8: Product features & validation
Wednesday, March 06
Friday, March 08
Guiding Questions
What should your early prototypes be like? What will be your product’s key features? What is your startup’s projected geographic reach? What visual elements and rhetorical choices will shape your brand identity? How do you validate your ideas early on, aka gather hard evidence that they will work? What’s the advantage of starting ‘lean’?
Class Topics
W, 3/6: Guest speaker, Lex Dennis, Director of Lifelong Learning for the Drucker Institute and developer of Bendable
F, 3/8: Workshop: Product, features, validation
Read This:
Readings with annotations are due before class on Wednesday of each week. All readings, videos, and webpages are available on Perusall, accessible through the course’s Canvas page. Please refer to the Readings on Perusall prompt for instructions. You must read on Perusall to get credit.
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Read: Google News Initiative Startup Playbook, Ch. 2, “Define the Problem” and Section 3.1, “How do you test your business idea?”
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Read: “The Learning platform that aims to make American cities more economically resilient”
- From “A Guiding Framework for Vetting Public Sector Technology Vendors” (Ford Foundation): The Overview and the Appendix, which contains a list of 21 “red flags” for community-oriented digital startups. Feel free to also look at individual sections of the report that interest you. They are linked on the Overview page.
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Watch: “The Lean Startup: A Summary” (The Swedish Investor)
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Watch: The 1-minute Uizard promo video and "A beginner's guide to Uizard"