Case 11: Pitch v.1

3 best pitches:


Introduction
A catchy introduction that gets people’s attention. Not too flashy or humorous. Keep it sober but interesting.

Doesn’t everybody love the smell and taste of freshly baked bread?
Imagine having this exact experience every day, without having to go through the tiresome process of actually making the dough. The process of measuring the amounts of ingredients, knitting the dough for longer periods of time and cleaning up afterward. Imagine not having to worry about the quality of the bread you’re creating.

Problem
The problem you’re solving, or the desire you cater to. Make sure we understand why this is a problem.

In Denmark, we throw out about 715.000 tons of waste yearly. 20% of this waste is bread.

Plastic / sustainable?

Concept
A short description of your overall concept that will address the problem

We are trying to solve this problem with Dågh, a revolutionary way of getting freshly baked bread every day.
Dågh only offers the highest quality dough that you can put right into the oven at home. In this way, you can bake the whole dough or you can divide the dough into smaller portions to use throughout the week. 

Experience -> Culture of dough

Solution / Product
The brief definition of how your product/service solves this. Should correlate clearly with the problem. 

Through our local store, you can buy the dough you want or come down and try some of the quality bread. You can also order right from the website and collect the dough when you need it. Either way, you get the bread in a specially made bread basket containing the dough along with a flyer where you can find information about Dågh and what we stand for. Both on the basket and the flyer there is a QR code that takes you right to a guide on our website where you can get advice and recipes on the bread you want to make.
Many people also prefer to feel like they’re creating something of their own. This is why we introduce a whole new way for people to be able to customize their bread by selecting type of toppings and fillings as well as the type of base dough you want. Sourdough with pumpkin and poppy seeds or seeds wheat dough with walnuts and chia seeds. 

Traction
Validation that customers love your product/service. Ideally, it’s sales but it can be LoI’s, sign-ups, or similar.

We tested out our service with potential customers by making interviews and we found that they were very positive. A potential customer stated that “… ”. Also, we made a survey with 165 respondents where around 50% of them would like to buy ready-made dough. 

Slide: sidste graf i survey

Business model
How you make money. Include price points and profit.

We compared to a local medium-sized bakery and calculated that we would be able to generate around 350.000DKK profit yearly, from one physical store.  

The average gross margin is 27% depending on which dough, fillings, and toppings. 

Future Market and competitors
What’s the market here? Is it going to be big? How will you make it big (your go-to-market plan)? How much money are you going to make off this thing? Convince the investor that they’re going to make lots of money with you. Can include a competition matrix that elaborate on how you are unique. A competition matrix not only describes your uniqueness but also informs us that you are aware of the competition.

Competitors: Smartbake, Nemlig.com, bakeries

Our service puts the dough in the hands of the customers. By being able to customize your dough and being able to come down to our store, trying out different combinations, we focus on the experience as a whole. With Dågh, you never have to compromise on the quality of bread. 

Snakke om Bowling pin strategy: 

  • More stores (KBH, Aalborg, osv) -> cost price down -> larger profit

Slide: case 7, spørgsmål 3 (Strategy Canvas)

Slide: anden sidste graf i survey

Team
The founding team is crucial, especially to early-stage startups. Make sure to project why your founding team specifically has the skills and profiles to realize the vision and ambitions of your company. Employees are usually of less importance. An investor invests in the founding team.

Svar på: Doesn’t everybody love the smell and taste of freshly baked bread?

Vores team, og passion

Ikke mere masseproduceret brød, som bare bliver smidt ud. Ikke flere kompromiser med kvalitet. 

How much money are you raising? 
Or – if not money – what do you need help for?


Business Case 10: Scaling

Crossing the chasm and bowling alley strategy

  • Describe how a bowling alley strategy would look for your company.

The first segment for us would be the center of Aarhus as we all currently are located there. It could be argumented that Copenhagen could be a better option due to it being a bigger city and new concepts like Dågh are more frequently introduced than in Aarhus.

  • What would be the first segment to conquer?

The first segment to conquer would be the target group of 20 to 35 year olds as our survey conducted earlier in the course showed that the willingness to buy dough from our service was highest within this age group

  • How will the next step be if it were either new applications or new segments

In terms of new applications, there could be several steps we could take. One idea is to sell a monthly subscription that would make sure the customers had a fresh dough for every week. Furthermore, marketing Dågh as a community instead of a store where people sharing the same passion or interest for making bread could meet could also be a possibility. Lastly creating new recipes or dough or having “dough of the month” could also be a way of introducing new applications to Dågh.
New segments could be creating a new store in a different location which could be in a different part of Aarhus as already establishing a store in Copenhagen because of the success of one store in Aarhus would perhaps be a risk. Before doing this it would be better to establish a market lead in Aarhus before.

