By Justin Reyes
On her way to the laundromat, Silvie Hibdon noticed that she didn’t have any quarters. Coming back from yoga class she doesn’t usually carry them around with her.
In the age of mobile payments, Silvie thought that there shouldn’t be a need for carrying loose change anymore. After a short brainstorm session, Silvie and her friend came up with the idea of a mobile payments based point-of-sale for laundromats.
Silvie is an international yoga teacher, who enjoys the process of exploration and being given the opportunity of creating something out of nothing. This time the challenge would be building a business of her own!
Working in San Francisco, Silvie has had a hard time of getting a hold of laundromat owners to meet with her. From waiting around until closing time to meet with the owner to targeting laundromats with wifi, Silvie could never seem to get a face to face meeting with an owners.
Until one day, she was inspired to take a different approach and reach out to industry associations instead.
Excited she went home and did a search on Linkedin and found the coin laundry association and contacted them to find out when they’re next meeting was. Sitting-in during a meeting of the coin laundry association she knew that she picked the right place. Networking with other Laundromat owners at the association during a Christmas party helped Silvie receive feedback that she needed as well as their assistance if needed giving her more confidence to proceed her venture further.
To improve her startup mindset, she reads blogs and articles that dea from hardware startups to how to attract an angel investor. While on the internet one day she came across an article on Femgineer that a friend had shared with her. After reading it and seeing what the site was all about she enrolled in our Lean Product Development course and saw it as an opportunity to improve her knowledge on product development in addition to discovering ways she can bootstrap her new found venture.
[quote author=”Silvie Hibdon”]Starting is the hardest part. The lean product development course will give you a useful overview and structure to get started.[/quote]
Going through the course provided her with a great overview into concepts such as market research and user experience. But most of all it validated a lot (in regards to customer discovery and development) of what she was already doing when she was interviewing laundromat owners.
Another important tenant of the course is to hold off building as long as you can. While her and her engineer have a design proposal ready, Silvie is staving off building until she has gone through all her options.
As she comes to finish the course, Silvie is gearing up to test out her idea with two beta customers: two laundromats located in apartment buildings as a testing sites. After conducting trials she hopes to approach an hardware incubator that can take her idea further.
Like Silvie, you too can learn how to transition into being at tech entrepreneur during the upcoming iteration of our Lean Product Development Course.
Learn more about the course here. Applications are due this Friday April 18th!
