As my internship is picking up, I had much lesser time to spend on Little Dipper this week. However, I am incredibly heartened that we managed to deliver our first playbox to Jill, one of the micro-influencers we reached out to (she's a radio DJ). She has a very adorable baby, and we were glad to hear that her toddler enjoyed her experience with the box. Our team intends to give her some time to explore with the different items inside, before asking her for a testimonial. She also kindly posted and shared about Little Dipper on her Instagram stories.

Since we launched our sponsored posts this week, we had a meeting on Saturday to discuss the insights gathered too. Overall, we realised that the reach was quite good, and we had about 200+ people who watched the entire video, which isn't all that bad at all. After the week, we got 2 genuine sales. This made me quite happy, but at the same time, I was hoping that we could garner more traction. I'm not sure if I'm having unrealistic expectations (and as an impatient person, I'm not good with waiting around), but I do hope to gear up and at least finish selling our initial batch. Nonetheless, our team decided to try out media buys with another two of our photo posts instead, for the next 3 days. During the meeting, we crafted another caption to give more comprehensive yet succinct details of the tools within the box. We wanted to give more transparency to the audience who have viewed the video, and experiment with photos too. Though we understand that videos theoretically capture attention better, we still wanted to test out different mediums by ourselves. Since there are so many factors at play, I hope to figure out what works best for our marketing strategy, which is most effectively observed through the insights and trends gathered. As we are just starting out, I would like to test my hypothesis that more comprehensive posts might be more attractive to a new audience. Particularly, given that parents are careful about what they get their toddlers, I wanted to capture our USP well. I believe that we would need another marketing shoot soon, as our content is getting limited.

Additionally, I have also been sending out emails to liaise with our customers. Thankfully, my teammates are available to deliver the boxes to our customers swiftly, which I am grateful for.

I also briefly worked on the feedback survey with Nandika. We intend to give some time for our customers to experience the playbox, before collecting feedback from them. I hope that these feedback will come in useful for us to continue refining our product.

Finally, I have also been taking some time to re-evaluate where we stand. As we are in the last few weeks of this module, all of our team members also have different hopes and aims that they wish to get out of this experience. Personally, I would want to continue running Little Dipper, as I believe it is still too early for us to get any visible answer or results from just a short runway of six months. Though the past five months have been tiring, I also feel quite fulfilled, and have taken away a lot from the experience. I think there is still much for me to learn. I understand that it would not be an easy road ahead, and I will also respect my teammates' decisions. I am grateful that our team can be transparent about our choices as well, and beyond LD, I have forged solid friendships as well. I greatly appreciate all that they have done for LD so far.

However, to cater sufficient time for any internal changes, I also hope to put more time and effort into developing a long-term strategy in the next few weeks. Through LD and other recent experiences, I have also learnt that my main strengths and interests lie in strategy and structure. Hence, I hope to channel these skill sets into constantly re-evaluating where we stand, and (hopefully) finding a way to help LD to scale. After observing different businesses, I have also learnt that keeping the big picture in mind is an incredibly important step. Often, it is easy to lose sight of the bigger picture when we are bogged down by the day-to-day details. Personally, I am of the belief that it is important to take stock, and spend some time listening and looking out for the signs or answers as well - especially if we are intending to pivot or take any new steps.

Photo: 2 orders so far :)

This week, I spent time editing the marketing videos. As our team is also planning to explore with the IG Story sponsored post in the upcoming week, I am also editing another version that fits the portrait phone screen, within 15 seconds. It is quite challenging to fit our whole message within just 15 seconds, but I think it will be quite effective in capturing the attention of users.

We launched our sponsored posts on Friday! I'm hoping that we will get some good results and insights. It is exciting to finally be pushing our products out.

Following up on the order form templates, I also drafted email templates that our team can send out easily. This will facilitate the purchase order processes. We have agreed to send out emails for order confirmation, liaise through SMS directly for delivery and self-collection arrangements, and then send out another email for the completion of orders.

Overall, the last couple of weeks have been quite tiring. Repeatedly churning out content has been a challenge, but I really hope that our team can do well at marketing.

Photo: Launching our ads!

