I planned to launch my own service product in my Entrepreneurial Design class at the School of Visual Arts. Our class covered the entire process, from developing a business plan to raising funds. Since I am passionate about developing and launching products by collaborating with engineers, I decided to build a service that would allow people in the IT industry to work together, develop a product, and network with each other.
To meet the two goals of networking and building products, I chose a team-matching platform for current students and recent graduates who want to build a product with a multifunctional team and launch it in the real world. Building and promoting our service required a lot of time and effort, so I worked with my teammate, Nayeon, who has the same goal as me.
Why are we targeting students and recent graduates?
We thought a lot about who are user groups should be. Although some experienced people working as engineers, designers, or product managers in the IT industry may want to start side projects to build services or products for their future businesses and careers, we are targeting students and recent graduates, since most of them want to gain experience building collaborative products with different stakeholders so that they can become more competitive candidates when looking for jobs in the future. This user group will make our service sustainable after successfully launching their collaborative products, because they will be able to mentor younger students by giving them advice.
Biggest challenges we faced during the project
We are planning to raise $70 per person and return half, $35, to them if they successfully launch their projects within a specific time frame. Our service is like a hackathon, in which participants must develop their project in a limited time.
We were able to launch our service successfully and decided to call our product “Pathfinder,” which stands for becoming a pathfinder for the IT industry.
However, we did not know how to effectively promote our service in way that could attract many people and raise funds. We tried promoting our service on Reddit and Discord communities with a Gumroad link. However, we did not receive as many responses as we had hoped from these communities.
We assume that many people did not know how our platform works and did not trust it. After further consideration, we decided to provide a free beta service to attract students and recent graduates. If our initial users successfully launch their products, it will provide great examples for future use and help us learn.
We also changed our strategy for attracting users. We contacted engineering students and design students directly via Linkedin to ask them how they felt about our platform and asked them if they would be interested in joining the side projects we are planning. We could see some of them were interested in what we are doing, although we could not get any responses from online communities.
What would be our next step
Our goal is to continue developing our platform and attracting users. After finishing our free beta service in the first term, we will launch our platform in earnest by receiving a participation fee of $70 per person in the next term.
We obtained great feedback from our classmates during our class. One of them said it would be awesome if we would host some workshops that covered helpful tips for students; for example, senior students who experienced technical interviews and successfully found internships can offer tips for technical interviews, like the whiteboard challenge. This will be a major benefit for users who participate in our side projects.
Takeaways
Thanks to our instructors, Melanie and Hilary, I had a great experience launching my product. There were many challenges regarding the time, cost, and promotion efforts, but it has been a great opportunity and I will continue trying to grow our platform while building a network with other people in the IT industry.
