On Pain points.
I was part of a social innovation challenge back in South Korea in my senior year of university, with an idea I had called Zuha Digital, a learning hub that would students in underprivileged areas the opportunity to become computer literate. The social innovation centre at my university organised a trip to the Phillipines for the participating teams of students and we experienced a social enterprise bootcamp at the Asian Development Bank (loved it). We came out of it with some lessons, skills, and frustrations.
The first lesson (and frustration) was that it’s very difficult to do market research by remote control. I was a founder at large, trying to get information about what my target market needed, while trying not to prescribe their needs. My sisters did a lot of legwork for me, calling district offices and schools and the like, because they were on the ground. I also created a survey and paid someone to do data collection for me, which worked well. But, it was still a lot to do from so far away.
Fast forward to this week, I’ve been considering the best way to go about doing actual market research, for our target market, which would be people who have smartphones, who would download an app. I posted under the hashtag ZedTwitter, thinking that if people retweet, then that would have more reach… well it didn’t. The reach was there, but not the engagement. I guess Twitter isn’t really the best for things like that, unless you have a large following. I did get a few retweets and slid into a dm or two to ask if they could complete the survey, but thus far, the highest numbers have come from actual direct marketing. Asking people (friends and family) in my network to fill in the Google form, and if they can post to their networks. I’ve also gone the Facebook ad campaign route, which is yielding results. I may have to do in-person marketing as well.
One thing the survey results are showing are that the pain points that were mentioned in the research I read from 2013 (2013!!), are the same pain points still needing to be addressed nine years later. As a commuter, these are my pain points too, so I think I can assist in solving them. At least we can be sure that the data is accurate. Zambia is sorely lacking in online data, and statistics. Thankfully there are organisations that are conducting research and writing papers because it can be difficult to create a pitch deck with data from nine years ago. So much has changed in this country since 2013. and so much will continue to change, for the better.
Onward.
