Scratchpad Spotlight: Danielle Rubenfeld on Pivoting and User Interviews
This winter, from Jan 2nd — Jan 23rd, we piloted our Scratchpad Fellowship, which gave 5 teams of students 4 weeks, free desk space, and $200 to pilot their early-stage ideas and test them for viability. We adapted this test from Four94 mentor Avni Patel Thompson’s Four Week Test. This blog post is from one of our Scratchpad Fellows.
My co-founder Andrew and I tested out our startup idea, Alea, in the Four94 Scratchpad Fellowship Program. Alea leverages artificial intelligence to offer grammatical feedback to help English language learners on their journey to fluency. Heres some of the lessons we learned:
1. Understand who is going to purchase your product
This seems obvious, but it can be tricky. When working with users it’s easy to get caught up in the details of perfecting your product. We were so focused on designing our product to help ESL instructors and students we lost track of who would actually purchase it, the ESL directors. We conducted user tests in a few different ESL classes and got some positive feedback from students and teachers. During our the fellowship, we connected with ESL directors and soon realized that the need in the classroom wasn’t as big as we thought. It’s great to be excited about your idea, but don’t lose track of the customer, frequently ask yourself, “Who is going to buy my product and what do they need?”
2. Don’t be afraid to pivot
Andrew and I had been working on Alea together for the past 6 months, we loved the idea and were passionate about helping our users learn English. When we realized there wasn’t a need in the classroom, we were upset but knew we had to pivot our idea. Pivoting seems scary but is actually very common for startups. Re-thinking your idea with the insights you have learned can be the key to launching your business.
3. Don’t ask your users loaded questions
Although it’s tempting to ask your users, “Would you use this product?” and “Do you like this product?” these questions are actually pretty awful for getting honest feedback. Most people won’t actively tell a stranger that they don’t like the idea. As you’re trying to learn from your users, make sure that you aren’t fishing for compliments. During this program, we discovered that the most useful questions were along the lines of “What is something that this product is missing?” or “What would be the hardest part of integrating this into your daily life?”
4. Seek out a mentor
The Four94 Fellowship connected us with a mentor that helped us throughout the program. Our mentor provided us with a third party perspective which was crucial in helping us to pivot and make some tough decisions. Launching a startup is difficult, so having the support of someone with experience is super helpful in conquering the inevitable hurdles.
