I have the pleasure of supporting the Early Stage & Product Validation team at thoughtbot, which is a team of product strategists that partner with founders, entrepreneurs and early-stage start-ups. Our team has a few approaches to helping founders take their idea and translate it into a product strategy, as well as producing resources to help them get to the next level with stakeholders. Those resources include Figma Prototypes, Proof of Concepts and Marking “hype” Landing pages to tell their story.
We cater each of our projects to our clients because in particular start-ups come to us with a variety of expertise and needs. Some are looking for a technical recommendation and feasibility assessment, some want to showcase the strong visual representation of their future MVP experience. This year we built out our services to better showcase the types of projects founders are seeing success with, most recently updating our Investment Pitch Package.
A deliverable that we’ve found that has been hugely helpful, is not only the product vision and a validated prototype, but also a marketing lander that allows our client to showcase their product, value proposition and begin collecting interested parties. Having a mechanism to start to grow a group of interested target users gives the start-up both an audience for continued research and proof of traction in investor conversations.
This week we are thrilled to have published a new case study walking through our work with Oromoon. Stephanie Waley, the Oromoon founder, had an idea she wanted to explore. We worked together to not only uncover the most impactful first version, but also designed the MVP experience and a marketing lander to help her grow her business successfully. She didn’t have to wait to be in the app store to start building her audience and driving excitement. With the website she was able to do that in parallel with app creation. The thoughtbot team had a wonderful time partnering with Oromoon. We find such fulfillment working with someone so passionate and the visuals we produced for her product and her lander, are something our design team is very proud of.
The secret sauce behind our early stage work, in either the Investment Pitch Package or Discovery Sprint, is the strategic conversations we facilitate upfront. Those dedicated activities align the group on the most important piece of our product and establish the business differentiator. Spending time thinking through user personas, problems to be solved, and our critical path all go a long way in validating the opportunity and understanding where their product can disrupt the market.
If you have a product idea or are looking to grow your start-up, we would love to work together to plan the right sprint that gets you the resources and confidence you need.