refining our customer segments

We have been working on our business plan, model, and canvas the past two months and I never realized how much effort, thought, and number crunching goes into it! At least once a week, Steph and I have been dedicating a full day to flushing out ideas, refining our purpose and goals, and narrowing down our market segment. With project commitments, this is the best way we can stay on top of it, although we frequently discuss hashing it all out over the course of a weekend.

Urban Matters has now narrowed down to one customer segment - Space Activators! These people come in a variety of shapes, sizes and capacities. We have community activists and/or organizations who are passionate about a positive improvement for his or her neighborhood, similar to our own creative director Stephanie Houston who developed the NOMAD garden idea. There are also social enterprises doing good each day through human and environmental initiatives, along with collaborative work spaces creating areas of entrepreneurs to work together, share ideas, and provide flexible space options. Along with the three above, we are targeting the oh-so-familiar (at least to us in architecture) city government and land developers/owners. The City of San Francisco provides us the perfect test bed with progressive government officials, like Jay Nath and Shannon Spanhake at the Office of Innovation, and thoughtful, creative land developers, like Seth Hamilian at Mission Bay Development Group.

So what’s next up for us? Getting out there and querying our market segment! If you feel like you fit into one of the categories and want to find out what we can provide for you, please contact us. We'll be reporting back with our findings soon!

We are not alone in this effort either. Our very talented friends have been giving us guidance and feedback along the way - Kim Sokolnicki, Raul San Nacio and Shawn Ardaiz, among the many!

-kc