Blitzscaling

  • Will your product be suitable for Blitzscaling?

Blitzscaling as understood by Reid Hoffman and Chris Yeh in their text “Blitzscaling Executive Summary” is prioritizing speed over efficiency in the face of uncertainty and not just merely a matter of rapid growth. This tactic is great when creating technologies and software but in our case, it is not really suitable. This is due to Dågh relying on creating a brand and mostly grow because of word of mouth and one rule of blitzscaling is ignoring your customers which would destroy our brand.

  • How does it score on the different growth factor parameters?
  • Could it be adjusted to be stronger aligned with the growth factors?
  • How does the growth factors relate to Peter Thiels view on how to create a monopoly?

Updated Business Model Canvas

The image below shows our updated business model canvas changed in terms of our experiments since the first iteration. The hypotheses that are overlined are no longer relevant for our Business Model Canvas, such as partnering up with Wolt for delivery as we will be delivering but creating a physical store instead. Furthermore, the hypotheses coloured green are something we have proven with interviews and a survey.

Case 9: Sales, competition and market

Estimation of the market size for our product.

The way we estimated the size of our market, was by looking at the questionnaire we developed at the start of our process. When looking at the market for “regular bread”, it can be difficult to actually asses the size of this market, since almost everyone in today’s society buys some type of bread(from bakers or mass-produced). Therefore we looked at the percentage of who stated that they would be willing to buy freshly made dough, from either stores or other types of channels. Out of 165 answers, around 45% stated that they were willing to buy dough – this could be an indication of how big the market potential could be. Realistically, this number is way too large of a number. If we look more specifically at the market of a city such as Aarhus, we also found that there was a bigger tendency of the “younger” age group, which also could point towards a more narrow market. People who are busy in their everyday lives, who was still concerned with getting a high quality of bread, was also a way for us to narrow it a bit more down. The city of Aarhus has many students, and actually a “young” kind of demographic, which could point towards a potentially large market in a city such as this. We, therefore, estimate the size of a market for this type of service to be around 25.000-30.000 potential customers.

Competitor map

Direct competitors: One of the companies we have been looking at and gathering information about is the company called Smartbake (https://smartbake.dk/). This company sells dough as well, and therefore we categorize this company as a direct competitor. Another branch that falls somewhat in the category of direct competitors, is the whole baking industry. Since this branch sells a product which is what we are trying to compete with, in some sense.

IndiIndirect competitors: An indirect competitor could be Nemlig.com. The reason for this is that they have a partnership with Smartbake, and therefore they have some type of interest in smartbake succeeding. Some other indirect competitors could be larger concerns, where stores to buy bread is located (malls, etc). This is because they also have some interest in these physical located stores to generate some type of revenue – so if our company makes their customers move their spendings towards our service, they would lose out on revenue, thereby making them indirect competitors.

Sales process

To create a sales process, we have used the Customer Decision Journey model to define the different stages :

Consider
We imagine that customers would begin to consider Dågh through word of mouth, advertisements, and the website. Customers would also walk by and see the physical store/stores, hence gaining insights in the company and its values.

Evaluate
The customers would evaluate Dågh based on:
– Quality
– Price
– Customization
– Transparency
– Design of store / advertisements / website
– Ratings
– Word of mouth
Here, they would compare the existing services, such as Smartbake or bakeries, with Dågh.

Buy
The customers would buy a dough from our company based on the following values:
– Price
– Packaging
– Transparency
– Information
– Guidance
– Instructions
– City center
These are the points of purchase which the customers values the most in relation to Dågh.

Enjoy, advocate, bond
We want the customers to keep using our service to buy dough. Hence, the following values provides different touch points for ‘holding on’ to customers:
– Website (touch point)
– Transparency
– Time
– Quality bread

Case 8: Pricing

Cost based pricing:

By researching the internet for costs on salary, housing rent and wholesale prices on raw materials for producing dough and salary, we came up with this cost based pricing budget for our start up: Google Sheet
Our cost price is depending on which ground dough, filling and topping we sell. We have based the budget on some examples of the different combinations that we would like to provide.

