Project Name
Event-Promoting Social Media
Date:
December 2015
Location:
Honolulu, HI
Type of Project:
MBA Consulting Practicum + Prototype Creation
Role:
Lead Interaction Designer & Consulting Team Member
Project Goal
Conduct market research and identify market gaps and opportunities in order to build a user-centered service and prototype.
Details
Note: Due to existing NDA, the name of this company must remain anonymous.
In a collaboration between the MBA and the Blue Startups incubator programs, my team worked with a startup company for an event-promotion social media platform focused on connecting friends and locals to upcoming events, festivals, and merchant promotions.
Our team was responsible for identifying market gaps, conducting research, and creating a prototype to be used for investor pitch meetings to secure seed funding for the company.
Team Recommendation:
Establish governance for user-generated data, and partner with event organizers, venues, and taxi/ride-share companies by hosting all new event and ticketing information for free (charging a small sales commission).
Hosting events for free would decrease switching costs, create cross-promotion opportunities, leverage credibility of established local organizations, and ultimately attract enough early adopters to reach critical mass.
Lessons Learned
- Co-creating value by involving key stakeholders early (during research) was a critical step to collaborative solution-building, however, involving potential investors in a more informal capacity could have prevented any potential “grand reveal” surprises.
- Early research and testing disproved major assumptions and allowed early design refinement.
- Due to lofty development goals, speed to market was this company’s biggest challenge, and unfortunately, about a year later, Facebook’s event feature dominated the event-announcement space.
Therese Fessenden 