Hi friends, welcome to Chillsy's 3rd monthly update!
Chillsy exists because we are frustrated at the lack of practical opportunities to make meaningful connections, and subsequent missed events and activities at university.
In these updates, we'll share what we've been up to, and our progress towards our goal of helping students make the most of their time at university through overcoming various barriers including time, opportunities, confidence etc.
This update will cover all our work over January.
Our Focus this month -
Validating through Minimum Testable Product (MTP) experiments + Early business model
At the very end of last month, we were keen to start testing some of our learnings, assumptions, and hypothesis. Initially, we planned to run extremely lo-fi experiments, to test the very basic dynamics of planning and executing an interaction between strangers, and build on this concept moving towards what could be an MVP. However, after an enlightening chat with Gwen from Cultivate, we realised this was not an efficient way to approach this.
Instead, we realised an MTP approach that tests value propositions and builds on them using basic A/B testing and experimentation, from a branded product perspective made more sense.
Quickly we transitioned to building an array of landing pages. The idea is to quickly build an understanding of what could help customers, and what they’d be willing to pay for. We aim to start driving traffic to our landing pages at the start of next month.
What is an MTP approach? 💡
The MTP approach is a lightweight way of testing features with an audience, to see what resonates and is desirable. The idea is to compare 2 or more versions of the same idea, see what people respond to most, and then keep tweaking, and adding features iteratively until you reach an MVP product. This lowers the risk of time and money.
Conversely, a traditional MVP is a singular basic feature version of a product that has enough features to be usable by users to provide feedback. This takes more time and is often riskier.
Good, Bad and Ugly
Good
Building out our MTP and strategy around our landing pages & ads.
Expanding our thinking around business models and solutions in line with our understanding of the problem.
Bad
Working across time zones has been a challenge at times.
Switching platforms after building a landing page to start again from scratch took up a few extra days.
Ugly
Tunnel vision on our initial MVP approach.
Our Focus For Next Month
Executing on shipping our MTPs, to validate our hypotheses and assumptions.
Building on our MTP Experiments. 🔨
Kudos
Gwendolyn Ong - For setting us on the right track with MTPs.
Sean, our mentor - For pushing us to test way more things at once!
Asks
If you come across one of our ads and decide to click through, we’d love to hear your feedback!