In average a dough for one bread would cost 23,69 DKK. With 21,87 DKK as a minimum and 25,87 DKK as a maximum. These prices is based on the assumption that we will sell 150 doughs pr. day.

This gives an overall cost based price budget of 1.296.917,50 DKK for the first year.

Value based pricing:

By interviewing two potential customers we found that they are willing to pay between 25 and 35 DKK pr. dough that will give you one bread. If wee look at our cost based pricing is these prices on the range of making a profit.

Reference based pricing:

By looking at a similar service, smartbake.dk, we see that they sell what constitutes one bread in dough for 29,95 DKK. This price will generate a profit for us as well based on the cost based pricing. Smartbake.dk does not provide any option for customisation of the dough which could be an argument for us being competitive in the market.

Case 7: Bold thinking

1. If you were to create a monopoly using one of the four methods discussed. How would you do it? Rate which ones would probably be the best for your company? Please create the table used in the lecture (see the slides).

2. If you were to create a monopoly in a market (that is being the dominant player). What could a good first market to address and why?

The first good market would be in the customization and delivery of dough as this is as close to reaching a blue market as we can get with Dågh. This market would be good as only a few others deliver dough and none offer the possibility of customizing it which therefore would mean that a monopoly could be quickly claimed if the service deems successful.

3. Create a Blue Ocean Strategy Canvas for your company.

Case 6: BMC model

The case for this week was to create a BMC (Business Model Canvas) for our company and brainstorm on a set of experiments based on this. The BMC shown below consists of different segments such as Customer Segment, Value Propositions and etc. which all are answered or filled out with hypotheses relevant to the segment they are written under.

In the bullets below we provide,  to some of the hypotheses, evidence from a survey we conducted in last weeks case that proves or suggests that the hypotheses are correct.

1 – Customer segments:

  1. The younger generation (15-30 years) because of money saved
  2. The middle-age generation (30-60 years) because of time saved
  3. The elderly generation (60++ years) because of quality

2 – Channels

  1. The younger generation would be more willing to use an internet service

2. The middle-age generation would be more willing to use a subscription- based service

3. The elder generation would be more willing to buy dough in a physical store

3 – Customer Relationships

  1. People want guidance on how to make bakery-quality bread
  2. People want to customize their own bread, to make it feel like their own
  3. A subscription-based service is prefered

4 – Value Propositions

  1. People wants to buy dough because of better quality
  2. People wants to buy pre-made dough to save time
  3. People makes their own dough to save money
  4. People wants to reduce their food-waste
  5. People wants freshly baked bread throughout the week
  6. People care about nutritional value in their bread

5 – Key Activities 

  1. We need to create a web-page
  2. We need to create a sufficient amount of different types of dough
  3. We need to try out different types of dough, figuring out the most “popular” type of dough

6 – Key Resources

  1. We need a lot of commodities to produce the dough
  2. We need a physical store, for either selling or a place to create the dough
  3. We need a home-page for ordering/”creating” the dough online
  4. Packaging solutions with service tips n’ tricks

7 – Key Partners

  1. A key partner could be Just-Eat or Wolt for delivering
  2. Partner of with supplier factories for cheaper purchase of commodities 
  3. Perhaps partner up with “brand” chefs/bakers, trying out the product
  4. Partnering with stores to get them to sell our dough in their stores

8 – Cost Structure

  1. A percentage for key partners such as; COOP, Just-Eat, Wolt etc
  2. The purchasing of commodities 
  3. Maintenance of homepage
  4. Salary for bakers

9 – Revenue Streams

  1. Are people willing to pay for pre-made dough?
  2. Could a subscription type of payment be viable?
  3. Would people be willing to pay more for premade dough, than what their own made dough would cost?
  4. Would people buy baking equipment as a part of the service?

The experiments that we could conduct based on this BMC would be: 1. Reaching out to COOP to see whether they would be interested in adding our product to their existing lineup in one or more of their stores. 2. Contacting delivery companies such as WOLT, Just-Eat or shipping companies to see if they would deliver our product to customers and how many percentages of the profit they want to do so. 3. Finding different suppliers of the commodities needed to create the dough and asking for how much they can supply and to what price. 4. Doing a survey or interview to see whether customers would be more interested in a subscription-based service. 5. Doing estimates of prices based on other experiments to see whether a subscription based service would be viable/profitable. 6. Doing interviews or surveys about people’s willingness to buy baking equipment from our store to improve their bread making. 7. Asking customers with through an interview or survey to see whether they want guidance to get the best out of the dough they have bought or not.

