Reflection — Sixth Week — Proto-Pitches & General Progress

Ted Huang
Ted Huang
Nov 1 · 3 min read
Story Arc of Sixth Week

Proto-Pitches

This week’s agenda for MIT+D (Dayeon, Irene, and Mikayla) was fully packed. We, as a team, had to think about what roles do we want to take to move forward and finish our work, together and individually, more efficiently.

The sixth week is also proto-pitches week, and we thought it’d be an excellent opportunity to refine all our past works and bring them onto the table. However, before we could make the new pitch fluent, we had a decent amount of work to revise.

Our business idea did not change that much based on last week’s research and feedback. However, we had to make some adjustments to our business canvas model and comparative landscape. For the business canvas model, we had taken our partnership out of the picture. We learned that it’d be more transparent and feasible this way for our startup to keep functioning. For comparative landscape, we switched our focus on branding — companies with sophisticated brands and high usabilities. This exercise was continually helping us to grasp what it takes to tailor an ethical brand based on features and functionalities.

Choosing Our Roles

Thankfully, since we already had a team week last week, for this week, choosing our roles was an easy process for us. We mutually recognized and decided to use a fair approach to it — volunteer for the roles we want, instead of shouting out what we want others to be. At ease, all of our teammates already know what they want to be, so there are no roles we had to vote on or fight for. As a result, I’m going to be the CEO of MIT+D, Dayeon will be CFO, Irene will be CTO and Mikayla will be CMO.

Customer Acquisition

To the new and exciting, but yet, intimidating checkpoint — customer acquisition, we were indeed confused at first about what our funnel looks like. After studying the diagram and reviewing the examples, we were slowly getting there. What does our funnel look like? For the acquisition, we decided to create possibly two landing pages to attract users and our market since our users and markets are totally different groups. We’d know by tracking these sources by them clicking into our landing pages. We are pretty confident that we’d gain some traction, because of our posters have brought us 29 interested users already.

For activation (part of the funnel), we thought this could be our most challenging part. We need our product to be exciting and feasible enough to serve and keep our target users. If they don’t like or think our product is useless or troublesome, then our problems will be stuck at activation and then affect the retention part of the funnel.

Once our product could bring a good amount of activation and retention, our revenue would be an excellent place to be — the bars and clubs’ would be looking forward to us to promote their business on our app.

Last but not least, the referral part of the funnel is the part we are most excited about. Our product encourages users to share their stories and locations with other friends. Therefore, if our product is popular enough, and the users would automatically refer it to others by nature.

For the Next Step

For the next step, we really want to conduct a new MVP test with some ideal users. Also, moving forward with customer acquisition by creating landing pages and using our own social network to send out these landing pages.

The Creative Founder : SpinClass edition [Fall 2019]

This is a publication to collect the writings of the Creative Founder class at CCA. (Logo credit: Wheel by Miriam Rj from the Noun Project)

Ted Huang

Written by

Ted Huang

IxD Student @CCA, Currently learning lean start-up with UX/UI, also part-time painter and musician; full-time thinker and explorer.

The Creative Founder : SpinClass edition [Fall 2019]

This is a publication to collect the writings of the Creative Founder class at CCA. (Logo credit: Wheel by Miriam Rj from the Noun Project)

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