Product Concept refinement & validation (Week 3)

We eventually run out our social connections and started reaching out to illustrators that we didn’t know. My way of searching junior illustrators was messaging the ones whose follower were lower than 10k. Luckily, it turned out that I was right. They are mostly just graduate from illustration major in art school and have freelanced for about two years. Even though they were very responsive and were willing to help, we still hadn’t done with all the interviews until Thursday because of constant scheduling. Hopefully next time we can contact them beforehand and start interviews on weekends so both of us, our team and our interviewees, are more free and we can also have enough time to synthesize our findings.

As we were synthesizing our findings, we found out that their behavioral patterns and thoughts contradict our hypothesis. They didn’t care about copyright that much and they got inspired by everyday surroundings instead of other illustrators. So we decided to pivot our idea. Killing our original ideas wasn’t that hard, but knowing the next step was. Illustrators faced many problems and we had trouble picking which one we should solve.

At first, because we heard that they get inspired from artists with other fields, they need feedback to grow, and the traditional illustration market is decreasing, so our early concept was a platform for them to collaborate with artist/designers in other fields to help them get inspired, get feedback, and get more job opportunities.

However, after we presented this idea and started brainstorming for MVP, we weren’t sure if we wanted to stick with it. We knew that the biggest challenge that junior illustrators had was their unstable finance situation but we weren’t sure if collaborating can actually solve that. Moreover, there were already many existing sites, such as “Dribble”, which provides very similar functions. We also thought of other directions regard to job opportunities and payment for freelancer. However, those problems were systemic and they weren’t clear or specific enough for us to know how to deal with them. Because of the lack of consensus and time pressure, we decided to still use collaborative platform as our MVP first then test it and see how it goes.

Currently, we have done two interviews. Both of their feedback contradicts our collaborative platform concept. Before this week, our team worked smoothly. We reached consensus easily and efficiently as long as we communicated. However, this week we were all a bit lost and I think we finally reached the phase when it was time to face challenges and disagreements. But I think that not knowing what to do isn’t actually a bad thing. As discussion time increases, I start to observe my teammates characteristics and the ways they communicate. Also, as we can’t come up with idea, we might be willing to rely more on feedback from our interviewees. Hopefully, by doing so, we will avoid wasting too much time on trying to come up with ideas based on our assumptions.