New Business Idea – Wing

Problem: In a world of digital messaging and email, snail mail still has its place: wedding invitations and baby announcements, for example. And real life addresses are critical for ordering an uber or entering a destination in a GPS. But texting and calling for an address gets old fast. How might we improve the way users track and interact with their contacts’ addresses?

Solution: Provide the default contacts app with an iTunes-esq upgrade that improves upon user experience and automatically updates when contacts move.

Process: Based on anecdotal evidence of the problem, the team developed an interview guide and performed some 20 interviews with a diverse group of potential users. We found that millennials, with weddings, cross-country moves and babies, were especially pained by the cumbersome address-tracking process.

Using the lean start-up method, we diverged on ideas about functions and features and converged on a minimal viable platform. Through Prott we were able to make a low-fidelity prototype to gather user feedback and gain proof of concept.

After further user interviews and observations, we iterated further and found that the most sustainable use case wasn’t wedding guest lists, as we originally thought, but rather establishing and maintaining contact with classmates in a graduate program.

Outcome: The team and I pitched the idea to a panel of venture capitalists and one of the VCs was interested in investing!