Product Strategy – Building Lean for Startups

Client Overview

Syntropi is a startup in the field of Artificial Intelligence and data collection. Their mission is to improve data cleanliness, consistency, and privacy for generative AI models, specifically related to video.

Challenge

Like most startups, Syntropi has great ideas and grand plans, but a short timeline and limited budget. After our first few conversations, we knew they were onto something, but needed some guidance on their business model, their product strategy, and what it is they should even build.

Syntropi wanted to build on top of a foundation that didn't require funding, investors, or people that may not share their vision and concerns around data privacy and ethics. In order to do that, they needed to figure out how to use every dollar they were willing to spend to its maximum potential.

Solution

Syntropi was ready to spend money from day one, but we talked them out of it. After digging into the potential cost of their ideal solution, and how it may or may not work out, we worked with them to change their approach to the problem entirely.

Instead of jumping into a build, we worked through a product design and strategy sprint. We spent 5 weeks peeling back layers of the business, what it would take to make it a success, and what they really needed in order to generate sales.

Based on the investigation, we helped them tailor their approach to maximize their value and minimize their spend. We worked with them to find the demographics of their users and their buyers. We built out personas highlighting the differences, the concerns, and what would influence their decision to use the app or make the purchase.

Once we knew who our users and buyers were, we used story mapping to take the end goal and break it up into deliverable pieces of value that would enable revenue and minimize expenses.

From there, we helped with some basic branding around color scheme, font choice, and messaging.

We then went into the design phase where we built wireframes, low fidelity mockups, and high fidelity mockups for both their end-goal, as well as the MVP. We helped them make educated decisions around where to spend money and where to save.