4A Opportunity Belief

1.                I have a belief, that bathroom stalls should not have large gaps in the doors that allow people to see through. It is the simplest of things, but it is such a big negative when done wrong, and when its done right people don’t notice the benefit. A solution is so simple, tighter tolerances when public bathrooms doors are designed and installed. A simple piece of rubber would only cost a couple bucks and would be an easy retrofit.

2.                The unmet need is privacy in the bathroom. People look to see if a stall is open, and sometimes eye contact is accidentally made. Everyone has the need for this simple decency. This would be applied to everyone who uses a public restroom. This need has always existed. I have always noticed, and something that always annoys me. It always annoy me when bathroom doors are not open by default, then you have to go through the awkward process of trying to open doors when they are locked and someone is inside. To meet this need now nothing is being done, they just hope to awkwardly avoid eye contact. I am sure this is an opportunity, and it could be applied to almost every public bathroom is the USA.

3.             The typical customer would be any business with public bathrooms, one of the first clients that comes to mind is airports. This could be a big market, each contract would be small, but it would be the quantity of contracts that would help make money.

4.             As this is a product is a large-scale product I tried calling a couple large places and the few I got through to would not give me an answer. Instead of getting responses from businesses I asked a couple of my friends and asked what they thought about it from a large business perspective. The main thing they were worried about is if businesses would have the motivation to pay money for something that they don’t think is broken. Their other concerns were about installation, if the business has to close the bathrooms for a while they would be less inclined to do it.

5.             I think my product is different from the normal product that would be sold directly to consumers. As I thought about it more I would need to include different colors to match all of the different color bathroom doors. Another things I would want to change is the ease of installation. Originally I wanted to have my product be screwed into the doors, but I think having an option to tape it on the doors would be faster and easier for installation. My product would not cost a lot, and one big contract like an airport would at least a hundred bathroom stalls where they could use my product.

6.             Answers in step 5

7.             Overall I liked this exercise. As I think about it more I feel like this is an actual opportunity that exists that. I think it would be harder to actually implement it than I thought. I thought it would be much easier to talk with someone at a large organization like an airport. I believe this forced me to do more research, and if I actually wanted to pursue it, it would require much more work. I would have to work on the project design and also on how I would market the product and get the word out to new business opportunities. In the start its all about listening to customers, but with a grain of salt. If you have a product that is revolutionary and not evolutionary customers would not know what is good for them, but in the end its all about listening to customers and creating a product that they want and would buy.