Concept Testing Kolabree for Product-Market Fit
Qwerry helped evaluate Kolabree’s potential as an integrated client consultation platform prior to launch.
Project Objectives
Identify unrecognized use cases for Kolabree’s user base.
Determine key audiences and the most relevant professional sectors for the product.
Explore potential pricing models and preferred features.
Understand demographic and psychographic profiles of target users.
Key Findings
Interest & Need: Kolabree got an 85% positive response. And, 82% of users found it more relevant because of recent trends.
Feature Priorities: Security was the top priority with scheduling, payment processing, and seamless client experience following closely.
Preferred Use Cases: Professionals in health, fitness, financial planning, medical, and real estate showed a lot of interest.
Pricing Model: A monthly subscription model emerged as the most favorable, particularly among those most likely to buy.
Kolabree
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Established: 2020
Industry: SaaS
Employees: 5-10
Location: Perth, Australia
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Concept Testing
Category Drivers
Introduction / Challenge
In 2019, Zyrous, the maker of Kolabree, identified a trend in consultative micro-businesses moving their work home. When COVID-19 hit the scene in 2020, the impetus for Zyrous to bring Kolabree to market grew rapidly.
Kolabree is an end-to-end business grade video consultation platform designed for professional service providers. It helps them manage their business, schedule appointments, handle payments, and offer online video consultations. All these features create a seamless user experience for both providers and their clients.
Zyrous picked Qwerry as its research partner to help them get potential user feedback, confirm use cases, and discover new ones. Qwerry was also able to help guide product and marketing decisions and explore pricing options before Kolabree’s launch.
Zyrous had done its work. It identified a need and crafted a compelling story and business case for launching Kolabree. It clearly outlined pains that Kolabree could relieve and gains it could offer to its target market. Zyrous calculated its total addressable market, identified its revenue potential, and made a compelling pitch deck.
Before investing more time and money into product development, branding, and marketing for Kolabree, Zyrous wanted to validate its assumptions and reduce the risks that come with new product launches.
Our Research Approach
Our approach to concept testing for Kolabree allowed us to explore its potential in multiple ways. We used a creative mix of research methods in one study to find insights much deeper than just market interest (which is important and was also included). We developed and executed a study that provided Kolabree with market data to reduce risk, deep insights to inform brand strategy and marketing decisions, and specific data points to guide product development decisions.
We designed our concept test to answer these questions:
What was the overall interest in Kolabree?
What use cases were not already identified?
For what use cases was Kolabree most relevant, most needed, and a product they were likely to buy?
What did potential customers expect to pay for a product like Kolabree? What were the most valuable use cases (potential willingness to pay)?
What did potential customers value? What features and benefits were most important to them and did importance differ by use case?
What were the firmographic and demographic profiles of the most valuable use cases?
We applied a variety of techniques to answer these questions. Here are just a few:
FACTOR ANALYSIS
We used Principal Component Analysis to identify unique clusters of product features and benefits, revealing five distinct themes that would influence buying for this type of service. This analysis gave Kolabree a solid data-driven foundation for possible brand strategies. That is, the empirically derived themes could be turned into brand positioning territories for consideration. Additionally, we ranked the themes/ territories by importance from the underlying data, offering insights into what mattered most to Kolabree’s target audiences. These insights were instrumental in positioning Kolabree’s brand to resonate best with user needs and expectations, and to increase the chances of a successful launch.
MAXDIFF ANALYSIS
To evaluate Kolabree’s extensive list of proposed features, we used a MaxDiff module. We asked respondents to identify which features were most and least important among smaller random sets of 5, from the full list of 18 features. This method:
Reduces rating fatigue (people will typically rate many items similarly when rating on a scale of 1-5, or 1-10, for example).
Avoids ranking overload (people can’t reliably rank a list of 18 items, for example).
Uncovers more reliable differentiation between options (for example, people may rate 10 out of 18 features with “9” out of 10, reducing the ability to truly differentiate. By forcing tradeoffs in the choices, MaxDiff controls for this).
