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Course: Entrepreneurship > Unit 1
Lesson 9: Danny O'Neill - President of The RoasterieDanny O'Neill - Finding the perfect customer
Danny O’Neill, President of The Roasterie, discusses the importance of finding your perfect customer. Created by Kauffman Foundation.
Want to join the conversation?
- Is there really such a thing as a perfect customer?(8 votes)
- I don't exactly agree with michelle meneses because I believe that no one is perfect. Even though some people prefer different things doesn't mean they are the perfect customer.(6 votes)
- I agree that the "build it, and they will come" mindset is dangerous and misguided. I wonder, do many people entering business really think this? How can a customer know what you sell, or even that you exist at all, if you don't inform them?(5 votes)
- The best way to have a successful opening is to have customers lined up waiting. Apple does not release a new iPhone without a significant amount of forefront marketing. The day the iPhone 5s was released, the 5th Ave store in NYC had a line that wrapped around 2 blocks, and the people had started lining up before the store closed the previous day.(4 votes)
- Thanks for the information. The comment "Just get fifty people" will pay for my house mortgage really stuck with me. I now plan to implement a subscription based approach to keep the dream alive!(1 vote)
- lol when he says "kids buying coffee" does he mean basic white girls?(1 vote)
Video transcript
- The lemonade stand's a
good, a very good analogy. You have to be where the people are. No matter how beautiful and cool and neat your lemonade stand is, if there aren't any
people around, you know, you're not going to do very well. So we get the coffee, we roast it, and then we want to sell it to somebody. Well who wants to buy it? So you have to find your audience. How are they going to know you have it? Well that's marketing. I think in a broad society
there's this notion oh I just need to get open,
I just need to get open whether it's a store, a restaurant, or an internet site today. They just think that when
they open that storefront or open that website, the
world's gonna come find them. And then the money will roll in. I need to put myself front and center and have a compelling product
and a compelling story for you to be able to make
that risk and buy my coffee. In the early 90's and even
to some extent right now, we're kind of an immature
industry in we're snobby and we're pretentious. If you were a discerning
customer interested in quality coffee, I didn't really
care where you were sitting. If you were at a coffee house
or at the grocery store. Women buy 75% of the coffee
and women do 75% of the shopping and women are
in the grocery stores and that's where they want to buy it. And then the other
notion was you can't sell quality coffee in offices. So we didn't get caught up on all those kind of fool's end arguments in my mind about where quality coffee should be sold. It worked out really well. We didn't know it at the time, but we were establishing
ourselves in these various market channels. It was complicated, but
again we didn't really know any better and we just
did it, we figured it out. So today we've established
ourselves pretty solidly in various market channels. There's a couple things
about coffee that are somewhat different. Sometimes you hear it described as an affordable luxury. Coffee has gone through up to
nine sets of human fingers. It's taken a year for a
coffee tree to produce a pound or a pound and a half. It's taken five years to get to that point where it can produce
that for its full crop. And then that pound of
coffee's going to produce 50 to 55 cups. So I can get all that for 15 cents and a couple of minutes at my house? That is a steal. So I'm gonna sell to the people who love the taste of coffee and love coffee. I'm not going for the
person that just wants a little caffeine to go. Back in the day it was pretty easy and when I was putting this
plan together it was higher the education, the
higher the specialty coffee. The higher the income, the
higher the specialty coffee. Those were two still
strong pieces of data. But today, kids have
grown up with quality. They know quality coffee. The ones that know it,
know it and they like it and they know what they like. They have five bucks,
they'll buy a cappuccino and a biscotti. Kids have grown up today with quality so it's a different market we're selling to, a much greater and wider audience.