How Highline Beta helped design a marketplace for under-represented consumers

At a Glance

Client: Global CPG company

Opportunity: Support the crafting of their strategic plan and focus for innovation. Drive towards the creation of new ventures.

Solution: Validated the business case for a marketplace targeting their core consumer, addressing unmet needs.

Roadmap:

1. Identify pain points for the CPG company’s core consumer: 40+ year old women
2. Conduct initial Discovery (through primary and secondary research) to validate the problem and ideate solutions
3. Conduct Venture Validation to further test solutions and validate the business model, market size and potential scale

Results: A validated new venture opportunity for a marketplace focused on menopause products (and services) for 40+ year old women.

Background

We worked with a global CPG company to support the crafting of their strategic plan and focus for innovation. Through that work, we identified a large and underserved asset: their core consumer. 

In this case, their core consumer was 40+ year old women. They knew these women, knew how to speak to them, but hadn’t changed their approach or the products they served this market with in over a decade. So we set out to better understand this core consumer, and identify challenges that they were having that our client could solve.

Through some initial research, we quickly realized that beauty and cognitive changes were a key problem for women 40+. We then set out to determine whether there were viable ventures ($50M rev potential) that could help perimenopausal and menopausal women navigate the challenges they face.

Our guiding question was: How might we help perimenopausal and menopausal women struggling with physical and cognitive changes?

What We Built

A D2C menopause marketplace for women between the ages of 40 and 60 with a focus on holistic wellness and nutrition. Products ranged from food to supplements to skincare and more.

The business model was similar to Thrive market where there was a membership fee for access to products specifically proven to help with menopausal symptoms. 

How Did We Get There

Discovery: Our goal was to identify problems and generate ideas to solve them

• Ideated and prioritized potential solutions
  • Conducted primary research with menopausal women using existing products and solutions to understand their current experiences
  • Identified 30 problems 
  • Ideated 100 proxy solutions
• Prioritized 3 solutions with plans for further validation
  • Conducted concept testing via ad testing & qualitative interviews to refine potential solutions and get feedback
  • Conducted a startup scan to understand what competitors existed and get inspiration from what they were doing

Venture Validation: Our goal was to explore early concepts quickly through testing & develop a go-to market plan, business model, and roadmap to build the product

• Prioritized 2 solutions based on desirability testing
  • Conducted primary research with our early adopter target to understand the core value of our solution
  • Presented 20+ pieces of stimuli to narrow into what was most desirable
  • Narrowed into 2 prototyped solutions with different websites and value props to test different pieces of the solution
• Formulated a business plan 
  • Conducted quantitative & qualitative tests to validate potential features of each solution
  • Tested these solutions with users to prioritize 1 that was most desirable
  • Conducted viability analysis and created a business model to validate viability

Key Takeaways

We started with an asset: a market our client had an existing relationship with but was being underserved in new ways that they didn’t currently touch on.

From there, we took the time to understand problems in that market and design solutions that credibly solved them. That meant we tested over 100 solutions for desirability, and then built 2 prototypes to more rigorously test viability and feasibility.

Finally we tested different potential business models, getting market signals to tell us which to pursue, and then modeled out what that business could look like at scale. After 6 months, we knew we had found a business that made sense to launch.