Unreasonable at Sea day 55: The Big Dance

Workshop with Cheryl, from Microsoft, on Marketing

• who’s is our MARKETING audience?
• for cereals we often think the mom, but NO, the kids bug the mom for the cereal so they are the audience.
• who does Protei have as our target audience for marketing?–>tech college crowd, scientists
• What are the key emotional drivers that you are going to use for your campaign? and how can you gather customer data? what are the emotional reasons that people have connected to Protei? engage lots of people?
• There are ways to get Data (Facebook, survey monkey)
• what are you trying to do with your product? change perceptions? drive awareness? Then figure out what are your tactics – use coupons , use online etc, and figure out the END ACTION
• advertising with social media is more effective and cheap compared to banners and stuff
• how are you going to measure to prove to investors?

ABBY from SYNERGY on Sources of Funding, within Asia

• what is the best source of funding for your company? What is possible and what is the goal? and what stage of development are you?
• A lot of people are interested in giving money but very few deals actually being made. For seed stage when you still need money for r&d: awards , competitions, r and d grants, initial money from corporate competitions; [ie SOE]
• Sometimes it is worse to get a social investor than a regular investor – they might have high unreasonable expectations – they want you to save the world and make a ton of money. if you don’t need investor funding now, don’t go for it – they might have expectations that will change what you are going to do – they think they know better and will come in and try to shape the corporation
• The smile program – business advisor for 2 days / week
• ANDE, GSBI, SEA, Asian Venture Philanthropy Network, SOCAP
• Synergy: virtual incubator; philanthropic investment to fill the gap before the commercial impact investors are willing to come in
• Investors are often concerned about exit strategy if it isn’t debt so there is a gap between helping one investment get to the next level: quasi equity, rev share, debt is good and clean
• To help us find funding – get a good advisory board & board of directors.

Design Thinking Class with George and critique for the students empathy research

• Clarification between : intellectual knowledge and embodied knowledge
• Nurture the fact that you are your own independent thinkers; going to university was a path on which maybe you didn’t have to blaze so many trails, but now you do have to be your own trailblazer

• Ideation2.0: techniques to get ideas out
• goal: come up with ideas
  • 1. tom chi: rapid ideation – work visually to get 4 starting points out; quiet time to draw out ideas
  • 2. braindstorm
    • defer judgement
    • wild ideas
    • build on ideas
    • lots of ideas
    • be visual
    • headline ideas
    • one person speaks at a time
  • 3. NEW : BODY STORMING:
    • put yourself at a vantage point you have never been at before
    • idea: to design the luggage compartments: let’s BE the luggage – at IDEO: mock up an airplane, put chairs out, laid on the floor as if they’re luggage to see what it’s like for the luggage to experience the flight
• Prototyping 2.0: create quick prototypes; manifest ideas in an experiential way
  • 1. low res Experiments- quick and dirty – create a new website using post it notes; try it out; test quickly what the interface / experience should be like before you code anything;
  • 2. LOTS of them: every night, do it on the fly
  • 3. NEW: ENACT THE SCENARIO” more like a skit / scenario – enact the scenario – by enacting it you will discover new insights you wouldn’t do otherwise

• TEST THE IDEAS & get feedback
  • John Hockenberry from the Takeaway WNYC – trying to launch a whole new morning show to take on morning edition
  • The Takeaway – things were unfolding so quickly that there was inaccurate stuff on air
  • enact the scenario in the studio – he got his entire crew in a conference room, explained the experiment, got three signals from AP wire from News ON AIR
  • through this enactment john noticed that the reporters are standing doing nothing : why not?!? because they are out in the field so have no idea what’s going on
  • so they do cross checking and within a week there is a news situation and the reporters know what to do as they did from enacting the scenario in the newsroom
  • So when you enact the experiment so you see things you wouldn’t, just by thinking about it
  • 1. set the scene, create props, create roles, and run the scenarios –
  • 2. to test: leave a told empty for the USER to then participate with you

We were now told to be teacher / coach, rather than client – we would like to push the students to go a bit more profoundly into the user / need / insight; The students’ work was awesome; we got some nice wireframes and insights: We are working with three different groups of students, each with three members working on Protei. They each had very different set of insights.

Here are some of Emily Kathe’s diagram’s of “buy your own customizable protei” website

My insights from the students’ insights:

1. Group 1; Emily Kathe talked mostly; The biggest insight is that people need to feel comfort inspired onto them that they would be able to use this boat well and wouldn’t be too “novice” because they don’t know “technology” supra well. So have layers or stacks that are easy to peel away, but also allow people to still know that they are buying a working product, and allow them to understand what it can do, not only how to modify it.

2. Asa mostly talked, as well as Romaine: It’s even more important to get people to RETURN to a website and to do this it requires rapidly evolving site; so then there will be newly generated content, user generated content that is organized programmatically

3. GF talked mostlyPeople return to a social website for two reasons : 1. to build a repertoire of comments on their OWN wall; to build their own ego; personal comments towards them 2. to have tags / customizable information flowing their way based on their interests;

After that, Cesar and I brainstormed about a name some more, I worked out (deck of cards) with Daniel and Coleman, brainstormed some more about the name, then went to the “dance party”.