Reflection  - Learning Launch

Challenge

I and my friend started working on a startup which aimed at increasing research  interests among students. We thought the idea is really good and started 1 of our  several services on the same. But the results were not as expected. We were not  getting very positive feedback on our product. We wanted to analyze and redesign the  product and our service so as to reach more people and fulfil our target of improving  students count in the research domain. We wanted to analyse the shortcomings of our  idea, the behaviour of our customers and their thoughts regarding the same.    Selection

We both realised that we made a number of assumptions while making the business  plan. We needed to know the actual data using a few experiments and user research.    Application

We started by focusing on our goal that at the end what do we want to achieve: ‘To  increase research interests among students’. And what are the reasons that there is a  need for doing so? We did user research to find that. We found many reasons, one of  them being the low pay in research than in the corporate world. We can not increase the  pay, of course, it’s not in our hand, but we can do something else. We tried to find out  why those students who are interested in research ultimately end up doing corporate  jobs. We note down the problems faced by them in making their career in the research  domain and focused on one of the problems at a time. We built a hypothesis and  designed a few solutions to those problems. Multiple solutions for each problem. Then  we picked one at a time and performed experiments to find the best solution for that  problem.     After finalising the solutions to 3 problems we built a business model around those  solutions. We made a complete timeline and used agile framework to distribute work  among the team. At last, we started working on the project. And the results were  awesome. We got much better feedback on our new products and services.

Insight

This powerful tool ‘learning launch’ helped us in realising that some of our assumptions  were wrong. We worked around them and finally found a good hypothesis to play  around with. Our team is really happy with the results.     Approach

Learning launch was the best tool for us as the beginning on our project, but at this  stage, we need to use more tools like visualization and storytelling to attract more  customers and explain the need of the hour.

