Lessons Learned : Final Blog Post from the Creative Founder studio

A photo of Glo-Up with Kate Rutter (our professor) and Bryan Hord (our technical advisor)!!

Before I start this post, I’d like to take a second to take a deep breath.

PHEEEEEEEWWWWWWWWW

That was a long journey filled with personal victories and tribulations. I’m not exaggerating here — in 15 weeks, I truly felt like a jaded startup founder with multiple versions of our product and with a deeper understanding of our users, my teammates, and myself. While it was full of ups and downs, it was definitely a unique experience and one that was deeply personal to every one of us. I’m going to be sharing my thoughts regarding some of the lessons learned in this class, what I thought I had personally done well, and what I feel I could have improved on.

Before this class,

I had a general sense of what to expect, understanding that I was to build a profitable business for a desirable product. I also knew that we had to present it on pitch day to a panel of investors and industry experts, but I had no idea what my product was, the faces and quirks of my teammates, and what my investors would look like.

The Creative Founder studio has been nothing I expected. Things I expected to go well — research, product management, creating an MVP — did not go as smoothly as expected, while things I expected to be super tough — business models, burn rates, and investment asks — were not as daunting as I thought.

Throughout this whole studio, I bore in mind this paragraph by William Hutchison Murray which we read in class on our first day:

“Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too.”

and I found it to resonate deeply with my experience.

Commitment fluctuates, but will is permanent.

Just as relationships falter and friendships wilt, my commitment to being a Creative Founder came in undulating waves, often affected by life circumstances, the workload of my other classes, my personal levels of energy, team-related conflicts, and the growing wisdom which came with being the CEO of my team. Nonetheless, I truly committed whenever I humanly could, and against all odds (unsuccessful feedback sessions, frustrating team brainstorming sessions) am truly and fervently proud of team Glo-Up’s journey and final pitch.

I did this…

Our studio work presented itself as weekly pitches that we had to prepare for, but with those pitches were specific requirements and activities we had to conduct as a team.

As part of Customer Development :

• Needfinding and Problem-solution fit
• Product sprints and Early MVP
• MVP Experiments

As part of Business Development :

• Business Model Canvas
• Markets

As part of Customer Acquisition :

• Acquisition Experiments
• Metrics
• Landing Pages

As part of Getting Started (aka $$$$ business!!!) :

• Partnerships, burn rate, revenue, resources, values, culture

…alongside 3 rehearsals (2 proto pitches and 1 final rehearsal).

With that, we present to you :

Glo-Up, a mental wellness service for student athletes that helps recognize and regulates mental stress!

Recognizing stress :

Glo-Up features a smart wristband that is able to track physiological signals to identify mental stress, through photoplethysmogram (PPG) sensors and galvanic skin response (GSR) sensors.

Regulating stress :

When the smart wristband senses emotional stress in its wearer, it prompts them to chat via the mobile app, which functions as a stress journaling tool that helps them reflect on their emotions while decompressing.

Here’s our final presentation.

I learned

1. How to work more efficiently and fairly as a team

In my opinion, I found the way we completed weekly requirements to be most exciting and pretty representative of our collective learning as a team.

At the start, we would focus on dividing tasks equally between all group members (in terms of volume), and do the tasks together as a team.

At the end, we grew to be way more efficient, through :

• splitting the work based on expertise levels, learning goals + interests, our specific roles (e.g. burn rate for the CFO)
• learning how to divide and conquer, for example, two people would do guerrilla interviews at UC Berkeley while the other two would work on planning the demo video
• learning how to put some slack between due dates of tasks, to keep in mind buffer time in case schedules collide, or a teammate fails to deliver.

I felt like we had for the most part successfully aligned what would help us work more quickly, and to the personal interests of my teammates. I felt like as CEO this was a balance I wanted to keep, and consciously sacrificed a little bit of efficiency (and a little bit of joy, honestly, when things got tough) to keep team morale up while keeping our gears oiled.

