How might we meet founders’ needs for personalize, efficient learning to improve platform engagement?
Background
StartupOS began as an online learning platform offering tools and education to help entrepreneurs launch their own companies. The platform showed promise, as many founders were attracted to resources like fundraising advice and startup frameworks. However, after strong initial interest, StartupOS struggled with customer conversion and retention.
The generic e-learning model was not adequately engaging users or providing enough value to capture paid subscribers. It became clear that a new, more targeted value proposition was needed to turn interest into conversions and loyalty.
Challenge
The product team tasked me with urgently conducting qualitative user research and rapid experimentation to uncover why conversion rates were so low. Despite interest in the platform, ineffective user acquisition indicated poor product-market fit. Leadership was ready to pivot strategy based directly on user insights rather than previous intuition-led attempts.
My mandate was to deeply understand user needs through interviews and journey mapping, quickly test potential solutions, and synthesize compelling findings to advise urgent product and go-to-market changes for dramatic conversion lift.
Process
Review analytics dashboards, current product flows, and initial user interviews to conduct rapid design audit identifying improvement opportunities in signup and onboarding
Align with product leadership on research goals to uncover conversion blockers and interaction design issues in priority workflows
Lead social media outreach and email campaigns to recruit 35 participants matching target founder personas for discovery research
Conduct 1:1 remote moderated interviews informed by semi-structured guide focused on key use cases and flows
Gather qualitative insights, document findings in insights database, analyze and theme data into actionable opportunity areas
Socialize top-level findings with leadership and at product team standups, make full research reports available
“I will burn every single one of my bras if you would do this!”
— Customer on integrating AI into the platform
Early-stage wireframes exploring a gamified achievement system for the founder mentor program to better meet community support desires
Key Findings
Primary motivation for platform is raising capital (100% indicated)
Additional strong needs uncovered for mentor access, pitch feedback, and entrepreneur community access
Interest expressed in AI tools for automating high-effort tasks like drafting pitches and business models
Raising funding the core "job" but supplemental support/efficiency were identified as important secondary functions StartupOS can support
Opportunity to better address founder needs beyond generalized e-learning content as intelligence assistance tailored to each founder’s unique circumstance
As-is Customer Journey Map
Early research and assessment demonstrated promise and value for new users getting into the site but the product did not offer meaningful value and features to keep them returning over time. This led to future product ideation on integrating founder-driven pitch events and premium access incentives for those events.
Social media advert I designed to promote the new pitch competitions
Results
Led ideation and created wireframe options to deliver on desire for paired mentorship
New intelligent mentor matching and community launched as a premium membership package
Positive adoption of new offering increased retention and reviews
Convinced leadership and activated pivot to AI-powered experiences based on user interviews
Designed customized AI experiences for rapid pitch and content generation after product capability analysis
Generic e-learning content deprecated fully to focus exclusively on tailored AI productivity tools
Established monthly pitch competition program to incentivize founder engagement with the platform in order to serve secondary jobs to be done for founders.
Revenue increased 5X in September of 2023 and is now a primary focus for product-led revenue for the organization.