Week 6 of thoughtbot startup Incubator: Senga

Dawn Delatte

Last week, Senga’s founder, Agnes Malantinszky was away for a few days, so we had Senior Developer, Jimmy Thigpen join our weekly LinkedIn live with Jordyn and Lindsey.

Watch last week’s LinkedIn Live here!

Iterating on the Prototype

Designing a clickable prototype is well underway and we’ve begun using the prototype to test some of our assumptions in user interviews. The team is learning a ton from potential customers about their pain points and we’re getting more and more clarity around the business and product opportunity. As we move through this process, some of our assumptions are validated, and some are invalidated. We revisit those assumptions often and take time to understand the patterns we’re hearing and seeing from these “usability tests” and apply that to our plans and future iterations.

As a special treat, we wanted to share a preview of the current prototype with you.

Senga Prototype onboarding screen

Senga Prototype dashboard screen

All Hands on Deck

There are many efforts underway at this stage, and it requires everyone on the team to participate in both the tactical and strategic work. We continue to interview as many people as we can throughout the week and iterate on both content and feedback as we learn.

In addition to conducting these interviews, the team continues to monitor engagement and traction with the Discord community and iterate on marketing messaging to test Senga’s value proposition with our target audience.

Tooling Highlight

We’ve used userinterviews.com for many projects over the last few years, but we’re using it pretty extensively for the Incubator to source participants that align with the market segments and target demographics we’ve honed in on for Senga at this stage.

This tool not only offers a lot of flexibility in how we conduct the interviews and access to great participants, but it has the ability to handle much of the operational aspects of scheduling and completing these interviews–a value proposition that especially resonates with this team.

Next up

For this week, Agnes and the thoughtbot team are continuing to interview users, iterate on the prototype, and begin to solidify plans and next steps for Senga as we wrap up the first Incubator programming.

If you are going through a business validation process, or hope to in the future, this programming can be a resource for you as well. We are also doing weekly LinkedIN Live broadcasts with the incubator team to dig even deeper into what’s being uncovered as it happens. Follow thoughtbot on LinkedIN to catch us live or watch the recordings.