What was difficult : Of course, it was impossible to feel like a good CEO 100% of the time. While it generally out of my element to make “insistent requests” of people, I found the week leading up to pitch day that it was much more efficient for me to suggest what my teammates could work on, given that we had to maximize our time most efficiently.

2. Prioritizing what to work on, and what to show

Meeting weekly requirements was something that Glo-Up did not always effectively deliver. I recall a time we were running our first acquisition experiments and our slide deck had nothing to do with conversion rates, because we were busy creating a beautiful and fully-functioning landing page! Our score for that week, a sad 81/100 proved as a wake-up call.

Since then, Glo-Up had been way better about meeting class requirements, understanding that procrastinating on weekly deliverables would lead to a lot more stress and anxiety down the road. Nearing the end of our journey, we were also a lot more intentional and well-planned, even anticipating the next steps of our journey as a startup. This deep planning was shown in our creation of the demo video, which required a lot of coordination and logistics planning on our end.

What was difficult : I think it was sometimes difficult to line up my teammates’ schedules, and this was in part due to class schedules, and also differing levels of commitment to this studio. Additionally, I found it difficult to let go of my own concepts (which I held strongly), but grew to be better at letting go (for example, letting go of the social-oriented stress regulation concept when it turned out to be weakly validated).

• Thank you so much, Kate, for the 30-minute phone call the day before our pitch! From that phone call alone, I learnt what’s important to show about my process (for example, the big win when it came to testing our MVP with 4 rowers from UIUC) in a manner that presented my product favorably yet honestly.

3. How to lead as a teammate

Growing up, I found myself lucky to have been in positions of leadership, be it leading student clubs, non-profit groups and in my paid work. However, it felt really unnatural to assume the position of a CEO in my team. It felt uncomfortable because these were really talented teammates that I had, and I did not feel in any way more ‘worthy’ of a managerial position. Of course, all four roles were regarded as equals, but there was an element of the CEO that seemed to be having my fingers in a lot of work, which brought intense levels of joy and frustration at the same time.

After the class, I not only grew as a teammate (always trying to be reliable and communicating like I cannot — like leaving for a trip to Boston), but learned how to embrace my leadership, and felt comfortable that these teammates had lent this position of authority to me for this studio. From embracing that side of myself, I think we managed to achieve higher levels of efficiency and were able to try many more things as a team.

What was difficult : I did not know how to breach difficult team conversations (based on individual members’ work ethic) without being explosive or insensitive. I think a little more leadership support for CEOs (without escalating it to a professor-student conversation) would have been helpful in learning how to manage conflict, especially when a lot of these things are not within my direct control as a fellow student.

When I go out in the world,

I’d like to :

• Harness my project management skills towards the causes I’m already passionate in, such as working with ShelterTech as a program lead (I got promoted!!!!!). Aside from connecting individuals experiencing homelessness to resources with sf.gov, I’m excited and passionate about possibly joining other initiatives like the Global Shaper (by the World Economic Forum), and in my personal artistic endeavors :)
• Bring this grit and resilience (which I never knew I had) towards my future projects — when there’s a will, there’s a way. I’d like to accomplish what we did together, channeling the essence of “it’s f*cking raining, but I’m still trekking down to UC Berkeley to interview 14 random students” + “I’m definitely breaking into the Cal gym to talk to the head coach” in my projects.
• Use the Microstories for Pitching method to share design concepts with my teammates in a compelling manner. This proved to be incredibly useful in presenting our value proposition to our panel of investors during final pitch day, without verbally saying the words “value proposition”. ;)
• Ensure that I align with the values of my future companies and teammates before embarking on a project. While part of the beauty of Creative Founder is not being able to choose your set of teammates, I found that similar values would provide a strong foundation to weather obstacles in product and business development.

Overall, this was an incredibly journey filled with frustrations and yells of triumph alike. I loved this taste of being a startup founder and would potentially start my own in the realms of mental wellness, economic empowerment, and homelessness alleviation :-)

Thank you so much Kate Rutter, for an amazing experience, and thank you so much Rita Lei, Vicky Yang and Richard Cho for being part of my journey!