Getting Feedback from Customers
The following post is from Jonathan Mleczko ’17 & Lexi Smith , co-founders of Carewell, a fall 2016 hatchery business.
Carewell Team
Since the start of this school year, Carewell has made significant progress in terms of development. Now is the time to begin testing with live users that are not part of our families, which is what we’ve been doing up until now.
Back in August, we made a soft push on Facebook using paid advertisement marketing the first iteration of Carewell which was essentially an AI that would take in any questions a caregiver may have and provide them with an answer or intelligently steer them in the right direction. Although this marketing attracted some users, we decided to waitlist them and iterate on Carewell towards a much more socially and emotionally geared platform that served kind of like a Facebook that was closed off to the public and place specific focus on capturing moments shared with the loved one being cared for.
We’ve been holding off on inviting waitlisted users onto the platform because we’ve become increasingly focused on pushing out the best product. But as we’ve developed we’ve realized that not pushing out Carewell’s second iteration and inviting users on will delay sooner improvements we could make to Carewell. In other words, we now understand the importance of getting to “no, this sucks” or “ok, I like this” as fast as possible. Reid Hoffman would say that if you’re not embarrassed by your first product, you’re launching too late. But we’ve been careful, keeping in mind that our target audience is already hesitant to adapt the newest technologies and is very protective. This hesitancy and protectiveness is the primary reason why we decided to approach caregiver via a social/emotional channel rather than a tech- laden/medical focused channel.
We’ll be bringing on waitlisted users in the coming days. It’ll be interesting to see how waitlisted users react to being invited to a technically different Carewell than they signed up for.