Carrier Chicken

How might we give whimsy joy to those we care about?

After taking some comedic improvisation classes, I wondered, how do I bring the absurdity and joy from the classroom into the real world?

Background

A few years back, I had purchased a rubber chicken as stress relief. After some exposure to BuzzFeed articles about potato-mailing businesses, I hypothesized that there would be a market for mailing rubber chickens.

Background

I didn't want to invest too much time and energy into this business before validating my product idea, so I carried a rubber chicken around with me to all my social gatherings for a month and noted the reactions I got. People universally understood the humor of a rubber chicken.

Thus, I threw an MVP site together and asked friends to use my service to send chickens. I also contacted a few journalists to gauge the novelty and appeal of the service.

People often say that if you can find your first 1,000 customers, you have validated your product.

Product Validation

Validation Findings

Recipients of the chicken were all surprised and amused. Some were a little confused, but follow-up conversations with recipients revealed that the chickens were overall a great living room and conversation piece.
One indicator of product appeal was that some recipients subsequently sent chickens to other friends. Some early adopters also sent up to 6 chickens at once.
One journalist from a large publication insisted that I invested in higher quality product photography in order to cover my business.
At this point in time, I have collected about 3,000 customer emails. The email newsletter sign-up to paying customer conversion rate is currently around 26.8%, which leads me to believe that there is indeed a market for my product.