Reflection: A Startup Journey

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The Creative Founder : SpinClass edition [Fall 2019]

5 min readDec 16, 2019

IXD Creative Founder @ CCA — Pitch Night!

Classroom Design Incubator

I was really hoping to get a good team in IXD Creative Founder. There were some skilled people in the class I wanted to work with. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I heard good things about it. I was excited to take it having a full semester this year. I felt prepared to enter this class, but I worried about my time. I was excited to be able to join a team with Shicheng, Eva, and Wen after a few workshops, we founded HAXZ. HAXZ was our last names all combined and it was good enough.

Teammates

This instance was one of the first times I’ve worked on a team for so long. It was a great experience working together through trials and difficulty. I learned that if I have a disagreement with design, I need to step forward and make an argument to the best of my ability. There were design opportunities that were missing in our product, although my intuition was in the right place. The design takes time and energy that I didn’t have during the semester, trying to balance all things as a student. In fact, my team was worried about me that I missed one of my meetings arriving 30mins late. Only being able to sleep 7 hours in 3 days, but I wanted that extra time to rest before our pitch night.

Foozi Pitch Night

Looking back I think I did exceptionally well during our pitch. I was well-spoken during the presentation from my friend’s feedback. I felt practiced, but not practiced enough to respond to the real questions. I confident in my responses but had to answer more often than my teammates. In hindsight, we left one question unanswered that we could have responded to.

They had asked us that this is much like OpenTable, and the majority of the responses were about our poor problem definition. Thinking back, I could have said, the problem with OpenTable is, not many restaurants do not participate in the program. Two, it’s not in a younger person’s mental model to check OpenTable. Our product would be more attractive in discovering new restaurants and allowing the user to send invitations to their friends. I think it was hard for them to understand our concept, but that was our fault.

Week 1 — Product Creation

We didn’t know what ideas we really wanted to focus on after brainstorming as a team. I had worked on an earlier project before entering CCA called Foodie Call. One of my classmates remembered it from last semester and suggested that maybe we could work on it. Foodie call was about meeting people based on food preferences, and m teammates found that intriguing.

We went out with our assumptions and started to talk to people to find out more about their behaviors. This is the first of many interviews that we conducted over the semester. With user data, we began a product sprint and started brainstorming solutions for identifying a possible solution. A product sprint helped get our ideas off the ground and start testing them.

Finding good ideas is so essential for a successful product, even if you think it’s a good idea, it is still an assumption. The experience opened my eyes to how you scale from small to large when you design. Design is hard, you really got to know your shit and why you are doing it. When you create the design and your going to design it again to be comprehensible.

Week 4 : Product Invalidation

I remember one of our first disappointments happened when we couldn’t validate our MVP. We had tested some ideas with people, but they couldn’t really demonstrate that it was a real problem. Looking back at this experiment may give us insight into why our reviewers couldn’t understand our problem.

We had thought of simplifying the actual invitation task, instead of the overall factors in the invitation experience. This led us to believe that the preplanning invitation flow was most important because many users could not really think searching wasn’t a big problem. They just don’t have anything to compare it to, just like our reviewers, thinking it wasn’t a big problem because there isn’t anything like it.

Lowfi wireframe Screens of invitation flow

I think this is the moment we designed too specifically for Tom and not more like people like Tom. We wanted to get down that core experience of just the invitation flow, but it wasn’t appealing for most. Reviewers were asking questions about what our product didn’t do and what it does compare to other products. In hindsight, we need to conduct more experiments. Such as actually doing a case study of A v B flow to provide evidence of simplifying the process, that uses the current tools and our product. That would be more compelling and argumentative in persuasion.

Design as an argument, a tool for convincing and telling a story that communicates the product concept. Design is communication between the creator and the receiver. Design artifacts are the premises of the argument to prove the validity of any statement. Mental processes that are recorded in design then summarized into presentations to lead the audience to the same conclusions. Learning how to design, then learn how to communicate that design is the career of any designer.