Needfinding with Atlanta’s Minimum-Wage Restaurant Servers

My Role

Teammate on a student startup team in Georgia Tech’s crash-course introduction to customer discovery and business model generation – Startup Lab.

Target Users

Minimum-wage restaurant servers in the Atlanta Metro area.

Problem

Minimum-wage restaurant servers in Georgia rely heavily on tips to make ends meet, and tipping rates are highly variable based on tourism seasons, sports seasons, and even the weather. People repeatedly expressed a need to find higher-tipping jobs.

Impact

With TipJar, servers can find a better-paying job in their area by trading information on their most recent tips earnings for access to a real-time map of tipping rates at other restaurants in their area.

• Interviewed 196 people working in restaurants around Metro Atlanta.
• Heard repeated accounts of servers struggling with high variation in tips earnings (servers are not protected by the standard minimum wage in Georgia).
• Defined our goal: how might we show restaurant servers what other people are earning in tips earnings nearby?

• Tested hypothesis that servers will trade their tipping information for a map of others’ tips rates through 2 Wizard-of-Oz prototypes, filling in tipping information manually from interviews with servers.

• Learned servers are willing to share tipping information if they can do so anonymously.
• Created working minimum-viable-product website that accepted tipping rates and displayed others’ tips around Atlanta.
• Released a minimum-viable-product website to the servers we had interviewed in Atlanta.