Growth Engine: Standup - AI-powered proposals
Growth Engine is an early-stage startup that came to us asking for help with their application's design. Their idea was to create a TikTok for training and knowledge sharing and to use the rising AI technology (Chat GPT API) for this purpose.
Problem Statement
Writing is a long and painful process. Whenever you write something you know it’s about re-writing. You need to correct mistakes and make sure your tone of voice is aligned with your audience. You often need to follow a certain structure, like a letter, quiz, recipe, or proposal. Your text needs to have a certain length. Sometimes it needs to be connected with other source texts, for example when you write an academic paper.
Although Chat GPT offers a brilliant piece of technology, it doesn’t focus on specific scenarios. And because it’s new and open-ended, it might be difficult for common people to write good prompts that will give the expected results. In other words, you need to know how to speak to AI so it could write what you want.
Project Goals
The goal of Growth Engine as a tech company was to adjust Chat GPT’s technology for specific writing use cases.
The goal for East Banc Technology as their consultant was to make sure that technology solves actual users’ problems and that the application is pleasant and intuitive.
Product Canvas Workshop
As an early-stage startup, Growth Engine had many ideas. But needed help with systematizing them and making decisions.
We started with a Product Canvas workshop. During the workshop, we wanted to define what are the goals of the application, who are their potential users and what their needs are, what would be features we want to have in an MVP (Minimum Viable Product), and what is nice to have but not essential (outside of MVP scope).
Following the workshop, the client came to the realization that they would benefit from a more robust business case and the guidance of someone with a strong background in business.
Competitors Research
They came back to us after 1 month with a new business-focused team member. They decided to focus on preparing teaching materials for salespeople. We suggested doing more research. Competitors' research to understand what is already in the market and user interviews to understand how training for salespeople is done in different companies and what are the problems connected with it.
We analyzed their main competitors and took into consideration things like content creation tools, organizing and managing content, content delivery, and assessments. We also took a deeper look into the interfaces of competitors’ applications.
User Research
We combined our and our client’s knowledge and assumptions to create research questions. This was used to interview sales managers to understand training struggles.
Pivot
With the help of the findings from our research, the client arrived at the realization that their initial concept of using TikTok for training was not the optimal approach. Consequently, they made the strategic decision to pivot away from targeting salespeople and explore other alternatives.
They decided to build a desktop application for generating questions, lesson outlines, summaries, writing proposals, and creating custom text formulas for repetitive use cases.
Design System and Mockups
Standup - that’s the application’s name, it didn’t have any branding, only a logo. So we took care of the color palette, typography, icon styles, and other building elements to create a scalable design system and consistent interfaces.
Results
The result of our collaboration with Growth Engine was a clickable prototype showcasing the main functionality of the product which helped software engineers build an MVP.
The product is live and available on standupai.com.
