One of the beautiful things about a vending machine is that it can’t hustle you into purchase decisions. It can’t even speak. Traditionally, unless you like to talk to yourself, your whole transaction is made in complete silence (save, perhaps, the pressing of a few buttons and the slap of the Dorito bag against the bottom door).
This way of getting goods to a customer, though it certainly has its efficiencies, presents some obvious challenges to the vending entrepreneur who needs to know why people buy what they buy; and yet our own Ben Chen of Venductivity is finding ways to put some creative hustle and clever sales into his vending of tech solutions.
Chen himself had the opportunity to be something of a human vending machine last weekend, doing sales and market research at the futuristic Escape Velocity convention in Washington, DC. Equipped with little more than his booth, a Square reader and an armful of products, he was able to interview close to 70 people and sold actual goods to eight of them.
The face-to-face interactions not only allowed him to ask people “why’d you buy that?,” but also led him to important observations as to who was using cash to budget and which charging products were more attractive to those who’d travelled to the convention. These provided him with clues to help guide product differentiation as he builds Venductivity, a vending company he’s designing to meet people’s tech needs in a relatively low-cost, convenient way.
Chen, who comes to entrepreneurship from a successful tour of duty in the corporate world, described the whim to attend the convention as “opportunistic and spur-of-the-moment … kind of like me doing the i.Lab.”
He’d been in the tech industry for years, working for big-name companies like Capital One and IBM, but once he reached a certain threshold of success realized he wanted to try his hand at entrepreneurial pursuits. “In the corporate world, I was making good money,” he explained, “but I really had this itch I needed to scratch.” He clarified further that the entrepreneurial urge was something that had, in fact, run in the family. “In Taiwan, most of my family are entrepreneurs.”
A few years ago, while still in the corporate world, he said he began to ask himself, “What am I going to do for the rest of my life?”
At that time he was working on a project to improve tech support for Capital One, and “reinvented the whole infrastructure there” to cut weeks out of the repair and setup processes. Noting other companies’ internal efforts to improve tech support for their employees, he discovered Facebook’s on-campus vending machines, and realized there was a “huge gap in the market” for that sort of thing in the real world.
The vending idea stayed in the back of his mind while he collected data, and after a year or so, he decided it’d be worth the risk to leave his corporate job and try this new enterprise. Though he considered going it on his own, he eventually decided to bring his idea to the i.Lab’s accelerator program because of the support, programming and contacts it provided.
“The diversity of thought provided by ‘classes’ [has] really helped,” he said, referencing a few of the workshops. “It’s been very positive, eye-opening … even enlightening.”
One of the things he said he’s learned the most—that’s been an “aha”—is that in the entrepreneurial world (as differentiated from his corporate, causal-thinking background) plans could always change and that as a result he’s “trying to keep an open mind” as he builds Venductivity.
Despite facing challenges particular to vending, such as FAA regulations, fair bidding, and the two-sided market of consumers on one hand and other businesses or locations at which to vend on the other, Chen says he’s having “lots of fun” on the entrepreneurial journey.
He’s described it as “scary, fun and exciting” at the same time, but said something that sustains him is that he “just love[s] the concept of vending”—and he’s also built up the capital to do this, with plenty of room to evaluate as things progress.
“What’s failure in entrepreneurship?” he asked, then answered for himself: “Failure for me would be going back to a corporate job.”
