Executive, CX/UX lead, AI, brand
Launching a startup ecosystem AI platform.
StartupOS was built to help founders navigate their startup journey. The platform boosts startup growth with tools, guidance, and a network of founders, mentors, and investors to potentially get founders to that next funding opportunity.
The Problem
While the platform was enriching founders and gaining considerable traction, retention was dropping due to founders needing a more efficient startup learning experience as well as a deeper connection to their startup community.
The Solution
Transformed the platform from a form based video-led learning experience to a lightning fast AI learning platform. Implemented a streamlined SSO onboarding process, startup community, robust with founders, mentors and investors with a social feed, scheduling and messaging center, as well as customized events and workshops used to increase founder engagement and retention across the platform. All of which was measured by the increase in premium sign-ups, overall engagement, and NPS.
The Research Process
Framework: Using the quadruple diamond approach, we conducted relentless qualitative and quantitative HCD research through varying techniques, to gather customer insights, data and feedback to understand our primary challenges and opportunities for improvement.
Methods & techniques: interviews, workshops, thought leadership sessions, fireside founder events, usability testing, and surveys.
Recruited participants through social media outreach, email campaigns, events, in-app announcements and outreach to our existing startup network.
Worked with key stakeholders to assess Mixpanel analytics data to identify pain points within our KPIs - overall challenges with engagement, bounce rates, retention, and conversion.
Leveraged Zoom, Userbrain, Dovetail and Figma to conduct interviews, workshops, and unmoderated and moderated usability testing to identify challenges, success factors and improvement opportunities from onboarding through guided tours, the PowerPack and PowerUp learning process and accessing the startup community.
Led CX workshops driving deep affinity mapping sessions to analyze insights and data, to determine primary themes and conduct sentiment analysis.
Led Ideation and brainstorming sessions to identify target personas, user flows, journey maps, and begin rapid wireframing sessions to stack rank through MoSCoW, and prioritize key opportunities for improvement.
Key Insights: gathered data from over 100 founders on the platform within the age groups of 25-60, as well as industry experts within various startup communities.
Coupled with the demanding job of running their startups, founders were exhausted from the manual work required to complete their PowerUp course learning material.
Founders felt frustration with the lengthy onboarding process and lack of transparency once on the platform in seeing a holistic view of their work completed and overall startup journey.
Founders lacked an efficient way of building their pitch deck to promote their startup for potential funding opportunities.
Founders felt isolated from founders, mentors and the investor community and needed a way to connect, create relationships and feel more integrated.
Through discovery, we were on a mighty mission to identify the largest pain points and challenges within onboarding, learning and community.
We began to identify key themes, trends and opportunities throughout our data.
“I will burn every single one of my bras if you would do this!”
AI Integration
“I do not have time to fill out forms! I am in meetings all day.”
Learning Experience
“I need a progress indicator, like what haven’t I done. A pointer that tells me which part isn’t complete.”
Learning Experience
“Group mentoring would mean something to me where I might get some advice from a human or a community of other entrepreneurs!”
Community
“It would have been helpful to have a journey map that would have stepped me through the entire platform.”
Onboarding
“I would like to see more concise PowerUps with guided tours or maybe an interactive step by step so it can take you through it.”
Learning Experience
“I can consume a lot of information but sitting down with body who can grasp it and go back and forth to direct me would be very helpful.”
Community
“Having AI would be amazing. A co-pilot will be amazing.”
AI Integration
“I need a more hassle-free onboarding experience with less form fields.”
Onboarding
I facilitated multiple brainstorming workshops to develop a shared understanding of customer goals, determining key opportunities and features for each goal
Onboarding: Single Sign-on to increase the time to platform conversion and to eliminate the multi-step manual form process
Guidance: Coachmarked experience to give founders transparency into their platform journey, as well as a dedicated dashboard experience to understand their progress at each step.
AI Integration: tools for automating tasks such as PowerPack and PowerUp learning, completing startup activities to create pitch decks and determining fundability.
Community: founder networking, mentor access and matching to help provide dedicated guidance and pitch feedback, investor community access for potential funding opportunities, and events to drive collaboration and support
Funding: improved opportunity investment dashboard scoring algorithm based on PowerPack and PowerUp completion along with balancing leading indicators, to icrease the probability of heading to a pitch events.
Ideation: Given our insight into the user experience and customer needs, I guided the team through comprehensive wireframing sessions, with prioritization, stack ranking and voting. I encouraged participation from all team members to generate a plethora of ideas aimed towards achieving our objectives. We selected the most viable options with each member providing input throughout our refinement process. Subsequently, we engaged in a collaborative voting process to prioritize features that we believed would effectively address our customer challenges.
Experience & Design System: We leveraged our agile design framework to create our product roadmap through rigorous planning across all workstreams. Within our key opportunities, list of prioritized features, and big ideas from our ideation workshop, we worked with our agile product team to plan our next sprint cycles and build our backlog.
Our amazing design team hit the ground with hi-fi prototyping for the StartupOS experience redesign. We implemented a responsive design system to create a cohesive user experience and consistency across our environment, in parity with the developers React Storybook. This created efficiency in our overall agile processes, and decrease technical debt. Our modern design system followed accessibility tenants, while ensuring consistency across the StartupOS brand.
The Experience
Final Reveal
We met and exceeded product deadlines delivering over 100 unique screens throughout the StartupOS experience including onboarding, coachmarked guidance, PowerPack and PowerUp AI learning, community, messaging, meeting scheduling, events, and social feed.
We created national partner events providing startup award funding for early stage founders and developed revenue streams for StartupOS. We increased premium sign-ups within our founder community and created generative AI courses that boosted efficiency across the learning curriculum. Through this collaborative experience, we created a robust digital experience across the StartupOS platform.
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