To create a product that resonates with customers, a company must successfully orchestrate technology, design, and business into a fine-tuned composition.
Unlike companies in early and later stages, which can afford specialised talent and process-driven organisation, startups have to be more agile and do more with less.
about:blank studio specialises in (pre)seed stage product design-development operations where a small, tightly-knit team has to holistically understand and carefully balance technical, UX, marketing, and commercial aspects.
Helping start-up founders:
Analyse markets and competitors
To conquer the world, you must map it first. I track down players, gather intel, and analyse competitive products to produce reports that paint a bigger picture of your ecosystem than numbers alone.
- Competitor analysis
- Market research and segmentation
- Demand validation
- UX research
Ideate and validate product ideas
They say measure twice and cut once. So, I poke holes in our assumptions to isolate points of failure. Then devise prototypes, proof of concepts and other heuristics to potentially prevent an expensive mistake.
- Design sprint fascilitation
- Speculative design
- Rapid prototyping and PoC design
- Solution and monetisation validation
- Minimum Viable Brand design
Raise funding and strike partnerships
Behind every great hustler, there is a great storyteller. Like a biographer, I get up close and personal to tell a compelling narrative of your vision. Until we write, direct, and produce a pitch deck that can “sell water to a well”.
- Product positioning
- Pitch deck production
- Marketing collateral design
Build a minimum viable product
Congrats, you got the dough. Now it’s time to cook up a storm. I rally stakeholders around UX by structuring information and designing UIs. We simplify the frontend by reworking the backend and deliver a fully functional app in nimble releases.
- Product strategy directing
- Product management
- Specifications and documentation writing
- User-centered app and web design (IA/UX/UI/IxD)
- Product reviews and QA
Go to market and gain traction
Working in advertising has taught me that “marketing is not a department”. We can all contribute to reaching the hearts and minds of customers. I do it with plain words and striking images that succeed in getting them to care.
- Customer acquisition strategy
- Content strategy
- Product marketing messaging and design
- Advertising creative and art direction
Define success and measure progress
You can’t fight what you can’t see. I subject the UX hypothesis to reality by choosing the right KPIs and designing experiments to measure them. Then translate data into user behaviour insights that lead to actionable conclusions.
- North star and KPIs determination
- Analytics and reporting set-up
- Product roadmapping
Calibrate for product-market fit
Software is never done. I pump insights from all sources of feedback to direct ongoing efforts towards the higher acquisition, lower churn and wider moat. Until it’s time to recruit a successor with expertise in scaling the operation.
- Experiment design, surveying, and usability testing
- Product auditing and diagnosing
- Conversion and retention optimisation
- On-site Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
- App Store Optimisation (ASO)