At the beginning of this week, I spent some time refining the instructional videos as well. I am quite pleased with how they turned out, given the restrictions from our shoot. Though I wish we could have gotten more shots, editing the videos also made me more aware of what to expect for future shoots with babies, as well as what shots are important, and which are "good to capture". Ultimately, everything should tie back to our USP. Marketing is truly incredibly important. Even if we have put in so much effort in the product development stage, the hard work will not pay off if the marketing is weak. Hard work doesn't always pay off, but it's always interesting to see what else we can improve on and learn from the experience.

Hence, we have also decided to run A/B testing for our sponsored posts. I think this will be useful in helping us to generate insights on how best to promote our product, and to reach out to our target audience. So far, our following is largely limited to our friends and direct contacts. We will be using both Facebook and Instagram as our main channels. After gathering insights, our team will track them and make the necessary modifications to maximise outreach.

On Saturday, we also had a consultation with Mr Roderick and Ms Lili that was incredibly helpful. Our team managed to clarify our doubts on the parameters for our media buy plan. Moreover, we were also reminded of the importance of including critical keywords and highlighting our USP in our posts. I am planning to edit a marketing video for our sponsored post. It will be 4x5 to conveniently fit the phone screens of our target audience, and include shots of our playbox and the baby. Within the video, I will also succinctly describe the functionalities of our playbox, along with its features and the USP. Hopefully, this short and succinct video can help to capture the attention of our target audience. I also hope that our team can explore with different angles and messaging to reach out to different audiences, which was also suggested by Mr Roderick.

Finally, we "launched" our products on Sunday evening. However, I see this launch as an unofficial one, as we have yet to put up our sponsored posts to reach out to our target audience. This will be done next week.

Since Jiaqi had created the order form template, I also spent some time editing it to make it more intuitive for customers. Nandika and I will be the two touch points for self-collection, and we are both storing some products individually.

Photo: A playlist of the edited instructional videos. They are in an unlisted playlist, as only customers who purchase our product can access them. Here is a link for reference: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwegv3FYVBTtKRRr6D-XBxWFOqZRS1nyM

This week, I spent most of my time editing the photos from our shoot, as well as the booklet. As Nandika had a friend who works on information booklets, she gave us some valuable feedback on how to improve on the layout of our booklets. This included the design and reducing the wordiness of the booklet, which we found to be incredibly useful advice.

I also edited the individual instructional videos and generated the QR codes to be included within the booklet. After a few revisions, the booklet was finally ready, and Grace helped to place the orders accordingly.

Additionally, after editing the photos, we managed to put out our first post and reach out to the micro-influencers we had sourced for. We were hoping to generate some interest in our brand before our sponsored posts. However, after our first post was put out, I realised that we did not present our USP very well. Hence, I decided to create a series of FAQs for our story highlights to supplement the information. While it is great that we took so many things into consideration during our product development, I found it difficult to narrow down our USP and explain the functionalities of our box succinctly, and also juggle reducing the wordiness of our posts at the same time. It's definitely true that marketing is both and art and a science, and I'm hoping that the next few weeks can help us to generate meaningful insights from our posts.

With so many tight deadlines and things to generate, this week was a bit of a challenge for me. Additionally, I am also aware of not letting our social media channels stagnate too much, since we are in the midst of building our brand reputation and image. It is quite draining to pump out so much content simultaneously, but I felt that I could have done a better job in terms of thinking through our posts more carefully. For example, I realised that if I had put more thought into the post, I would have realised that our first post did not flag out our USP enough. Though I feel that this was a lost opportunity, it was also a lesson learnt for us. It also taught me how to be adaptable and move forward, such as coming up with an FAQ to supplement our post. I got inspiration from the pages of existing home businesses, which I found quite helpful.

Photo: Sneak peek of our information booklets! Feel free to scan the QR codes to access the instructional videos :)

This week, I did up the shot list before we had our product and marketing shoot. Grace, Nandika and I met up on Saturday for a half-day shoot. Due to capacity limitations of our contact's household due to Covid, we decided to split up our workstreams, as we could only have 3 members come down for the shoot. Jiaqi and Danesha helped out with searching for the micro-influencers that we intended to reach out to.