Case 4 and 5: Define and experiment

The tasks for this week were to conduct simple experiments to get a better understanding of our idea and what direction to proceed and to go from a level 1 idea to a level 2 idea that’s ready for prototyping. Before conducting the experiments we formulated different hypotheses as this lays the ground for the reasoning behind and what we expect to gain from doing the experiments. The different hypotheses are a follows:

Hypothesis 1: What are people’s baking habits and are they willing to buy ready-made dough?

The first experiment we conducted was to answer the first hypothesis, i.e. whether people were willing to and interested in buying ready-made dough.
We first conducted a semi-structured interview, to build our basis for a survey, with two students, aged 23 and 25, to gain qualitative knowledge. We wanted to find out what experiences people had with baking on their own, how often they buy bread or bake themselves, and whether they thought our concept would be helpful.

Three parameters were found to be important for the interviewees:

  • Price
  • Time
  • Quality 

Furthermore, the interviewees mentioned that they were willing to buy ready-made dough as long as the price was not too high and the finished baked bread was still high quality. One of the interviewees also stated that the social element of baking was important.

We further created a survey with Google Survey with simple questions about food waste and if people would be interested in buying dough instead of making it themselves with 165 respondents. This was mainly aimed at retrieving quantitative information about potential customers. We posted the survey on our own Facebook pages as well as in a Facebook group called “Det Gode Brød” with 2.700 members for baking enthusiasts. Hence, we gained a broader understanding of our target group and their wishes. We analyzed and split the data into four age groups; 19-29, 30-44, 45-64, and 65+.
Snippets of the survey are shown below:

The younger part of the respondents (19-29 years old), as well as the older part (65+ years old), were the age groups that were most willing to buy ready-made dough. The age group 30-44 were also somewhat willing with almost half of the respondents answering yes.
Additionally, the most frequent reasons for people to bake their own bread was the economic aspect (27%), better quality (76.6%), and the social aspect (67.9%). The most frequent reasons for people not to bake their own bread was the economic aspect (14%), baking is troublesome ( 52.7%), quality (6.5%), and the time it takes to make bread (79.6%).

Hypothesis 2: People throw out large amounts of bread per week

As the respondents of the survey were mainly baking enthusiasts, not many threw much bread out in relation to how frequently they bake. Only about 25% of the respondents threw out a small amount of bread each week. If the respondents were not baking enthusiasts, it may have had an impact on the data. The respondents were very aware of food waste with 83.6% answering that they think about food waste and 76.4% answering that they actively take action in reducing their own or their family’s food waste.

Hypothesis 3: Dough is cheap to make and produce

To test this hypothesis, we searched the internet for the price of dough requirements, i.e. flour, yeast, grains, and so forth. Also, we searched for buying large amounts of these requirements from mills that make flour and grains.
These searches showed that these requirements were cheap to buy, especially in large batches. For example, we found one distributor who sold 12.5 kilos of wheat flour for 96 DKK. This is, of course, depending on type of flour, how much that goes into each individual bread, etc. We estimate that each dough will cost approximately 10 kr. to produce per kilo, which is cheap compared to how many buns or loaves of bread customers are able to make with one-kilo dough.


Hypothesis 6: Dough can stay fresh for at least a couple of days in the fridge

To test this hypothesis, we made an Internet search for an average of how long a dough can last in the fridge. We found articles (e.g. https://www.thespruceeats.com/retarding-427620) mentioning that dough can last approximately three days in the fridge, which depends on the amount of salt and yeast. Some videos and articles mentions that dough can last up to a week in the fridge and weeks or months in the freezer. 

Case 3: Idea generation #2 – ODI model

Who is the customer?

  • The customer segment we have thought of that would benefit from our service, would be people in the age group of 20 years and above. This is a particular wide user group, therefore we would like to describe some of the main characteristics in regards to the different sub groups of this segment.
    • 20-30 years old: The characteristics of this group is young people who like good bread, and who cares about baking and further regards their reputation and image. This could e.g trendsetters, instagrammers, influencers, bloggers, students and young people who take an interest in sustainability.
    • 30-40 years old: The characteristics of this group is people who has a settled rutine in their everyday life. They have a job and a family with young children which results in a busy daily life. This segment still want quality bread but without the struggle of making the dough themselves.
    • 40+ years old: The characteristics of this group is older people who has a settled rutine in their life. The difference between this segment and the previous one, is that they care even more about the quality of their bread and even wants to pay a bit more for a luxury bread.
    • Cafe’s and hotels: We imagine a possibility of selling big quantities of dough to cafe’s and hotels. This segment doesn’t have the means and time to produce their own dough, but still wishes to give their customers quality bread.

