Case Study | New Product Development (NPD)

01. New products often fail because they (1) do not address a great enough customer need or (2) simply address a need that customers are unwilling to pay for.

As a cohort member of the regional NSF I-Corps program, our team, Pawsitive, had a chance to hone and define our product-market fit. This involved segmenting our customers and interviewing 20 prospective customers from a segment to understand customer pain points and customer needs. We also needed to ideate on how our product could relieve customer pains and add additional value where there were unmet needs or no current solutions for existing customer needs. Our team pivoted from our initial idea to a more streamlined mobile app product that addressed only the most pressing customer needs and we believed our customers would actually be willing to pay for it. We received $3000 to continue to pursue our idea and are in the process of applying to the national NSF I-Corps program for a chance to earn $50,000 to develop our idea.

We realized that, initially, we had not identified a great enough customer need and so our initial product would have been hard to market— customers would have been unwilling to pay for our technology. Our revised product definition truly addressed universal needs of dog owners in America.

02. It is crucial for startups to thoroughly define their product-market fit, while continuously gathering feedback from customers and business stakeholders to test the validity of the hypotheses and assumptions they used to develop a product.

Our initial product idea consisted of a dog vest and mobile app that provided customers with biometrics and data-driven recommendations for their pet. After interviewing 20 first-time dog owners, we decided to create a social application that that helps dog owners understand their pet’s personalities and their own lifestyle choices, while also connecting with other dog owners and vet specialists to answer questions or anxieties they might have about their pet. We realized that our initial assumptions about what customers really wanted were wrong and we were focusing on the less pressing customer needs. The I-Corps program helped us prioritize the most pressing user needs instead.

After the regional I-Corps program, we applied our idea to UPenn’s Weisslabs Startup Accelerator and will receive $1000 to further develop our product idea after the 10 - week summer program. We will also have a chance to pitch our idea to venture capitalists by the end of this summer. At the moment, we are still determining how to monetize our idea, as we do not want to spam our customers with ads like other social apps such as Instagram or Facebook. We want to take a more thoughtful approach towards monetization and create something that eventually allows dog owners to adopt healthier lifestyle choices for themselves and their pets. Unlike other matching services like Tinder, we do not want to spam users with false matches or advertisements promising matches that we cannot really guarantee. We want to help match dog owners with one another so that they can develop authentic relationships with people and dogs in their area. Read more about Pawsitive here, we are always looking for investors and collaborators!

03. New products can either be push technologies or pull technologies, depending on the hypotheses and assumptions used to develop them.

Pawsitive is an example of a pull technology, something formed out of directly validating existing customer pains and needs through 30+ user interviews. This semester, I also created a business plan for a new technology being developed at Penn’s Platt Labs, as part of an Engineering Entrepreneurship team. Our product is called AchievEEG and uses proprietary dry-electrode EEG sensor technology within a sports headband to measure an athlete’s focus, stress, fatigue, and engagement. Our entrepreneurship team talked to athletes across sports types and finally decided that our core value proposition should be measuring team synchronicity for crew teams in particular, our early adopters.

As this is a push technology or a technology developed without initial user validation, our business strategy was to market our product to star crew athletes who compete at the national level to gain recognition as a tried and tested product that works. We chose crew athletes as our early adopters because this is a smaller market where national level athletes don’t mind paying higher prices for emerging technologies. In fact, after interviewing Alix James, CEO of NK Sports, which is the industry standard for crew performance measurement, we decided to price our product at $399 and felt confident we could gain traction in both the American and European markets simultaneously after initially launching our product.

04. Iterative design and business processes are crucial for pivoting at the right time, in case a new product does not address market needs.

Our Engineering Entrepreneurship team used the business model canvas to iterate on our business strategy while writing out each portion of the business plan. As we learned more through user interviews and stakeholder interviews, we made modifications to different aspects of our business model canvas and re-wrote sections of our business plan throughout the semester. As a result, we were able to produce a focused pitch deck, pitch or idea to venture capitalists by the end of the semester, and receive positive, constructive feedback on our business plan. Read AchievEEG’s complete business plan here.

05. Ideally, all new ventures are trying to find blue oceans — chances to increase customer value and reduce operations costs within an uncontested market with no competitors.

While defining product-market fit, it is not crucial to come up with a complete product. Instead it is necessary to test each hypothesis or assumption about the product using a series of minimal viable products (MVPs), prototyping the bare minimum features or functionality and then testing it with users, as advised by Eric Ries in his book, Lean Startup. However, before the complete product is ready to go to market, features and functionality must be prioritized depending on customer needs and market demand. To quote Marc Andreessen, “Product/market fit means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market.“ In an ideal world, startups are looking for blue oceans or undefined markets where there are no competitors so that its easier to launch a simple product and gain widespread traction with customers.

In my opinion, pull technologies or technologies that are created only after validating real user needs tend to be more successful than push technologies, or technologies developed in a lab environment and then literally pushed into the market. Pull technologies are intuitive to users, while push technologies might not always meet user needs or might be ahead of their time in terms of real-time adoption and gaining paid customers.

‘Sous Chef’, an idea I developed independently within our first design studio class, won an honorable mention at the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Collab Student Design Competition. I used Lean Startup principles to create a simple product that does one thing, and only one thing, really, really well. Sous Chef consists of an app and a kitchen appliance. Users simply select a recipe they would like to try and the appliance prints out or speaks out each step in the recipe and sets a timer for that particular step in the recipe. The design of the mobile app and kitchen appliance was simple enough that the judge from OXO felt it was an intuitive product and viable for development in the real world. Read more about the Sous Chef design process here.

I had also thought through how the AI within this simple system could gather information about how much food users consume each week so that the device would be able to recommend groceries based on what households already have in their fridge, ultimately saving consumers grocery money and eliminating food waste— the spoilage of uneaten or unopened foods that users tend to wish they hadn’t bought! The AI aspect of the product would not have been an MVP feature, if Sous Chef were to be marketed towards consumers— this would have been a feature that would have been developed over time with updates to the software components of the device.

NPD Projects

01. Pawsitive

Pet Social + Pet Med

02. AchievEEG

Neuroscience + Sports Tech

03. Sous Chef

Food Waste + Cooking Habits

04. OMNI Parking

Book city parking spots in advance.

05. NPD Portfolio

All new product development projects