Produces more reliable results across respondents who may use ratings scales differently (a “7” to one person may be a “5” to another).
Produces an accurate overall ranking. By analyzing ”most” and “least” responses from many choice combinations, MaxDiff combines individual preferences into an overall and reliable ranked list.
The results of this module helped Kolabree decide which features to prioritize in its software development pipeline, which is critical to any software product. For Kolabree, we learned that features related to security, scheduling, and payment integrations were most important to focus on first.
PERSONALITY AND MINDSET ANALYSIS
We also leveraged Principal Component Analysis to yield five distinct mindsets across potential Kolabree customers, based on how they identified with different personality and mindset statements. This segmentation-lite approach highlighted behavioral and attitudinal dimensions among potential users and uncovered themes among emotional benefits Kolabree could emphasize in its messaging. These insights would help Kolabree create a brand that could connect emotionally, not just functionally, with its potential users. It would also align Kolabree with their hopes and motivations.
Study Highlights
We surveyed 539 respondents
To qualify, they must have worked on their own or in a business that involved consultations with clients and their consultations could be done via videoconference
We split the survey across two geographies: the United States (N=271) and Australia (N=268)
Our test and analyses allowed us to evaluate:
Product-Market Fit (Guaging initial reactions)
Values, Features, and Mindset (Understanding the audience and what was important)
Use Cases (Building profiles and prioritizing use cases based on potential value)
“Qwerry’s research, insights, and recommendations helped us confirm our product-market fit. They also guided us to change some priorities for the new product launch. We gained new customers at higher rates in areas we didn’t originally consider.”
— COFOUNDER & MARKETING LEAD AT KOLABREE
What did we find?
There was a healthy interest in a product and service like Kolabree. Most people were using a mix of disparate tools including Zoom and Teams or Skype for video plus a mix of email and other tools for scheduling, paperwork, document storage, billing, etc. Kolabree combined these all into one, including proper storage of sensitive files like healthcare files and data, which was compelling.
Most respondents reacted positively to the Kolabree concept. Three-quartes of them needed something like Kolabree because it was better than their current mix of tools or they thought that nothing else filled their needs. At the time, 91% said Kolabree was even more relevant to them due to the pandemic and 86% of them said the concept would be relevant to them long-term, assuring Zyrous that Kolabree would not become obsolete post-pandemic.
Security was the most important feature to potential users- an area Kolabree had focused on early in the development process, thus validating their hypotheses. Our study provided a clear and reliable ranking of 18 product features so Kolabree could prioritize its development pipeline leading up to launch. We then determined 5 underlying themes among 20+ benefits we asked about, providing Kolabree with brand positioning directions to consider (these benefits were different than the 18 product features we ranked).
Kolabree wanted to understand which pricing model was most appealing: a monthly subscription fee (per user), a flat fee per each video consultation, or a percentage of the customer’s consulting fees. A monthly subscription fee was the most preferred overall. Looking deeper (we like to connect dots to validate our findings), we found that a monthly fee was the most preferred among those that were extremely interested and extremely likely to buy, ensuring we weren’t recommending a pricing model that was more appealing to those that were not really interested anyway.
Kolabree had identified five key use cases (industries Kolabree would be most suited for) before the concept test. Our objective was to validate those use cases and discover whether any new use cases should be prioritized. Our results validated a subset of the initial five, identified some of the initial five to de-prioritize, and discovered new use cases to consider based on their expected value to Kolabree (expected revenues). This helped Kolabree focus its marketing efforts during launch on the most valuable target markets.
Conclusion
Our concept testing for Kolabree validated that there was interest in the product before launch, reducing what is known as Desirability Risk (the risk that customers aren’t interested in your idea). We also gained early indications of low Viability risk (the risk that you can’t earn enough money with your idea), helping Kolabree launch with success. You can learn more about concept testing and different approaches in our article Concept Testing: Research Methods and Examples.
