How we reduced uncertainty using a concierge approach

Project overview

A startup approached us who had not yet built the startup's product but had spent tens of thousands of dollars on software prototypes. The company works in the consumer space and has a well understood problem statement but the solutions for this problem vary dramatically from effectively running a bank or financial credit facility through informational products designed to help with the problem.

First Principles conducted an intensive workshop with the company and its development partners to assess its entire strategy from the ground up to determine the right next steps.

Client

Consumer B2C

Year

Nov 2022

Services

No-Code Concierge

Platform

Web

Execution

First Principles took a holistic approach. We started by working through the company's different problem statements, and then we evaluated each statement against six different sets of criteria to rigorously consider where momentum could be most quickly achieved with the highest impact. Next we fully explored dozens of possible solutions to the customers' problems and chose two. With these two, we articulated clear end states and designed full user journey maps that could be used for MVPs.

With the MVP's in hand, we began approaching customers for the second time and quickly realized that while one of the two MVPs was close to the right solution, there was too much variation in what each user needed to return to product development immediately. We recommended and then scoped a no-code solution that could account for the high variance and allow the team to test its assumptions in the market.

Project results

We built out a no-code offering at approximately 1/20th of the cost of an MVP for our client to use with its first set of early adopters and provided guidance on how to select the initial adopters. We joined meetings with the early adopters to ascertain their true needs and ran an additional research panel to validate and invalidate assumptions from friendlier adopters. Together, these insights gave us the detail we needed to refine our customer profile and understand which users we can and cannot benefit.

Our no-code solution included the basic package needed for success without overly specifying how the mechanics would work under the hood. We implemented:

New user registration and FAQs
Gave the user the ability to upload the key materials that drive the engagements
Set up thoughtful tracking and reminders for those materials
Built out a modest dashboard for the users to access
Built a prototype-grade processing engine to calculate values that go into a user intake assessment report

With these materials in hand, we began to support the client in onboarding the first users to the concierge system and have begun working through the different challenges that were surfaced in our strategy session. Soon we will have all the information we need to drive a robust Go-to-Market strategy in addition to a crystalized understanding of where product can add leverage and exactly which features will drive value.

Ready to start working together with our team?

Our services