Interviewing Customers No. 2

     Going through the first round of interviews and elevator pitches I decided to narrow my focus from a restaurant to a café. I think that a café is more in line with the type of food I want to serve and the way I want to do it. Everything will still be served in mugs, which will provide a unique twist on the traditional café while also providing an in store experience unlike any other.

     From the comments on the last post I decided to broaden the age group in my target population. Unfortunately for the interview, younger people tended to be more willing to answer my questions but I don’t think age is the most important thing to go after when you’re interviewing someone. Last time, I interviewed a range of people to get their sense of how they felt about unique places versus chain restaurants. For this round of interviews, since I narrowed my opportunity, I targeted people that often visited cafés and were able to say what they look for in an ideal café.

     For this interview, I really wanted to find out everything from what was their favorite drink to order to what are must haves are in a café. I asked what is their typical drink and how much are they willing to pay for it, to help me establish what types of coffee I would need to offer to satisfy the customers and where to price them at. My next question helped me to understand what people liked in their current favorite coffee shops. I then wanted to know how they felt about the food that was offered at their favorite place but found that many of the people I interviewed don’t often buy food at cafés. For my last question, I asked each person to describe some things that are must haves in a café for people to return. All of my questions were targeted at discovering what makes people return to the same coffee shop time after time.

     Inserted below is one video of all the audio clips from each interview. I sought out people between 13 and 50 that had an opinion of cafés.

     Overall, I’ve learned that my idea is very realistic, especially in a college town like Gainesville where people are visiting coffee shops multiple times a week, sometimes a day. Through the interviews I’ve found that while food is important for a restaurant to survive, no one mentioned good food as a must have in this last round of interviews. Even in the first round of interviews, few people said that their favorite place to eat was based on the food. Therefore, it seems to me that as long as you provide decent food to eat at reasonable prices all you need is to have your café embody the atmosphere that people are looking for in their ideal café and not currently getting in other places. I think it helps to be known for a certain dish or drink but will have to explore this more in the next round of interviews.

     The biggest advise I can give to next semester students is to approach people that are eating or about to eat because more often than not they don’t have to be anywhere soon. Be cautious about of approaching people with headphones plugged into their phones because I’ve found that about half the time they are actually on the phone and not listening to music. I’ve found that groups work the best because I’ve seen friends kind of bounce ideas off of each other and I feel groups are more likely to provide answers beyond of what I hoped for. My second tip would be to be hesitant to approach people that look like they are studying because I’ve found those people to be very stressed out and in my experience don’t provide very helpful answers to the questions. My last tip would be to not be afraid to approach someone you find intimidating because I’ve found some of those people to be the most helpful and willing to answer my questions. An extra tip that kind of goes along with the last one is to approach people and ask if they like coffee, in my case, before you start interviewing them so you can decide if they will be able to answer your questions. For example, in the first round of interviews, I asked people to choose between Satchels and a chain pizza place to get a sense of whether people were more inclined to visit unique places and one girl that I asked simply replied that she wouldn’t go to either because she didn’t like pizza, which led me to having to interview someone else and in a sense wasting both of our time.