Applying classroom learning in the real world
Time and again, lessons I learned in Medill’s San Francisco classes found their way into my work at a startup.
As an undergraduate, I had heard the myths about classroom learning finding real-world applications, but — as someone who triple-majored in the liberal arts — I never witnessed any of that applicability myself. Never in the course of my job after college was I asked to analyze the structure of a sonnet or expound upon the impacts of America’s post-war foreign policy. Yes, surprisingly, even my extensive knowledge of Edgar Allen Poe’s aesthetic philosophy never found much purchase during our magazine’s weekly P&L discussions. So, like many jaded former liberal arts students, I came to the conclusion that nothing I learned in a classroom would ever actually help me in real life.
Then I spent a quarter in Northwestern’s San Francisco program. Over the course of 12 weeks, my cohort and I took three classes: Mobile Web Development, Design Thinking and Research, and Business of Innovation. The first of the three expanded upon our previous quarter’s work with front-end web development and thus helped me solidify my somewhat shaky familiarity with coding. The last two classes introduced me to a number of concepts that I, almost immediately, began employing at my internship.
Two days a week I interned at a company called Subtext, a media startup led by JulieAnn McKellogg and David Cohn. Subtext is a one-to-many texting service, where users subscribe to receive text messages from their favorite reporters. Subscribers pay between $1.99 — $4.99 a month for these messages, which generates an entirely new source of revenue for the journalists’ employers, a.k.a. the publishers. And in an era where publishers would trade their firstborn for a new source of income, Subtext has found a warm welcome in newsrooms across the country.
During my work with the company, I had a number of opportunities to see lessons I learned in Design Thinking and Research and Business of Innovation come to life in front of my eyes. This was a new — and very welcome — experience for me, so below I’ve listed a few of the concepts that made their way from classroom application to bona fide real-world utility.
1. “Crossing the Chasm” Sales Pitch
For our Business of Innovation class, our professor Birju Shah asked us to read a number of canonical business texts, one of which was “Crossing the Chasm” by Geoffrey Moore. The book contains a handful of illuminating insights, but one stood out in particular. Moore postulates that early adopters of a new technology are willing to put up with an imperfect product if they’re convinced that the product might give them a competitive advantage.
During my time at Subtext, JulieAnn and I conducted multiple demos of the product to curious publishers. Time and again, the publishers would express hesitation about investing in a product that essentially asked them to create a user base from scratch. And, in response, JulieAnn would essentially trot out Moore’s concept, convincing the skeptical customers that texting was the next big wave of media innovation, and that their company could either be on the leading edge of that change or they could be behind the curve. By turning “We’ll have to build up an audience from zero” to “Everyone has to build up an audience from zero, but you’re getting a head start,” JulieAnn was able to sell a number of customers on the concept.
2. Persona Creation
In our Design Thinking and Research class, taught by Anthony Jakubiak and Hannah Hudson, we received a crash course in the basics of human design and visual communication, which introduced me to several helpful business practices that I have used time and again in my classes since then. The human design process is, as its name would imply, a process, so isolating one component of it and putting that part of the process to work is not quite as helpful as employing the entire shebang, but doing so can still help product designers glean some helpful insights.
At Subtext, that’s exactly what I did. More specifically, I used the persona creation technique to help inform my decision-making process when creating Subtext’s social branding. In class, Anthony and Hannah impressed upon us the importance of knowing exactly who you’re designing for before beginning to design. To do so, we used feedback systems like interviews, surveys and research to create personas of our target demographic. We then hung up pictures of those personas in our workspaces, so we could constantly keep in mind who we’re designing for, what their needs are, and why they would use our product.
When creating the Instagram and Twitter accounts for Subtext, I used the processes we’d been taught in order to create target personas for both social platforms, each of which attracted different users, with different needs and different desires. The voice and tone of our Twitter, in particular, was especially important, because our product caters to media professionals, and Twitter is a haven for journalists.
My baseline concept — working from the idea that “texting is better than tweeting” and then treating our Twitter account as a platform for ragging on Twitter — really hit it off with our followers, and David ended up really running with the concept. Creating a social media tone that communicated our brand identity while also resonating with our target demographic was a huge success, and one that I couldn’t have done until taking Hannah and Anthony’s class.
3. “Whole Product Offering”
Finally, another concept we learned in Birju’s class — “whole product offering” — found its way into my work with Subtext a handful of times. The idea posits that while your initial offer to the world is a highly targeted, very specific concept, as your company scales up and tries to “cross the chasm” from early adopters to the early majority, your product needs to change. This is because the needs of your initial audience are different than the needs of mainstream users.
As a result, you constantly need to be taking in feedback about your product with the intention of adding offerings to it that make the product more appealing to a larger consumer base. With Subtext, our initial product offering was very specific: a one-to-many texting service for journalists. However, demo after demo revealed tiny little asks from publishers: “Could you turn this list into a spreadsheet so we can combine the new user data with our regular database?” “Could the product be used by non-journalists, who have entirely different goals than writers?”
Questions like this and more have prompted Subtext to continue to adapt, leaning heavily into the sports world — where we’ve had a lot of success — and working with publishers to emphasize Subtext more as a “retention play,” i.e. an added resource to get subscribers to stay subscribed, rather than as a standalone media product. Seeing JulieAnn gather this feedback and, more impressively, happily adjust Subtext’s offerings to cater to customer needs, taught me a lot about the right way to look at iterating your product. Subtext might have started as one thing, but its final form will look different. It’s impossible to know at the moment, but JulieAnn and David’s willingness to be flexible will be key to Subtext’s success.
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