Peer-graded Assignment: Reflection | Tool: Learning Launch

Challenge and Selection

As a sport and technology lover, I started a few months ago a company in Brazil. The idea is to  give everything the professionals have to the amateur soccer players, from scores and graphs  from the matches to automatic generated videos making the experience of playing soccer  digital and social we would charge the players to deliver this to them. It is not a secret that  soccer is one of the most popular sport around the world, and our goal was to build something  scalable and worldwide applicable. Since the money was short, we guided ourselves by Lean  Startups and fail fast concepts, in order to learn about customers’ needs to address it quickly.  The selection of Learning Launch for this reflection is because we use some of its concepts and  that helped us to shape the solution, mainly because we started doing experiments instead of  a Business Plan, this saved us time and money.

Application

It is almost impossible to talk about Learning Launch without mentioning the previews phases.  We went from the observation and data collection (what is) from our friends and started  generating some hypothesis (what if), we did it structured and non-structured way and then  we started making some experiments based on them, using correlation with other things for a  better visualization (another tool from Design Thinking) of what we said. Anyway, it was  helping us to construct, and co-create with the people that would be one day our customers.  At that time, they did not know that yet. Once we learned a lot of what would make sense  (what wows) we decided to build a prototype (what works) and go sell it – Learning Launch.  We build a structure with security cameras and it automatically recorded the matches and the  players could use it was a social network; they could cut their moves and goals scored sharing  it with friends and so on. Good features! We started offering, different prices, different ways  of approaching them, because by definition Learning Launch is the time where the output is  not a GO-NOGO decision, the output is learning and improving it. Of course, it was un- structured, we did it naturally, and somehow things led us to it. Then we started discovering  some stuffs we did not see on the observation phases.

Insights

Most of our customers were playing regularly (once a week), for stress relief, with couple of  friends from work or college. Yes, we knew that already. But what the Learning Launch showed  us were some hidden traps on the way. We had competitors, the first one the beer and  barbecue after the matches; they rather spend money there than paying for a video from their  matches as memory. The second one was the timing. After every match, we uploaded about  one hour of video, that’s depressing, they wanted to see only the best scenes, the highlights,  they didn’t want to see the whole match. Yes, we thought about it, using machine learning to  try to extract goals and highlights automatically to make the experience better, but for that,  we needed to spend hours of development, research, and money of course, which was out of  question at that time. But we kept going, we made small changes in the platform meanwhile.  We offered for different aged people, different gender, then we discovered a segment that

saw other benefits of our solution. By the end of 6 months, we had only 5 recurrent customers  paying 40 dollars a month to have their matches recorded, team and personal profiles. That  was much lower of what we expected. Nevertheless, one day, a person we offered the solution  came to us asking if we could help him with a championship, he was organizing. His pains were  a little bit different from the players, but he saw that we would help him in several aspects.  With some minimal changes on the platform (when I say minimal change, I am saying not more  than one day programing – that was our fail fast and cheap way of thinking), we created new  features to attend this new persona; suddenly we became a championship platform! Now our  customer were the championship organizer, he paid us, the players of a championship have  other pains and expected something very different from the regular weekly player (despite we  know most of the championship players are also regular weekly players). The emotional was  different when they were playing a championship; they wanted to feel like a professional  player. That was the biggest lesson we learned.

Nowadays we are still learning, we are going to our 10th cup and we have something around  10.000 players registered.

Approach

We had done two things wrong. First one were installing the security cameras for the MVP.  That was not scalable, that was difficult with a high cost of implementation. We tested with a  GoPro previously, but the time we spend using it was not enough to notice the “competitors”,  and the second one, when we switch from a GoPro to a security cam, you lose a lot of quality.  That is a big change. From customer perspective, once you introduced something good, you  cannot go back; their expectations are up high, if you do so, you will have trouble as we had.   We should have invested a little more time in the Visualization of this change, this certainly led  us to failure of the real test, but what is funny to mention is because of this failure we found  what we think is the right path. Of course we didn’t give up on this idea, we just put it on the  shelf, we are now trying to develop the machine learning to collect the highlights, seeing  possibilities to use players own smartphones to record the videos, an easier and scalable way.

Life is a journey; learn fast and cheap, if failure is the way to learn you should pursue it!

Nazmi Molano – 20th January 2017

