Reflection Post : Acquisition Experiment Part 1 and Alum Panel

This week, the VR3 team launched Glo-Up, a holistic mental wellness service that senses when you’re feeling stressed, visualizes your emotions, and uses that graphic visualization as a conversation prompt to encourage your friends to reach out to you. Aside from setting our landing page up (with the help of our amazing CTO Rita), we continued MVP tests at the UC Berkeley Memorial Stadium gymnasium.

(If I ever get arrested for trespassing and solicitation, just know it was most definitely for user research ;))

On launching our landing page and working towards acquisition

Visit our landing page! :-)

What we did well

  • From dividing our team into different roles, we were able to assign tasks to individual roles in an efficient manner. Rita, VR3’s CTO was in charge of researching analytics and how we could integrate it into our landing page, and she did a brilliant job of it. As the rest of us were focused on other tasks, she was able to focus on technology research that directly assisted our acquisition experiment this week.
  • Additionally, we tapped into our team’s unique skills to craft our first look of Glo Up’s look and feel. As Vicky has industrial design skills, and I have copywriting skills, these elements contributed to the landing page’s eventual visual design.

What could have gone better

  • However, we definitely spent too much time on creating a great landing page and figuring the details out. This was in part due to our late-ish pivot that required us to split time more evenly between the MVP and our landing page. In the future, I’d like for the team to settle into our new roles and find ways for us to do things more efficiently.

Confidence in our team’s work

Overall, we were confident in understanding who our users were from the research we had collected, and from the interviewees who had unanimously declared that they would ‘download our app in a heartbeat’. However, we were unsure in the willingness of our users to pay for our product, and would like to test our MVP further to ensure that it is indeed desirable for our users.

Next Steps

  • Set up a booth at UC Berkeley this week and speak to even more users
  • Work on our TAM SAM SOM diagrams and rethink our numbers

Hearing from the alum panel

This week, a group of 9 creative founder designers from the last studio visited the class for an hour for us to ask any questions we might have. We asked several questions about the acquisition experiment, pitch day, how to best test our MVP, and their general experience working in a team.

What could have gone better

  • Among the three teams (VR3, HAXZ, and MIT+D), we could have come up with a more systemic way to ask questions and ensure that each team would have the same amount of air time.

Overall, this was a fast-paced cycle filled with gradients (wee!), a few hiccups in our acquisition experiment, and lots of learning opportunities. However, I’m still excited about newer iterations of our product and can’t wait to see where this will go!

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Rachel Poonsiriwong
The Creative Founder : SpinClass edition [Fall 2019]

Lead Researcher @ShelterTech. Designed at @Microsoft, @Autodesk, @Dell. I love designing productivity tools and uplifting vulnerable communities!