subscription plans.

Our tireless local research company (Ricochet Research) helped us identify a neighborhood that suited our needs for the second prototyping session: a mixed income neighborhood with spotty access to water. We rented a small kiosk in a prime location and prepared to outfit it with our products and our brand. Our multi-talented translators – Carol and James – agreed to double as SmartLife salespersons.

We were ready for action!

Go Time

We opened our kiosk for business at 10am by hanging our SmartLife sign outside the door. James, our kiosk manager, began announcing our free water samples and did an amazing job of selling subscriptions and health & nutrition products. Carol, meanwhile, went door-to-door in the neighborhood, explaining our service and our brand and handing out vouchers for people to redeem at our kiosk. In the afternoon, Carol also sold products and subscriptions directly door-to-door with great success as the heavy rain that day prevented people from leaving their homes. By the end of the day, in addition to all of our sales at the kiosk, we had ten orders and sixteen 20-liter jerry cans of water to deliver to paying customers the following day!

The next morning we teamed up with another Richochet contractor, Clinton, to deliver the water. Wearing a pristine and white SmartLife uniform, Clinton went around the neighborhood delivering water. People were delighted and somewhat surprised that the water showed up! And many of the neighbors who witnessed the transaction then wanted to subscribe to SmartLife as well.

After each delivery, the IDEO.org team interviewed each family about the experience and gathered extremely useful feedback.

Here are some of our learnings, in no particular order:

1. The presence of a physical kiosk was very important to establish trust among our customers. However, people were still willing to subscribe to the service via our door-to-door saleswoman because it was so convenient.

2. People were willing to pay upfront for the service. The trustworthy brand experience, low cost of entry (our price was cost of the water plus 100 Kenyan Schillings deposit for the jerry can), and our personable sales-team (Carol and James) made this possible.

3. Grouping the products into the three categories (Strong Kids, Germ Free and Be Fit) helped us articulate our brand proposition for our customers. These three categories also enabled us to have a different sort of conversation with our customers, even about products like hand soap with which they were already familiar.

4. The distinction between drinking and utility water (non-potable water used for tasks like cleaning) is very much engrained in people’s heads. Most of our customers subscribed to our service for drinking water, but explained that they would rather buy utility water from the usual places at lower prices.

5. Our door-to-door experience needs to be substantially streamlined. The sales script needs to be more concise and Carol (our translator and door-to-door saleswoman) had WAY TOO MANY props to juggle as part of her sales pitch.

6. Saturdays and Sundays are better days to conduct door-to-door sales because the head of the house is usually home (as opposed to a Wednesday when we ran our prototype).

I have been at IDEO for six years now and this has been one of my most incredible research experiences. The amount of learning and progress we were able to make in only ten days in the field was amazing. The power of integrating fast prototyping in our initial learning phase got us light years ahead compared with where we would have been if we had just done the more typical user research.

I can’t recommend the fast prototyping method enough. BUILD TO THINK!