What job(s) do they try to carry out in relation to your idea?

  • I want to minimise the amount of bread that I throw in the trash.
  • I want to bake quality bread
  • I want to have freshly baked bread throughout the week.
  • I want to impress my followers/friends/family/customers

Which need have you identified and have you found unsatisfied needs?

  • Customers
  • Minimise the time spent baking bread at home
  • Minimise the amount of bread thrown out during the week
  • Maximise the quality of bread you can make by yourself
  • Maximise the nutritional value in your bread
  • Maximise peoples awareness about breads nutritional values

Needs for Opportunity landspace model:

The Opportunity model shown below is made based on the need statements mentioned above.

The main take aways from making a Opportunity Landscape Model based on our need statements are

  • The model is well suited for giving a broad overview of the possibilities a idea offers
  • The model is good for engaging a discussion about your target group
  • The model is difficult to use without conducting a preliminary survey of the demographic

By using the model we learned what specific demographic are more likely to find this idea interesting. Furthermore, the model showed that the need for reducing time spent while still making quality bread could be a direction for us to focus on.

Case 2: Idea generation #1

Idea generation by looking at the team’s bird-in-hand resources:

Frederik Mørch Valsted:
Frederik said in his bird-in-hand excersise that he knows a fair amount about bicycles. We therefore came up with the idea of restoring and reselling old bicycles parts from bicycles that people have abanboned.

Nicolai Kjær Bomholt:
Nicolai wrote in his bird-in-hand that he before his time at the university worked as a skii-instructor and therefore knows alot about this area. We came up with the idea of a ski-boot that guides the user in improving his or her skiing technique.

Christopher Victor Holst Nielsen:
Christopher did not mention this in his bird-in-hand excersise but he enjoys cooking and in particular baking. A problem we all agreed on was that baking has become a mass produced commodity which impacts the quality of the bread and also has an impact on the environment as way too much bread is thrown out. We came up with the idea of being able to buy dough in grocery stores or bakers so you can bake the bread when needed “DoughToGo”. Furthermore, we came with the idea of a community bakery where it is possible to use industry grade ovens and get the guidance needed from bakers.

Frederik Kold Knudsen:
Frederik wrote in his bird-in-hand about his work in creating a summer school course and one of the problems he faced was finding passionate people to collaborate with. There our idea is a platform that can somehow help find the right people for the task at hand.

Idea generation by looking at changes in technology, imbalances or social change:

We tackled this exercise by first looking at relevant technology and idea generated with this in mind, afterwards we did the same with imbalances or social change.

Technology:

  • Robots
    • Guide Robot instead of guide dog
    • Coffee delivery robot
    • Search robot, find your forgotten items
  • AI

Social changes:

  • GDPR
    • Cumbersome data gathering
    • Not enough knowledge about this area
  • Recycling
    • Still lack of recycling in terms technology
    • More sustainable technology
  • More immigrants
    • Better handling of immigrants, optimizing the process

Imbalances:

  • Recycling
    • No international recycling guidelines
    • No international recycling
  • Taxi
    • Uber is not legal in Denmark, better and legal way to better car services
  • Hospitals
    • Optimizing the process in waiting areas

Jobs and Need statements:

  • Job: Getting freshly baked bread
    • Minimize the amount of bread thrown out in the trash by bakeries and private customers.
  • Job: Creating a good project with collaboration
    • Minimize the effort for finding passionate people for collaboration in projects.
  • Job: Improving your skiing abilities.
    • Minimize the process of learning how to skii as a beginner.
  • Job: Saving money on bike repairs
    • Maximise the accessibility of second hand cycle parts for DIY cyclists and bicycle mechanics/shops.

Case 1: Idea generation #0

In our first week we were assigned to generate as many ideas as possible for a potential startup. We did this by iniating a brainstorm focusing on everyday problems that we personally face, ranging from rusty bicycle chains to not knowing when and where roadwork is being done. All the ideas had the common theme that they were problems stated and not solutions as we wanted to find an issue that we all face or find interesting before generating specific ideas.