Challenge

I am currently part of a startup that is participating in a national prospective startup competition and working with my team members to continuously develop our business model. Our startup focused on creating a children’s product. The motivation behind this was that an important population of customers that never die out are parents. Many parents are always on the search to find something beneficial for their child, such as nutritious foods and books. Our team knew that the most important factor was that any children's product had to be compelling for guardians to purchase for any chance of success. As a result, in order to create such a product, our team knew the first step was to understand our target market: the parents.

Selection

Our team resorted to storytelling as an important tool for our business, as our product was to address the concerns that parents faced with their children. Storytelling is a tool that gives personal insight into one’s life, and the overlaps in a population’s individual lives is a common source of inspiration for the invention of a solution. Parents, in particular, have many worries and topics to discuss regarding their children. They are eager to try out solutions if they find it persuasive enough to try. Using the tool of storytelling from our target market, our team hoped to identify an overlapping issue that many parents share and to inspire the development phase of our product.

Application

First, our team started with the basic step of researching previous information already shared on the internet. This included important stages children go through and skills that children develop during these stages. Most importantly, the research revolved around the common concerns or problems that parents face so our team could understand a general grasp of their shared/individual stories. As a result, our team narrowed our focus on the creativity skills children develop, specifically doodling, and then began a more hands-on utilization of the storytelling tool through surveys with parents. We collected a total of over 50+ survey responses in a few days and were able to gain our own data on the stories and insights parents had with the concerns we asked them about.

Insight

Interestingly, the data did not align with our initial expectations of having large interest in the issues our potential product would address. Many parents commented that issues of their children doodling did not apply to their lives and did not find such products compelling to purchase. Despite this, the stories of the parents were an opportunity to learn their actual opinions on the matters our team identified. Through this moment of trial and error, this suggested to our team that our approach of narrowing down concerns to one topic of doodling was a poor route. It limited our perception to one topic, while it would have been better to set a

general topic for parents and give them the role of narrowing their concerns down through storytelling. Simply put, a more broad start was needed for an effective design thinking process.

Approach

Despite this result of using the storytelling tool, this motivated our team to continue to use it. The fact that this tool yielded informative results was proof that it was effective and helpful to our developing business. Our team is continuing to use this tool through one on one interviews with parents to have a more in depth understanding of their concerns and opinions on our startup’s direction for our product through their own stories. This course made me view our target market’s results in a new light, as before, I would have viewed the many unaligning responses as discouraging and see our business model as hopeless. However, the existence of many other tools and ability to reuse tools in a more effective way inspires our team to look for new approaches to grow our business model.