As we predicted, we had limited time during our shoot with the baby. The marketing shoot lasted about 2 hours, and we had quite a number of items in the box to go through. With my bit of photography / product shoot experience, I was in charge of taking the photos. As expected, it was really quite a challenge because I could not possibly give the baby any directions or instructions. Most of the shots had to be candid and well-timed, and for each item within the box, I had both photos and videos in mind. This is because we require a variety of photos for IG and FB, along with our instructional booklet. Additionally, we also needed videos for the instructional booklet (accessible through QR codes). I was once again reminded of the importance of having a pre-planned shot list so that we would not leave out any shots in the process. Fortunately, Grace and Nandika were there to support me by trying to make the baby smile, and to prepare the items beforehand. The shoot would have been impossible to do alone, so I'm grateful for the support from my team members :)

As the baby was only 11 months old, she had a much shorter attention span. Thankfully, she seemed pretty engaged and enjoyed playing with the items in our playbox, which was heartening! This was important as the baby had to look interested for a successful shoot. Moreover, I realised this was also an indirect test of whether our resources were curated and selected well, as it was our first time passing the items to a baby. I am especially grateful to Nandika's contact, Zee Yun, who was incredibly helpful and enthusiastic in volunteering for the shoot. Additionally, she gave us some valuable feedback on the items in our playbox. Generally, she had quite a positive response to the box, and she also has some experience in the early childhood education sector. Her main feedback was that some activities (like threading and oobleck) were more suitable for slightly older babies. However, this is still in line with our target group ranging from ages 1 to 2 years, and her baby was slightly younger. Hence, we decided that it would be clearer for us to add in that detail into the instructional videos too.

Moving forward, she was also very willing to share her experience with our playbox to her peers. Though we had made our first post of LD's logo on our IG/FB and managed to garner some following from friends and family, we hope to slowly reach out more to our main target audience, especially through boosting our marketing through targeted ads.

For the next few hours, we had a team Zoom meeting and our product shoot. This included a flatlay and pictures of the individual items in our playbox. Since we had more time and the items were inanimate, I was more confident in shooting the items in our playbox.

During the Zoom meeting, we selected the key micro-influencers to reach out to in the upcoming week, finalised the price of our playbox, as well as discussed the arrangement for preparing our next batch of boxes. We have decided that we would reserve a few boxes in this initial batch for micro-influencers that are potentially willing to help us promote LD, and we also gave one unit to Zee Yun out of appreciation for her time and support. Since we only have 10 units prepared in our initial trial batch, we intend to use the remaining to test out our marketing and sales. Following which, we will try to engage our customers directly to find out what can be improved, while developing our second batch concurrently. We also hope to research on Alibaba, and hopefully further reduce the cost per unit and increase our profit margins.

In the next week, I will be editing the photos and videos from our shoots. I am confident that they will turn out well. I foresee that we will need to have more shoots in the future to constantly pump out content. For now, it is fortunate that we can save some cost and make use of our team's skills on the marketing front. In the future when LD stabilises, I believe this can be outsourced too. I will also be working with Nandika in revising the information booklets. We actually ordered a sample to use for our product shoot, and it looked good. However, we feel that some things could be touched up on and refined further, such as making it less wordy and more engaging.

After reviewing the raw photos, I'm quite happy with how the shoot turned out, and am very excited for sales to begin :) On a sidenote, I can't believe it's been 4 months since we conceptualised Little Dipper. I am still quite energised and determined, but looking back, I realised this is just the beginning. The entrepreneurship journey is truly like a marathon, but each milestone has taught me something different, and made me learn a lot about others, the business, and myself. I really like that entrepreneurship is also about personal growth and development. Being someone who likes to dabble in different areas and pick up random skills, I am quite glad that having basic skills in photography and design has been useful too. I am grateful that our team works well together, and everyone has their own strengths. I have come to appreciate and maximise others' strengths more, and I am happy that our team is developing together. While the semester has once again started and we each have our own commitments to juggle, we are determined to stay committed as a team!

This week, we did our individual tasks in our own time, while waiting for the remaining items to arrive. Additionally, I designed the logo and instruction guide to be included in our boxes. We will be finalising the content and placing orders for the printing. The logos will be laminated paper stickers pasted on top of each box, and we intend to have the instruction guides be about A5 sizes.

We will be meeting up physically next week to pack the boxes. In early January, we will be filming and editing the marketing collaterals. As I have some experience with photo and video shoots, I will be filming and editing our content. Thereafter, we plan to push out marketing and targeted ads vigorously. This will assist us in our A/B testing and give us more visible results that we can work with, fool-proofing our strategy.

Photo: Our new logo that I designed! Our information booklet will also look similar, so that we can maintain a consistent visual branding.