Mrs. Fresh was a course project I have conceptualised to apply the lean startup learnings while I was attending the Lean Customer Development Course conducted by The Testing Ground. I had conducted 10-11 guerilla user interviews in my neighbourhood to gather feedback and concensus about the problem space of hiring domestic cleaners.
Who is your customer
- Late 20s-40s working adults who have busy social engagements and work commitments.
- Working married parents 30s-40s that require to offload house chores while attending to their children
What are the problems of the customer
- Difficulty in managing time to be at home to monitor the cleaners’ progress.
- A main problem is to be able to feel secure leaving the house keys in the hands of the cleaners when they are out of town.
- Do not have relevant contacts for hiring the services of trustworthy and reliable cleaners.
What is the riskiest assumptions
- Logistics issue such as provision of vehicles to place the cleaners country-wide.
- Difficulty in securing a sufficient supply of well-trained and honest cleaners and managing the staffs’ turnover.
- There is also a lack of effective training programmes to upgrade their skills.Do not have a better way of resolving conflicts and theft issues between the home owners and the cleaners.
Summary of Learnings
Ad-hoc CustomersReturn Customers
- As booking could be pre-book in days or months ahead so a proposed reminder service is essential in managing the booking schedules.
- Run through a pre-cleaning set of specific cleaning routine instructions, i.e. the types of detergents & relevant cleaning methods required for leather sofa with customers to have clarity of communications.
- To keep a backlog of the history of the customer’s cleaning jobs so as to better tailor to his needs and keep him on longer-terms retainer contracts. Such information is useful as cross-reference for the customer to review his cleaning chores and avoid ambiguity in the services provided to him.
- Such useful insights captured from the backlog will be extremely useful in upselling better-tier services to the cusomers in future.
