Defining Product, Understanding Your Audience, Building a Business Model
One of the first polls our 30+ member CUNY entrepreneurial cohort responded to when we kicked off the course months ago was about the biggest challenge for defining our innovation journey: Was it understanding your audience? Was it building your business model? Or was it uncovering a clear idea of the product?
Overwhelmingly people ticked the business model and audience categories. I was one of the few who responded “product.”
Representing the Solutions Journalism Network, I had a clear sense of our business model — we’re not looking for the product to bring us money, and we don’t make our own content. As for our audience, we want to reach communities who would be served by solutions reporting who may not have access to it yet.
But what was the product? Would it be WhatsApp groups? SMS messaging? Social media influencers? A widget?
This is often where many people who are trying to reach underserved and/or BIPOC communities find themselves. They know who they want to reach, and they believe technology can help them get them there, but how?
Thankfully we were awarded a grant last year to find out just that, and were able to invest in R&D. That brought us onto the first step of our journey, for which we enlisted the heroic Jenn Kho, former innovation VP at Huffington Post, and her expert posse. After an extensive survey creation process, Jenn coordinated with People Fish to reach news consumers across fifty states and political spectrums, with a keen eye to ethnic diversity.
The results were revealing: People absolutely want this content, and want it primarily to apply it to their communities and situations. We also realized people still primarily go to the big news outlets and the big social media giants (Facebook still reigned) for news.
This brought us to several different competing ideas around newsletters, influencer campaigns, and aggregators. We needed to then decide amongst these very different — and non competing — options in order to make smart resource and budget decisions. We conducted a series of focus groups, interviewing 25+ people, primarily BIPOC. The most important insight was that people wanted these stories but weren’t going to subscribe to a new service or get off their usual news platforms to find it. They wanted embedded services similar to the technology offered by Public Good that would provide solutions stories right as people were reading the problem-driven news.
It was through working with the CUNY cohort and brainstorming with a fellow member — Shawn Carrié who founded Code the News — that we decided on an embeddable “What’s working” fact box that will help surface solutions content on existing news platforms. A solutions story would be embedded directly within a newsroom’s online articles to meet audiences where they already are and seamlessly take them to more information that can help build their sense of agency. I spent most of the last part of the cohort working to create a prototype and find the right partnerships with the leadership of the SJN team.
This leads me back to the original question asked around business development, product, and audience research. The paradox is that product development happens in stages AND loops: we are constantly looping back to audiences, finance teams, and partners, even as we focus deeply within one stage.
And this leads me to why all of us valued our 100-day sprint and cohort: making is about thinking. The cohort and the course structure gave us the structures of mental and physical space to think and problem solve. All of these stages and work live within that dreaming. And dreams are what all solutions are made of.
