RealWorld

In the first week of the Product Management course, we were split into groups of 3 and tasked with coming up with an idea that we would develop into a product over the 4 weeks of the class. I was partnered with LB and Driz, 2 girls from UVA who would turn out to be great partners, as we gelled immediately while some of the other groups faced growing pains and were stuck in the "storming" phase for a while.

We decided to go with my idea that I have been thinking about for the last few months, an online platform that serves as the one-stop shop for recent college graduates going through the apartment hunting process. We called it RealWorld, a name I'm still not a huge fan of (I'm open to ideas!!) and pitched it to the class as a Pecha Kucha, a presentation style in which you present 20 pictures (no words) for 20 seconds each. It was a strange format, but helpful in thinking about the idea in a different way.

We would be following Lean, Agile principles throughout this class and our product development process for RealWorld, and we started by thinking about the underlying problem, writing down all of our assumptions, and filling out a Business Model Canvas and Value Proposition Canvas.

In the second week, we made a subtle, zoom-in pivot to focus on the apartment and roommate matching aspect of the one stop shop idea. Here is our Validation Presentation from the end of that week that covers our pivot, canvases, survey to validate assumptions among iX and Yale students, still unvalidated assumptions, and next steps at that point.

I also drew a few mockups on Balsamiq and then built a landing page during the second week that can be found at ix-realworld.herokuapp.com. Perhaps the coolest part of this whole experience was actually getting random people to sign up. I posted the landing page on the Boston Housing Facebook page and Apartments Wanted section of Boston Craigslist, and within 24 hours we had 5 signups. I sent these early adopters a couple of apartment listings I found on Zillow, and 2 of them actually got back to me. One asked to see one of the apartments I sent to him, and I just directed him to the landlord listed on Zillow, while the other agreed to do a Skype interview with me. We talked for about 15 minutes about her apartment hunting process (she was having trouble finding one room she could share with a roommate for $450 each - no duh!) and she complimented the personal service of the site, as well as my smile!

In the third week, we improved the design of the landing page to remove "we" language and focus on the customer perspective, more clearly answer the "3 what questions" (What is it? What's in it for me? What do I do next?), and make the Madlib signup form easier to complete. We also continued to source feedback, in the form of interviews with friends who had recently gone through the apartment hunting process, Quora posts asking landlords about their experience, and usability testing on the site. Finally, we made a few user personas, another tool to remind us to think like the customer. Here is the Week 3 Presentation.

In the final week, we focused on growth and reaching more customers. I added Google Analytics to the site and built a dashboard to make it easy to follow our key metrics (number of sign ups, bounce rate, etc.) and then we started marketing. I sent an email to the ~75 members of the Yale Class of 2017 that are going to be in Boston next year and set up search ads with Google Adwords, which brought us 13 clicks for $9.63 for a $0.73 average cost per click. We also created our social media presence with a RealWorld Facebook page and Twitter handle, and promoted the Facebook page, getting another 600 views and 3 clicks.  

For the final MVP presentation, we fleshed out our plan to make this product a success over the coming months. We laid out the goals for versions 2, 3, and 4, developed a product roadmap and go to market plan to guide us there, defined the business model, and assessed our market size as well as the competitive landscape and our competitive advantages. 

Overall, it was a great learning experience to go through the motions of building a startup under lean principles. It was a lot like my experience building DoUNoA last semester in my "Apps, Software, and Entrepreneurship" class, but you always learn new things along the way. I'm not sure if I will continue pursuing RealWorld, but I had a great time building the MVP this month at iXperience.