Chris had done a great deal of research and facilitated a number of conversations seeking input on his idea and vision for The Standard. Having successfully managed a venture previously, he understood the importance of clarifying the path forward with target audiences before making a substantial investment in the creation of a custom product. Social Media and community based apps are a highly profitable space, but also a crowded market, so it was imperative to have concrete findings that informed The Standard’s unique value proposition, go to market plan, overall positioning, and primary feature set.

We then facilitated discussions to iron out our research plan. This included the creation of a validation framework that highlighted the goals of our research, the hypothesis or key assumptions we wanted to validate and the structure of our experiment. We then defined the attributes of our target users - Influencers.

The influencers were selected as the primary persona to conduct research with because of our assumptions around their willingness to share, join an additional platform and the general unknowns around their motivations around content creation and growing a community. With that target user defined, we worked to schedule 1:1 qualitative interviews with 5 - 6 candidates.

We had some clarity on where the top applications were falling short including hesitations around privacy, security, and lack of authenticity. In terms of motivation, it was clear that for Influencers, the day to day work of creating content, growing their brand and engaging a community was comparable to running their own business, in most cases around the clock. To get this highly valuable but also extremely busy user on our platform, it would be crucial to make it clear the benefits we could provide them and how their involvement would provide a return on investment. 

It was great to hear that our ideas around impact and celebrating the power of a group’s contributions interested influencers. It tapped into their motivations around sharing and growing a community. They also were in total agreement that typical social media platforms don’t foster a shared sense of improving one’s life as a way of improving the world and also that true authenticity wasn’t always coming across.

We share Chris’s sentiment about using research and experiments as the best way to learn more and instill confidence in the path ahead. Some of the short-term next steps we identified included a go to market strategy for a beta website, a possible avenue for expanding on more positioning work and also direction on what key features would resonate with target users. We hope to continue working with Chris to facilitate additional experiments as a way to continue to evolve The Standard into a trustworthy, world changing platform. We hope you check them out and join in on the movement.