The REgulars

Product Vision

The Regulars is a digital service designed to help New York City restaurants to secure the funding needed to develop resilience measures prior to the impact of a threat. The primary goal for the Regulars is to help local restaurants effectively and strategically collect emergency donations from their customers who already regularly patronize their establishment. Building upon the foundation of donations, the secondary goal of the Regulars is to ensure that restaurants continually secure the funding they need to grow and develop their businesses in the absence of a crisis. The restaurant industry is one characterized by very slim profit margins. After adding New York City rent and tax rates, I realized that restaurants near me might be operating on profit margins at or around 5%, which is the bottom portion of the national average range of 0% - 15%. (Upserve 2020) Such low profit margins means that the restaurateur has less resources available to cover emergency situations than other restaurateurs across the country, placing them at a disproportionately high risk of closure compared to their national counterparts. 

The Regulars is designed to address this very situation, by helping restaurants to create additional value for frequent customers, thereby making it worthwhile to systematically donate to their establishment. As customers receive additional benefits above those of other customers, such as preferential seating and access to a secret menu, they find additional value in regularly donating to the establishments of their choice, in addition to knowing that they are doing everything they can to personally contribute to the success of one of their favorite restaurants.The Regulars presents options for people to receive rewards for patronizing their favorite local restaurants in exchange for recurring monthly or yearly donations. 

Product Wireframes

The Key Insight That Inspired The Regulars

The inspiration for this service concept came from my direct observations about the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the New York City restaurant industry. During the height of the pandemic’s impact here, I watched my favorite local restaurants close temporarily, in adherence to the shelter in place order. As the pandemic waged on, many of those beloved restaurants that were only closed temporarily ended up shuttering their doors permanently because they were not able to raise the funding that they needed to meet their rent and expense requirements. At the same time that many restaurants were closing, I also witnessed several online initiatives to help restaurants collect donations to be applied toward everything from fulfilling their rent expenses to paying the payroll required to keep their servers, hosts, and cooks on the payroll. During that time, it seemed to me that for every restaurant being forced to permanently cease operations, there were at least a handful of people who were willing and able to give donations to keep that restaurant in business. Using this observation as my driving force, I concepted a service to collect donations for two types of local residents: those who already want to make donations to their favorite restaurants and those who love their local restaurants, but might not feel comfortable giving a donation.

Activities

• 3 Concept Development Sprints

• 1 Persona Discovery Session

• 2 As-Is Journey Maps

• 2 To-Be Journey Maps

• 1 Assumption Discovery Session

• 1 Hypothesis Development and Prioritization Session

• 1 Automated Remote User Survey

• 3 Market Discovery Sessions

• 2 UI Sketching Sessions

• 2 UI Wireframing Sessions

Lean Research Protocol

Lessons Learned

Developing and refining this service concept afforded the opportunity to consistently merge my existing business and finance expertise with my blossoming research design skillset in a way that developed my proprietary methodology for unlocking product-market fit. While other variables can impact the success of a new product venture, product-market fit is the single most crucial factor for ensuring that a product will be valuable enough for people to want to use the product repeatedly. Developing The Regulars has refined my sense making process with market participants, giving insight into what questions to ask, how to phrase them, when to ask them, and to whom I should present them. Working with target users to understand the challenges they face and how the product concept can address them is a compelling way to uncover what the value of the offering is to your users and, therefore, presents itself as a handy tactic for refining all relevant product features, including the business model. Going forward, I will continually seek out opportunities to pin down the potential for product-market fit, understanding that, for a given service concept, finding the seemingly magical composition of features can be reduced to iteratively testing the existing offerings and learning about what matters to the target users.