Are you a startup with a new product in development? Great. Now stop developing and find out if you have a market. A new pop-up restaurant coming to central London this summer will give diners the option to eat in the nude.
Do you have an appetite for dining in the nude? Over 30,000 Londoners apparently do. That’s according to the online waiting list you can find on the website of London’s first naked restaurant.
The Bunyadi, which is opening in June for three months, will be split into clothed and unclothed sections, and even feature staff in the nude with certain body parts covered up
“What makes this viable -It’s found a gap in the market few would have thought existed”
The owners describe this as “a naked dining experience”, rather than a restaurant per se. And no wonder. Visit the website and you’ll see this is a pop-up restaurant, meaning it’s only going to be around for 3 months. Tickets are allocated on a first-come, first-served basis (no pun intended). It doesn’t have a menu. Nor is there any real indication of what it will look like besides a rather crude floorplan.
Talk about your minimum viable product! Pop-up restaurants are a great example of the MVP in action, and a salutary lesson in why you need to emphasise the “minimum” part of MVP.
Customer discovery and validation is key
Do you think, if the online waiting list for this dining experience was too low for the owners to make a profit, they’d still go ahead? And if they didn’t, what would they have lost? All they’re selling is the concept. Now they’ve proven there’s a market for it, the product can come later. This is the way successful ventures engage in true customer discovery and validation.
Designed to get people back to nature and away from the ‘industrialised-world’s modern trappings’, the clothing-optional restaurant will also be free from phones and electric lights. That’s is what I ma talking about. This is a viral business idea after all its all about “Demand and Supply”
What makes this idea great?
Remember, a product or service is only as good as the idea behind it is saleable. Make sure you are testing the market, talking to prospective customers before you go too far with development. If the naked restaurant teaches you nothing else, remember this: it’s a great idea – supported by great concepts, customer validated propositions and business models – that sells. The tangible product can come later.
