This was definitely one of the most interesting projects I have done at Stanford. I loved the fact that we were randomly assigned a company in a field that we had no experience with from a product and development perspective. Usually, classes ask you to come up with an idea and develop it yourself, however, being assigned the idea really allowed me to delve deep into thinking of every aspect of the company and potential products from a very objective lens, removing many biases I would usually have if it were my own idea. The initial ideation process is always tempting to go back to and modify, but this format eliminated the need to do that to an extent.
As a pet owner myself, I had personal experiences and opinions that I could bring to this idea, and I found that to be pretty useful throughout. Despite having been a user in the space before, I encountered many surprises along the way. I knew the pet food industry was a booming ultra-competitive landscape, but delving into this really gave me a taste of what a bloodbath it truly is, and the intricate thought that goes into every toy, treat, or pet product. As someone who has usually thought about everything from a technical/software development point of view, it was also refreshing to approach things from a product and business perspective. While our product did involve an important algorithmic aspect, a major part of it was also really trying to understand the intricacies of product manufacturing/development, procurement of raw materials, along with shipping, and logistics. All those factors contributed to our business model, and revenue streams
As a team, I think we initially took a little bit of time to get accustomed to each other’s work styles, but once we started meeting regularly and came up with more ideas, we hit our stride. Since we have such different backgrounds, we had different approaches to certain issues, so to deal with any conflicting ideas we came up with a very effective strategy of majority voting initially. As for our presentation, we were not able to narrow down the topics and prioritize aspects of the pitch deck well. That is why our initial presentation was a little too long. I also think we initially stuck too rigidly to the rubric and P1 guidelines to the point where we verbatim stuck to each heading and each subheading for topics like Business Model and Go-to market strategy, which can be pretty extensive. After seeing more pitch decks online, other presentations and getting our feedback, we realized that the flow should be more organic. We decided to do what makes most sense objectively based on our industry and market, so we ended up pivoting our product a few times, before eventually coming back to a modified version of the initial version we had. It felt like a very natural way to come back to our fundamental idea, and filled us with confidence that our personalized pet food solutions and delivery was ideal, but just for cats and dogs. We made better decisions by usually agreeing on majority decisions, which was a major advantage of having 3 people.
As for our product development process, we went to the Stanford dog park for some user research and actually spoke to potential customers to understand their preferences, current methodologies, and suggestions. That was very helpful, and it informed a lot of what we did for the final version of the presentation, especially because our product is a D2C user-facing product. Apart from that, we also successfully incorporated majority of the feedback from the “Product Council” into our final presentation. Our mentor, Adrian, really helped us hone in on clarity about the exact product, our upselling strategy, and acknowledging the premium nature of the product and market we are in to adjust our revenue strategy accordingly. The feedback and help we received from Christina, Laura, and the CAs along the way also really helped us prioritize things to include in the pitch deck, and gave us more clarity on our product vision, our users, market sizing, and financial projections.
Overall, it was an amazing experience and I wouldn’t change anything major about the class structure or format of the project for future iterations!
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