Spinning

Yes I like spinning classes – but that is not what this is about.

We've been at it now for just about 3 months and we've made some steady progress. We've had several focus groups and zeroed in our market – pre college teenage girls that are active users of social network web sites. This is a huge accomplishment; at Raindance I don't think we ever really figured this out. We decided that the manufacturing of these has to be made part in China and part in the US – and we're still not there just yet. The formula still needs work – we have to lower the freezing temperature of the bottle so we can ship these in the winter – and my one semester as a chemistry major isn't really helping. We've created a dozen plus colors that are all very cool and much better than the original stuff I made when I was a kid. There seems to be some early buzz on the idea – we've stopped having focus groups because it feels like we might be peaking early. We started to hear of requests on how to get a bottle from people outside of our control group – this is cool but it's too early to promote Spiderman 4 – we need to know what the hell we're doing first.

The spinning part is trying to write down our strategy in a fashion that is compelling, simple and believable. I have seven executive summaries all talking about this business in some different way. They all have a common theme – a bottle tied to an online experience. So what is that online experience? Well maybe version eight we'll get it right. For now I'm afraid my Word might break soon with all the "file new" action – I feel like I'm back in college writing term papers. One thing is for certain – this gig is starting to feel real and if done right it can be huge.

Comments

[Ben Casnocha]

Awesome!

Although "active users of social network sites" doesn't narrow it down much. If not now, soon, ALL girls will be on social network sites.

[Paul Berberian]

It's not that narrow but much smaller than internet users that use email - and I can design and market to that segment. Interesting a good number of girls in our focus groups don't use email - it's all commenting and text.