KeyUp’s Team Grows

Mission

KeyUp exists to create a world in which people from low-income backgrounds have paths to the middle class other than getting a 4-year degree. We enable our users to reach those middle class careers by educating them about their non-traditional options and connecting them with existing training services and support programs in a user-friendly way.

Happenings

This week, our main challenges were keeping up with all the great opportunities that came our way. Chris Lofton at Austin Coding Academy hooked us up with a great symbiotic relationship with our new Wordpress developer intern, Alex Meek. Alex, a graduate of Austin Coding Academy, is going to help us out with building an MVP version of KeyUp, which will give him the opportunity to learn about startups and practice building a fairly complicated web app from the ground up. This threw us into a flurry of redesigning our KeyUp screens to suit everything we’ve learned in the last few weeks and gathering together other assets and bits of information to get Alex started.

We also welcomed Joshua Fesi and Samar Ward to the team as our interaction design interns. They’re going to be learning about and helping out with stakeholder management, secondary research, digital marketing, and usability testing.

On the sales side, on the advice of our cohort-mates from MediaTech Ventures, we decided to focus on showing traction through gathering letters of intents (LOIs) from stakeholders up and down the higher ed value chain. From the guidance counselors who will use our product to the larger training services, non-profits, and governmental organizations that will be paying for it, we will be seeking LOIs as tangible demonstrations of interest from all the people we have been speaking to for months. From our users, namely young adults from low-income backgrounds, we will be kicking off a drive to gather email addresses and phone numbers from people interested in using KeyUp.

What’s Next?

This coming week, we are going to solidify a business plan with the help of our mentors. We’ll also be continuing to develop our flows and starting to have meetings with stakeholders about creating letters of intent.