from annoying pain point to connective experience
Designing a Scheduling App Purpose-Built for Friendship
0 to 1 Product Strategy | Pool | R6 Accelerator | 2024
Skills
team management
product strategy
venture building
storytelling
financial modeling
Background
Our research revealed the most annoying job to be done in millennial friendship: negotiating how and when to spend time together.
Challenge
How might we make scheduling between friends a point of delight?
Result
Pool, a mobile app that replaces the awkwardness and logistical drag of scheduling with a user experience designed for connection.
Team
Kirsten Collins, Product
Vivi Kreisel, Design
Stephanie Le, Marketing
Bhumika Ahuja, Research
My Role
Drove a collaborative product design process
Led synthesis of market analysis and user research
Crafted the opportunity and product positioning story
Defined the prototyping approach
Designed the financial model and business plan
Opportunity Space
Insight
“Social Wellness” should be on par with fitness and nutrition in our concept of wellness. It isn’t.
Market Analysis
Within the emerging social wellness market, there are plenty of companies enabling communication between friends and platforms for making new friends.
We saw a big opportunity space around upskilling friendship.
Ideation & Product Concept
Through a series of ideation workshops we generated over 100 potential product concepts.
We ran our top 6 ideas through a rapid feasibility and market analysis.
This enabled us to quickly zero in on our most viable concept: a gamified mobile app that coaches people to get better at friendship.
Choosing our GTM User
We identified four potential user markets and conducted interviews in each segment:
We synthesized our interview findings in combination with market sizing.
We chose millennial women as our go-to-market early-adopter segment. They are in a life stage of high transition (career, family), actively invest in wellness products, and culturally carry the emotional load of friendships.
Value Proposition 1.0
For millennial women who feel stagnant socially, we offer a social wellness app that empowers them to know themselves better as social beings and to create deeper connections with others.
Deeper User Research
With a target market, product hypothesis, and value proposition in hand, we conducted deeper user research to understand their friendship needs.
Learning Objective
What is challenging about friendship today?
What are people yearning for?
Methods
Survey - circulated in online groups; 245 qualified responses
Interviews - 30-minute 1:1 interviews with 14 target users from across the USA
Research Insights:
People are hungry for connection, but they don’t have the time
Parenthood creates the toughest time constraints, felt by both parents and their friends without children
Friendship takes deliberate planning and logistics but should feel organic and spontaneous
Scheduling with busy friends is a huge annoyance
Right Market, Wrong Product
From our user research we learned that millennials indeed have a clear need for support with friendship. But not with skill-building. Time to pivot.
We circled back to product ideation, now with clear insights from our market.
Experiential Desire
friendship is organic
Painful Job to be Done
negotiate a time to meet up
Product Strategy
Opportunity
Be an early entrant in the emerging social wellness industry.
Use technology to solve one of the most annoying jobs to be done for millennial friendship: Negotiating how and when to spend time together.
Current state
Friends currently make plans going back and forth over text messages. It’s a drag.
Friends also use some scheduling tools like Doodle, When2Meet, or Calendly. But these tools are built for business and feel awkward to use with friends.
To set a date, one person has to coordinate the who, what, and when of a plan. This big mental load is an unnecessary barrier to initiating plans.
Our Innovation
Replace logistical drag with sense of connection.
Bring the who, when, and what into one place.
Allow users to initiate a plan based on who, when, or what and collaborate on setting a plan with others.
Minimize the mental load of planning with a user journey that leads to a recurring relationship cadence.
Value Proposition 2.0
For millennials who value friendship but struggle to find time for friends, our product relieves the headache of planning by simplifying the when what and who of getting together so that you can focus on what really matters, instead of logistical hassles.
Unlike traditional calendar and project management apps that are built for doing business.
Who are we designing for?
We identified three clear friendship types, drawn from interviews and survey results. I developed behavioral-based personas to guide our design process.
Admin Friend
“My hometown besties say: ‘We don’t get together until you come to town.’”
Takes initiative to make plans. Proposes times and dates. Keeps the planning thread moving. Likes to organize, but wishes she didn’t carry the burden all the time.
Millennial Adrift
“It’s so easy to stay home.”
Yearns for friendship and connection. Struggles to maintain social circles amidst frequent geographic moves. Feels impulse to reach out, but the mental load is a huge barrier to initiating plans.
Down for Anything
“I’m there!”
Rarely initiates or suggests specifics of when and what. May not always participate in planning conversations but will reliably show up with enthusiasm.
Experience Design
Since our market opportunity was to differentiate based on experiential excellence, we created a user-centered experience journey, based on the Jobs-To-Be-Done framework.
To create our user journey map, we first identified the user's key goals and needs, pain points, and jobs.
We then mapped the desired actions, touchpoints, and customer feelings across a user journey through the “5 e’s”: Entice, Enter, Engage, Exit, Extend. Connecting those actions and touchpoints to the user’s needs and pains helped us make strategic decisions about what features to include and (crucially) what to exclude.
Prototype & Test
Our riskiest assumption was desirability. Would our product and positioning resonate with millennials?
To test this assumption, we considered several prototyping methods:
Build something interactive with low-code tools (like Bubble)
Storyboard with lo-fidelity sketches
Video story with hi-fidelity wireframes
Given the timeline, resources, and skills we had to work with, we took inspiration from Dropbox and made a video demo prototype accompanied by a survey.
User Feedback
key survey results, from research presentation deck
Test the Value Proposition
To test our value proposition and market positioning, we developed an initial brand strategy, instagram account and landing page.
Results here were inconclusive. We learned we would need more time and investment in ads and content creation to establish meaningful traction.
Demo video of Pool in action, created by Vivi Kreisel
Our prototype survey revealed that our product met a genuine need. Users easily grasped the concept and articulated use cases in their own lives.
However, as predicted, users also expressed low willingness to pay.
Conclusion
We were on the right track and needed to build a business plan that didn’t solely depend on direct payment from users.
landing page, brand, Instagram designed by Stephanie Le & Vivi Kreisel
Drive Business Growth
To bring Pool to life, we developed a business plan and freemium revenue model driven by a built-in network effect, complemented by dining and entertainment partnerships and in-app advertisements, ultimately positioning the brand for acquisition.
Business Model Canvas, showing high-level strategy overview
For a Deeper Dive
Next Steps
This venture began as an MBA capstone project. With support from R6 Accelerator, we are currently seeking a technical co-founder and pre-seed funding to bring an MVP to market.