RookieOven Academy - Day Two

Our aim with the RookieOven Academy is to develop viable product idea's. Last week Chris from Add Jam helped us generate idea's and in our second session the excellent and inspirational Rohan Gunatillake (founder of Mindfulness Everywhere) joined us to share advice on business models. With the advice and insight into Rohan's experiences our groups were well placed to develop workable, viable business models for their ideas.

Day Two Speaker - Rohan Gunatillake

Rohan shared how he got started in business and the story of his business Mindfulness Everywhere. Mindfulness Everywhere is a two person company that has grown from his passion for mindfulness. In 2014 he launched Buddhify on iOS. The app is unusual in being a 'Level 5' app, this means it has a cost of $5 on the App Store and is a one off payment. Many competitors to Buddhify are based on subscription services with a very limited free offering.

Buddhify was hugely successful on iOS and soon after an Android version launched. Initially this was priced the same as the iOS version but Rohan found buyers on the Android platform were more price sensitive than those on iOS and he adjusted the pricing to $2. He noted how it's important to analyse performance and react when the product is underperforming.

Of note Rohan finds iOS generates 5 times as much revenue as Android.

Business Model vs Revenue Model

One of the core pieces of advice Rohan shared was a distinction between a business model and a revenue model. Rohan identifies a revenue model as how you make money for your business; one time sale, subscription, licensing etc etc. But a business model is how your business exists.

This makes your business model much deeper than just how you make money. It includes how you talk to customers, how you find them, how you treat them after you've sold to them and even includes how you treat your employees.

Creating more products

Rohan didn't stop with Buddhify. He used his learnings from this product to create a suite of mindfulness products such as Cards for Mindfulness (a successful Kickstarter campaign), Sleepfulness App (a free app with in app purchases), his book This is Happening and now Kara a mindfulness app for cancer patients.

With each new product Rohan builds he uses learning and real world feedback from customers to make better and better products. With all these products sitting in the field of mindfulness and mental wellbeing they drive referral sales across the business. Customers who love Buddhify bought into the Cards for Mindfulness Kickstarter. Customers who discovered the Cards via Kickstarter can become Buddhify users.

Lastly with creating such a suite of products in the field of mindfulness it's made Rohan a domain expert. He is now sought out for opinion and commentary by the press and often invited to speak at conferences around the world. This in turn then drives more sales for his products.

Top tips

Rohan was immensely giving of his time and in giving open, honest insight into his business. The biggest take away for the young people in the Academy being:

• Don't just think how you'll make money, figure out why your business exists and how it will exists
• Try new things. Rohan has constantly pushed himself into new territory. Whether that be physical products like Cards for Mindfulness or becoming a published author with his book This is Happening.
• Grow your reputation. Become a domain expert and it will open doors for you and your business.
• React when thing's don't work out. Rohan was quick to change the pricing for Buddhify on Android when he noticed it wasn't having the same growth as on iOS.
• Sometimes it's good to copy what your competitors are doing but equally there are times where it's worthwhile doing something different so you stand out.

In all Rohan was hugely inspirational to the Academy participants and gave them a unique chance to learn from one of the biggest talents in Scottish tech.

Exercise

Following Rohan's excellent talk we moved onto a short exercise. We tasked the groups (formed in our first session) to come up with some innovative and different business models for some every day items. Milk, crisps and golf balls.

The creativity from participants blew me away again. For milk we had suggestions of dairy only restaurant and milk subscription services. Crisps we had crowdfunding of custom flavours, liquorice and toffee flavour anyone? Well by using crowd funding you could presell a flavour and make sure it was financially viable. And for golf balls we had balls with beacons in them so you can find them and golf balls in the post, 3 new balls a month for a flat fee of £3.99.

The exercise was there to show we can look at every day items and apply a new business model to them. This got us all thinking of how we could apply a model to our own idea's that we are developing through the Academy.

It's ok to change your plans

One thing we're doing with pride at the Academy is failing. It's ok if things don't work or we decide to ditch it - as long as we learn from it. With this being the second week of the Academy our initial idea's didn't all stand up to scrutiny when trying to apply a viable business model to them.

• Visual to-do list - this idea is still being worked on but has changed to now be aimed at businesses and there is talk of white labelling the product.
• Make up when you need it - this idea aims to make it easier to get make up as and when you need it. Depending on seasons and maybe even your calendar it will help you make sure you have the right make up you need.
• Smart chair - bad posture is a serious problem. People sat at their computer all day can do some serious damage. What if a chair could react to their sitting and adjust itself to make sure the person sitting on it doesn't cause damage to themselves. What potential could it have for disabled people?
• Content for teens - there's so much noise on the internet. How do you find the good stuff? This group aim to create a platform where content sources can be curated and the best content can be discovered.

Next Week Design and Branding

Before the next session all the teams will be having a think about their idea, talking to people for feedback, getting advice and iterating on what they're doing but also starting to develop the basis of a brand. Next week Graeme McGowan founder of Jamhot will be on hand to share his experience on branding and digital design.

Resources

Slides used on the day are available here feel free to use them in your classroom, if you do let us know.

RookieOven Academy is supported by Glasgow City Council and Skills Development Scotland