The past week the big thing that happened in team YoungMoney’s life was undoubtedly the hackathon. Our great engineers and designer gave up an ever so valuable Saturday in the name of making funding more accessible for Wesleyan students. A truly noble cause! And all their work was worth it seeing as we ended up with a great first iteration of our product, WedFund, that’s all ready for the upcoming demo.

It was the job my fellow manager, Sarah, and myself to prep the supplementary material for the demo day. This consisted of creating a demo day deck and, more broadly, trying to create a broader narrative in which we could boast about our product. From my perspective, the challenge with our narrative would be defining our customer base. We are in the interesting position of creating a product for which some customers aren’t even aware of their need yet. We believe that the current system not only discourages students from taking advantage of opportunities but also makes it more difficult for a student to happen upon an opportunity organically. Where as now students most frequently must be directed to a certain opportunity, our goal was to create a platform where students could also seek out an opportunity.

The place this problem was most obvious was in our market research. Obviously, doing research on a market that isn’t fully aware of itself poses some challenges. It is for this reason we chose to pursue the method of doing in depth interviews with a smaller number of customers as opposed to a broader random survey. Doing this allowed us to isolate our customer segments a litter better and form a more complete narrative for our final pitch.