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Project 1: Product Specification

Learning Goals

  • Practice hypothesis testing and the MVP loop
  • Refine your product idea

Project Context

You and your team will be spending the rest of the semester building a product prototype for your startup. This assignment is intended to help you build something viable (that I hope will become the basis for a real company someday).

Please read the assignment in its entirety before starting. As you move through parts 1 and 2 and refine your ideas/pivot, keep in mind the legal/regulatory/technical questions from part 3. In other words, try to make sure you're working on something legal and feasible even as your idea changes.

Deliverables

These deliverables should be somewhat familiar from homeworks one and two. Now, you're doing them "for real," trying to hone in on the product you and your group will be producing for the rest of the semester.

1. Initial value proposition/product description

Turn-in instructions

Please answer the following questions:

  1. What is the big idea of your startup? What problem are you solving? What is your solution? What makes your solution special and distinguishes it from the competition? (1-2 paragraphs)
  2. What is/are the value proposition(s) for your product? (1-2 sentences)

2. Viability analysis: do people want it?

In these exercises, you'll collect some initial viability data, and make a plan for collecting more as you build out your prototype.

2a. Measure/demonstrate that people want your product before building anything

Recall the unbiased discovery you did during HW1. You're going to collect more data this time, from a broad range of members of your target demographic. If your target demographic is gymgoers, for example, you should talk to at least a few non-student gymgoers. This will help you determine who your target demographic actually is (and thus refine your value prop).

You will have 20 or more discovery conversations across your group, with each team member conducting at least two conversations. These conversations should give you valuable data about the problem you're trying to solve; if you haven't been forced to refine your idea, at least slightly, over the course of these conversations, you are likely doing something wrong.

Turn-in instructions

Please turn in:

  1. Your raw notes, demonstrating that every group member participated in at least two interviews.
  2. The five most useful questions you asked. (1 paragraph)
  3. The five most useful pieces of concrete data you collected. (1 paragraph)
  4. An updated version of your value proposition/product description (question 1), informed by your discovery. Describe what changed and why. (3+ paragraphs)

2b. Measure/demonstrate that people want your product after building something minimal

In class, we've discussed several ways to get feedback from users without building an entire application:

  • Concierge MVPs
  • Smokescreen MVPs
  • Paper prototypes
  • Kickstarter-style campaigns
  • ...etc.

Choose which of these makes sense for your startup. Then, build, deploy, and advertise it for at least a week. You can drum up business from your friends, through flyers on campus, on social media, etc. Be creative!

After you gather feedback from people, you may want to change your value proposition or the entire idea of the product!

Turn in instructions (1-2 pages)

Choose at least one data-gathering approach for your startup and describe:

  1. Why you chose it.
  2. What you built (with a link or pictures if relevant; for a smokescreen MVP, for example, please link to the MVP webpage or demo).
  3. How you gathered feedback (e.g., for your smokescreen MVP, where and how did you circulate the link?).
  4. What you learned from the feedback (e.g., did a thousand people view your webpage, while only one signed up for the list? What does that tell you?)
  5. An updated version of your value proposition/product description (question 1), informed by your data gathering. Describe what changed and why.

2c. Prototype plan: how little can you build and still get valuable feedback?

As you're refining your idea, it's important to figure out what you're going to build (and possibly start building!). In this milestone, you'll sketch out (a) your first two MVP sprints and (b) how you will get feedback on the user stories implemented in each sprint from real users.

Describe, at a high level, the user stories you are building.

  1. Write the user stories for your product. Make sure you use the proper template:
    • As a <user>, I want <action> so that <benefit>.
    • Estimate each user story's size as a t-shirt (Small, Medium, Large, Xtra-Large)
    • Assign each user story a primary and secondary owner.
  2. Prioritize the user stories into your product backlog. Assign each one to be done in a particular sprint.
  3. Enter these user stories into your GitHub Issues page on GitHub. Turn in a link to your GitHub Issues page.

Sprint 1 turn in instructions (1-2 pages)

  1. What user stories will be done in this first sprint?
  2. Why are they the right user stories to work on now?
  3. How will you use these user stories to collect data about your what your users want?
  4. Describe what you will build in a reasonably low-level technical detail (e.g., what frameworks will you use, what API endpoints will you expose, what UI components will you create, etc).

Sprint 2 turn in instructions (1-2 pages)

  1. What user stories do you anticipate will be done in this second sprint?
  2. Why are they the right user stories to work on?
  3. How will you use these user stories to collect data about your what your users want?
  4. Describe what you will build in a reasonably low-level technical detail (e.g., what frameworks will you use, what API endpoints will you expose, what UI components will you create, etc).

3. Viability analysis: are there reasons not to build it? Can you build it?

Answering these questions will help you avoid attempting the impossible; please upload your answers for each.

Are there any legal risks associated with your product? For example, could it condone or support illegal acts? Describe any potential legal risks you could foresee. This will require online research.

3b. Regulatory risk turn in instructions (1+ paragraph)

Are there any regulatory risks associated with your product? For example, some medical or health products may require approval from the FDA or other government agency. This adds time and a potential to fail to obtain regulatory clearance. Describe any potential regulatory risks you could foresee. This will require online research.

3c. Competitor risk turn in instructions (3+ paragraph)

Describe your product's competitive landscape, including its three closest competitors. What do these products do? How is your product different?

3d. Technical risk turn in instructions (3+ paragraph)

Describe, in a relatively fine-grained level of technical detail, what you are planning to build.

What tools/frameworks/libraries are you planning to use for:

  • The frontend
  • The infrastructure
  • The database
  • Other technical core features. For example, if your product uses computer vision, what library are you planning to use?

Explain why your group has the background to build these features.

For example, if you're building devtools for ML data processing, please outline your experience with ML and data processing.

3e. This-is-a-semester-long-course risk turn in instructions (1+ paragraph)

Please justify why it is possible to build a prototype product over the course of this semester-long class.

As one anti-example, fabricating new chips for ML workloads is certainly an exciting thing to do, but it's also something you can't do over the next couple months. Avoid such endeavors.

4. Viability analysis: can you make any money?

Turn-in instructions

Please turn in answers to the following questions:

  1. What evidence do you have that people are willing to pay for your product? (2 paragraphs)
  2. What is your monetization plan? (1+ paragraph)
  3. What is your projected revenue across the first 10 users of your application? 50? 100? 1,000? (1-2 paragraphs)
  4. What is the value of similar competitors? (1-3 paragraphs)