Turbado | From customer discovery to Customer validation

After spending over a year working on Turbado with our team of 30+ people, and burning almost 800 000 euros cash, I feel it is the time to come to market.

From customer discovery stage, where we found a problem worth solving, tested it through customer interviews and landing pages, we developed a solution through customers. The question then becomes can we execute on a solution to these problems and get customers to pay us.

Turbado enters the Valley of Death, aka Customer validation stage.

The objective of this stage is to build something people will want and validate our innovative business model. This is the hardest and most uncertain stage, where we must find the right ways to showcase our solutions, to make our business repeatable and scalable. In turbado.sk we found out we need first to build up a customer base and trust, only then we can count the orders and scale our business, only then we can offer the ultimate solutions Turbado is about. And trust comes with time, stability, fulfilled expectations and over-delivering on promises.

So after many thoughts, we make a first significant iteration to Turbado: Split our offer from one ultimate solution to a base offering that is good enough and costs less and a premium service that is excellent, but costs extra. Customers were asking for this in two ways: those would could pay for it said it is too good to be true and those who didn’t care about any extras, just wanted a lower price.

So Turbado now competes on new fronts: a new for us are the price conscious buyers (account for over 40% of the market), then our preferred technology geeks that tend to upgrade their electronics very often (around 15% of the market) and buyers that look for best price-value ratio (around 30%). These in total now give us a target group of over 85% of the internet market and we will see where the customers will steer our company. We will follow them where they want us to go.

We will start offering the lowest prices on the local markets, giving only the minimum expected services to our customers, but at the same time introduce them what Turbado really is and how they can become a part of it.

We launch in August 2014 with this new iteration in Hungary, Slovakia and Spain. Shortly adding Poland, Czech Republic, Germany, France and Austria.  Let’s give those first new customers some Turbado experience. Let’s amaze them with our Superior Unexpected Customer Service. Welcome to the Valley of Death:

turbado at the valley of death

turbado at the valley of death