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Venture Design Week 4: Coaches Landing!

By Soffee

For this week, we decided that we simultaneously run two tests: running the product/service test while figuring out the DDP.

For the product part, our team decided that we should start from ourselves, putting our own profile as “coaches” and see if we can attract some possible applicants. I designed the testing pages, including the landing page, the coach profile page and also the personal page for each coach by Unbounce, which is a quick and easy way to put some pages online. Check out the website here:(http://coach.loopo.co/currentcoaches/)

We created an “application form” and fill out our personal profile, providing information such as education background, working experience and services we can offer. As for contact info, we left our school e-mail address and also WeChat ID. Applicants can also find us by scanning QR code of our WeChat ID.

The testing was launched this afternoon and we’re also planning sending some posters through our personal connection with Universities in China. The number of contacts we received can be the measurement. Since our star feature “coach matching ” is not available at this stage, the result of the test can only tell how our marketing strategy works. Anyway, if an applicant wants to contact us, that means in his/her thinks we match to some extent. 

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Venture Design Week 2-3: Test Started!

By Soffee

After endless discussions and wire framing, our first test eventually launched.

We planned to use Unbounce at first, but we’re not familiar with the tool so we end up making mockups in Illustrator and manually send our survey-like test to our friends in China (in Chinese of course), since our target customers are Chinese international students. (link:http://www.sojump.com/jq/3281713.aspx)

Instead of sending the survey link through email, we used WeChat, a popular mobile chatting app in China to spread the survey. The good thing about this is that most of your friend will definitely do you a favor to look at your project and answer the questions. The down side, obviously, is that it’s hard to get beyond your personal network and it’s tiring to send the link one by one (screw you WeChat! Why don't you add a group sending function!). Even if you can share it on your timeline, you’re not ensured plenty of relies.

Even though we have already 1000 users on our current Beta website, we didn’t really use this resources. Instead, we chose some of our friend who has never been exposed to our name LOOPO and the business before, just to bring in new thoughts and insights. Up to the moment I’m writing this blog, we got 34 responses in 48 hours. It’s a small sample, but the insights from the test are very interesting.

Since our business involves both current international students and Chinese applicants, we asked them to think in both situations:

Q1: If you are an applicant, which service do you like better? Why?

Q2: If you are a current international students in the US, which service do you like better? Why?

  The result shows that, as applicants, 58% of the participants prefer the coach-matching service provided by Loopo versus the Quora-like platform Ansu. However, when they switch the role to current students, they don’t have a strong preference.

 When looking at the reasons behind, we found something that we haven’t thought about yet. For applicants, they want one-on-one, highly focused, all-about-me guidance during their application process. But they also want to hear different voices about their question, especially when they haven’t decided which school to go and when they’re eager to find the direct answer rather than communication. 

For current international students however, there clearly a trade-off between the amount of responsibility they take and the money they can earn. They’re willing to help applicants because they’ve been there done that and they understand how hard it is. But the real issue is that they don’t really want to feel obliged to help them, especially when they have to deal with their busy life at school already. Of course, money is a big incentive, but that might not be good news for the applicants.

  Question 3 and 4 are for experience test of the 2 services. We asked the participants to pick their favorite functions in the 2 different services. (I just realize that we should have ask them to rank, damn it.) The results are interesting as well. In Ansu’s case, participants seems satisfied with all 3 of the features, versus in Loopo’s case, the majority seems to be big fans of the “coach matching” feature, but they are not very interested in other features and functions. Clearly, coach matching might be a signature for Loopo, how might we leverage this and monetize will be considered.

  Question 5 and 6 are about testing the pricing point. According to the result, half of the participants prefer 200-300RMB(about $35-$50) per hour when they are applicants and the majority of them prefer the 200-300RMB(about $35-$50) from the perspective of current international students.

At this point, our team has already decided that we should go with the second concept. However, it doesn't mean that the test is meaningless. In the contrary, it provide us with many insights about why people prefer concept one than our concept two, which gives us a direction and opportunity area to keep exploring. And I can wait to share this with my other teammates outside ID.

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Venture Design Week 2-3: Readings

By Soffee

Few weeks ago, our developer was extremely enthusiastic about Lean startup methods that he suggested running an A/B test to test our concept and he’s gonna code it for 3 months. And we were all like: Are you serious?? Coding for 3 months just for a concept test?

But it turns out that A/B testing can be used in a more elegant and efficient way. In the Etsy presentation, it’s good to know that the method of A/B testing are used to test different assumptions and detailed user experience. And it’s also good to know in class that this kind of testing method is usually used after several rounds of iteration. But I recently found that Unbounce it providing the A/B testing function too. I think is less about when to use the methods, but more about how to choose the right methods according to the current resources and limitations.

