Jaap from Best Bike Advice talks about his experience working with Wise Minds.
What problem, challenge, or question did you bring to Wise Minds?
I wanted to start my own company, an online advice platform, and wanted a minimum viable product for it as quickly as possible. A working version as cheap as possible, which I could test and see: can this become something?
A challenge that played into this: I had never done anything with development before. In which language do you develop something like this? With which party? I had a limited budget. You don’t want to spend too much money, but you also don’t want to hire a bungler. I found it difficult to make a choice. As a startup, you don’t have the financial space to redo something a second or third time. In addition to this, I was doing this alone. I needed someone who could think along with me.
The platform I wanted to build is a kind of Independer, but not for insurance but for racing bicycles and mountain bikes. My belief is that webshops often get it wrong. Not necessarily with simple products, but with more complex ones. Here, a list of specs is usually just dumped online, and the consumer has to figure it out. If you were treated like this in a store, you would run screaming.
I apply the questions of a good salesman online. This means I ask the customer online not what specs he wants, but what use goals he has. What do you want to do with the product? How much experience do you have? Et cetera. An algorithm then determines on the basis of the answers what specs are suitable. And then you get a top three of racing bikes or mountain bikes that fit your wishes.
Such a webshop is not a standard model. It had to be completely custom made.
What was the solution that Wise Minds could offer?
I was mainly looking for someone who could think along with. It is not easy to find IT people who are really good at IT, but are also entrepreneurs and can also think on the business level. So for example, thinking along about the customer journey. Where do you start, where do you end? It’s quite a puzzle to make sure you ask the customers the simplest possible questions to come up with the most suitable advice possible.
That is what Wise Minds has helped me very well with. Mohamed has a very broad interest, follows everything in the market, has a very diverse knowledge and immerses himself in all things that come with programming. Mohamed also took the time to introduce me to the world of programming. I also got a small IT training course.
In addition, Wise Minds thought along strategically. With questions such as: what target group would you want to appeal to? What will people pay for? We then built a system with which we could experiment.
What has the solution from Wise Minds achieved?
I have a very nice working website, which performs well, for which I receive many compliments. I just haven’t been able to test the business model yet, because corona happened. That turned the bike business upside down, as everyone suddenly wanted to cycle. Therefore, sellers of bicycles don’t need extra customers. So right now, I can’t do for them what Independer does for insurance. Because what I would do with my platform is actually help the bike seller by referring to him when he offers the best match for a bike. For a small margin. But since they are not waiting for extra customers right now, sellers don’t want to pay for extra customers.
But what I’ve done with Wise Minds is set up a whole different business model. This is the concept of bikefit, but digitally. Bikefit helps you to sit in the right posture on the bike, preventing complaints. Normally this is done by a bikefitter. You pay them 250 euros, and they spend 3 hours with you. With us, you can do this online for a fraction of the cost. And that’s actually going quite well. Last month, we sold nearly a thousand bikefits.
We were able to do a lot of experiments with this platform. We build gradually and tweak along the way. And that is very important for these type of solutions. And Wise Minds offers a lot of flexibility in this. So that we waste as little time and money as possible.