I was given a task by my menotr Dima and like usual, I will sahre the results with this blogpost. The task itself:
Please observe two "purposes" below, in no particular order.
1. "People having low self-esteem, affects their mentality and mindset and is one of the biggest threats to continuing our civilization. The purpose is to improve our self-esteem."
2. "People are in the process of
destroying the planet and the environment, due to not noticing the personal
effect on themselves. The purpose is to bring out the possibility to
people."
For each purpose, write an essay on what would you practically change within
SportID, if this was the purpose of the company. Feel free to write a list of
say 10-25 items for each, and/or a paragraph on explaining why you would make
those changes.
Areas to explore:
- External communication and copywriting.
- The functionality of the product itself.
- Customer segments, roles, and business
models.
- Investors who you would attract.
- Events you would go to.
- Team structure, roles, and hires.
- Processes and discussions within the team.
- Training courses and onboarding manuals.
- etc.
How to improve people’s self-esteem with SportID
First of all, I do not think that there will never be a threat
But let’s explore if the product’s true value would be enhancing users’ self-esteem how we would change the following areas.
External communication
The messages would be clearly focused on how they would not need to push like “the fitness people of instagram” to be healthy and fit and look good. Just 3 times 30 minutes would do it. And that is actually true. People will start feeling better about their bodies and themselves if they would acknowledge the fact that this amount of time is actually doable to them and for everyone else as well. People would start feeling instantly much more confident about themselves.
The idea is taken form the book I currently read: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27409908-living-the-good-life
Functionality of the product
I would not change a thing about the plans. Sure, I would change how the product works today but that is obvious that we are from being ready.
Customers
Would not change anything. This is pretty obvious that companies would value employees with higher self-esteem.
Investors
This is hard challenge. There are no VC-s declaring that they are investing in products that promote users’ self-esteem. So, this is more like a personal thing and most probably we would have to feel the mindset of the person we are talking to. My wild guess is that VC-s do not suffer with low self-esteem problems. For them we would need to show how many trillions of people are suffering due to this and how much they are willing to pay to make things better. The slogan needs to be “We will disrupt the market of enhancing self-esteem. We will make people’s self-esteem 10x better, because 10% is not enough”. Then we will be on their radar ;)
Events we would go
Maybe lecture of David Icke would be a good place? Also, any alt-right voters’ meetings? Weight-watchers? Yes, sure those are places where most of the people are not evaluating themselves very highly. But honestly, I do not actually think these places would be very valuable. I guess we do not need the change of events. Since our target group is everywhere.
Team structure and people
The structure would be the
People – I guess the answer would be in both cases that we would need people who feel that the cause is important.
Processes and discussions with the team
I guess there no need for a big change here. Since I believe our product already helps people with lower self-esteem. From time to time I go to our helpdesk to solve customers issues. To be honest, this happened usually due to the overload there, but it gives some perspective of things happening. And I remember a lady complaining that swimming ticket in Lasnamäe was 2€ more expensive for her than in Pirita and she was willing to take the bus to there and back to save those 2 €. I had really a WTF experience. You want to spend 30 minutes a bus to go there and another 30 back to save 1€? (Her employer is paying 50% of the ticket price). Hey lady, have you done the math? How highly do you value yourself and your time?
Training courses
The more I do this essay, the more I think it sucks this time. I do not really feel that we would need to change much. These are marketing materials generally, so the same mindset applies.
Save the planet
I have to be honest and tell that for me it is even harder to go through these details if the mission of SportID would be to save the planet. I can feel that if people would move more by foot or bikes and less by cars, that would have some impact on the nature and on our planet. Quite sure that would leave some mark. It would have positive impact on people as well. But for sure it would not be the most efficient and straight to the point way dealing with the issue. Those more efficient solutions have to come from fields of agriculture, industry and energy production.
So I will skip the second part of the assignment and instead will write a summary about the book I just finished reading and that I previously linked in this blogpost as well.