This Monday, I attend the first presentation of New Venture Challenge at Chicago Booth. My teammates have done a very good job presenting. The judges were kind of impressed by our progress. Few weeks ago, our product was a social networking site and we didn't know clearly what problems we’re solving and how we’re gonna make money. Thus I feel deeply connected to the article by Steve Blank. I’m not sure if business model is the “first principle”-my designer self still think that users are the most important element. However, I have to admit that from the moment we pivoted the business, at least everything started to make sense. The whole process is painful. It took us months to accept the fact that we should make changes because we’re emotionally attached to our original product. But I guess this is what it takes.

And the Amazon article surprised me a little. I used to think giant company like Amazon must have made a lot of money. It’s hard to believe that they’re actually losing millions with their products and service seems to be everywhere. I didn’t really witness how Amazon has expand its e-commerce empire step by step, but as a foreigner, I kind of got the impression that it’s the default platform for online shopping. And clearly, Amazon has the ambition to grow their business around the world, but they have to deal with different situations and figure out new solutions. Take China for example, some successful service cannot be duplicated into China market because the shopping behaviors and attitude are totally different. 

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Venture Design Week 1: Start From Here

By Soffee

In the past few months, I’ve been involved in the world of startup. I didn’t really realize that until so many dramatic things happened in my team that kept us struggling and react quickly to unexpected situations. Honestly, I joined the team just because I need to gain some experience in UX design since I shift my interest from Industrial Design to UX Design but I have to say that I got more that what I expected. The whole idea of having new ideas and just go for it excites me so much even though the process is somewhat painful, because you never know what’s gonna happen in next second.

So here I am, starting my first week to learning more about what I’m up to. I feel the first take-away from the first class is how design thinking can be combined with Lean startup. According to the WSJ article, they all focus on the customers/users and solve their problems by quickly prototyping and iterating. Design thinking provides solid intent for Lean startup while Lean startup “helps with discovery of the market opportunity that lives around the observed need”. This is very enlightening and it makes me see some of the reasons that me and my team are struggling: we really haven’t agreed on a crystal clear intent about what are we trying to do. Even though we’ve done some user research, but without truly understanding our intent, we kind of messed it up.

Another big take-away from the reading is the Airbnb article. The idea of “It’s OK to do things that don’t scale” is inspiring since we’re trying to do something like this. I used to think startup is about make full use of your current resources and now I have new understanding on this idea: since resources are limited and not scalable, we should just go for it and learn as much as possible from it and finally make the final success scalable. It’s more than just a good example when I try to argue with someone who insist on data (to be honest, most of my teammates are data driven.). 

And I love the lecture in class. It was so structured and insightful with many up-to-date case studies, which I’m really interested in.

I just finished reading the article for week 2. It was a good reference too. Actually we recently just registered for Unbounce and I was asked to make test plan. Hopefully, in the following few weeks, I can learn more to help my team move forward.

Got an idea?

By Anqi

In week one, we shared our business idea with classmates. And with their feedback, we tried to adjust our initial idea--which didn't really happen to us, because IDers got so much idea and we didn't get time to pitch! So here, firstly, we wanna give you a quick view of our business idea.

This start up project is what my teammate Soffee currently working on. We want to design an online coaching platform targeted on Chinese international students in the U.S. to connect and share study aboard experience. 

Needs:

As Chinese international students, we realize that there are millions of applicants in China that are eager to talk to current international students in the US, for advises of further studying and also many other information that they cannot find on official website. Service: To meet these needs, we're trying to build an online coaching platform where Chinese applicants who're applying for US universities can "hire" current Chinese international students in those schools as coaches to help them with application. While the applicants can talk to "coaches" from their dream school, current students can also earn extra money from their inherent knowledge and the platform can make profit by charging certain percentage of the service fee.

Test your business!

From the "Patient Connect" example in week 2 reading, we learned about how to use Pay-Per-Click(PPC) campaigns(AdWords, AdCenter, etc) to test our business. To test our idea, we need to: 

1. create a good landing page for your campaign: The landing page of your campaign should be nice looking to attract enough users. Also, landing pages needs to be as brief and concise as possible. Make your message powerful and do not get into the details, just tell them you can solve their problem.

2.  use Microsoft’s adCenter to text your campaign. Use google's AdWords Keyword Tool, to generate bunch of keywords and import the keywords list to the adCenter.

3. build a powerful, silver bullet, text ad for your campaign.

4. keep an eye on the dynamic text result. Then repeat this process, test and adjust your idea.

This is a test process focusing on the idea generation period. The PPC campaigns could not only be used to test whether you are reaching a juicy market but also help us get a connect point to our future users. It gives us a good chance to quick develop our idea and get us resource for the next step.