Rapidly exploring ideas - developing disruptive brands, user experiences and digital businesses in startup, growth and corporate environments
Thoughts on
Thoughts by
7 tips seed stage startups should take on board
Over the past 6 months we’ve seen and worked with a lot of startups and interestingly the same issues crop up again and again. So, as it’s Christmas we’ve decide to share a few of them.
User needs can not be retrospectively fitted to your idea
Understand who you have as your target audience and then figure out what their real needs are - without trying to match either to your precious vision.
Don’t solve the wrong problem really well
This follows on nicely from the first point; until your proposition has been broken down into user needs - even sociological needs - it’s very easy to go way off the mark and create a product that no-one wants.
For more read on
Mobclix Swedecamp - moving to become market leader
We hooked up with the Mobclix team via Skype chat and Adobe ConnectNow last week to see how a virtual version of the Rapid Innovation framework would pan out. These guys have had a great few months, first becoming finalists at TechCrunch50 and later winning Seedcamp. There is little doubt as to why - they have what appears to be a great team and a very timely product.
Check this article for a short summary of the workshop.
Basekit swedecamp - turning web 1.0 to web 2.0
Finding a user base that would benefit from Basekits promise to let you develop 80% of the needed functionality of 2.0 web apps in one hundredth of the time is easy - creating a proposition that let’s web savvy but perhaps not tech savvy small business owners, bloggers etc take their websites from web 1.0 to 2.0 is definitely harder.
It’s clear these guys have an extremely strong product on their hands, and gauging from the new interface changes we saw it’s getting closer to be a tool worth your attention. Check out the brief summary inside.
Soup swedecamp - expressing yourself
This Tuesday was Soup.io’s turn to go through an in-depth examination and exploration of their product, users and potential future.
We knew Soup had a great product already, making it really easy to blog anything, pull in your feeds from around the place - and make it all look great with very little effort. But what we didn’t know was that if you take the core foundation - the needs that have motivated soup to create their product - a really exciting future picture emerges…
Pictures and more conclusions inside
UberVU swedecamp - back to the future
Last Friday we took UberVU through our product exploration workshop in the boardroom of Scottish Equity Partners. These workshops are meant to dissect the current product into it’s individual building blocks, analyze each component and then build up a new, stronger product proposition.
Check out this brief summary of the conclusions as well as more photos from the session.
A space that represents the real me
A lot of profile pages on social networks really suck. Built on the same template with boring predictable layout and features - often just text-based and non visual, apart from a profile image if i’m lucky.
During one of our projects recently we wanted to show that it is possible to give a personal space that is both user friendly, intuitive, exciting to use and slightly more human!
My new found love
This could easily turn out to be a love letter to Carol Twombly, but im not sure if my girlfriend would approve, so therefore this is about my new found love Nueva Std Condensed designed by Carol in 1994.
It’s not often I go Bananas over typefaces, especially ones that have been staring at me for [...]
More than two thirds of money spent developing an idea is wasted
Some things have changed in the last year or so - the introduction of truly commoditised IT like Ning and a market full of ideas but short on cash - and the professionals in charge of designing products, services, PR and marketing must change accordingly.
This article outlines some thoughts on how rapid idea development must be in todays market.
A way to make video websites not suck
A couple of years back we tackled this looking at a concept for when the journey is more important than the goal. What if 1000’s of videos are mixed with products, personalities, articles and advertising? Can we send people on a journey of discovery through a 3-dimensional space? Is being pleasurably lost an appealing state of mind?
In this article I moan a bit, remember the 90’s and show some nice work we did on video interfaces.
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