MVP Product Design
/ Food St
StartupFood St is an Australian startup founded in 2015 that connects passionate home cooks with time-poor families. They started off servicing the Northern Beaches and Inner West regions of Sydney, with plans to scale nationally in the long-term.
/ OPPORTUNITY
Food St was founded on a brilliant idea – to stop the reliance on take away dinners and establish a community that shares healthy home-cooked meals. They wanted to connect time-poor parents wanting to feed their kids fresh, nutritious meals with passionate and qualified at-home cooks wanting to share their delicious creations with others. However, they needed to know whether their idea had legs and if it was scalable.
Food St recognised that in order to get their product to market they needed to expand their team, and so engaged DIJGTAL to become their design and marketing partner in 2016. DIJGTAL’s immediate focus was on designing, validating, releasing and marketing their Minimum Viable Product (MVP).
/ Approach
The first thing we did was to leverage the insights from existing research to ideate a number of concepts, and test them with potential customers to determine if we were on the right track.
Once we had established a good understanding of the core needs for both Cooks and Buyers, and were able to meet those needs, we designed and implemented a lean MVP using Shopify and existing plugins.
We launched a pilot of the product as well as the branding and marketing strategy, focusing a limited release on the inner Sydney suburb of Zetland. While the manual processes in this pilot weren’t scalable, completing low-level tasks by hand allowed us to develop an intimate knowledge of what did and did not work.
After the pilot ended, we took these learnings and applied them to the design and implementation of the next product release. This formed Food St’s first official launch, which was focused on the Northern Beaches of Sydney, where the founders live. To support this launch, we ran content marketing on Facebook, and hyper-local brand awareness paid campaigns.
/ Outcome
DIJGTAL was able to prove the Food St concept in a controlled pilot environment before producing their initial product offering, and getting it to market.
