Individual Write-up

Working on StudioHub this quarter has been a great experience in learning the ins and outs of product management. When we first sat down as a team and began discussing ideas, the market that we wanted to target did not change significantly. We always wanted to target the idea of being a LinkedIn competitor, since we realized that there were no other platforms as widely used as LinkedIn in the professional-social space. We also all came from the same Gen-Z background and upbringing and recognize that there could be a new way of doing things that could greatly impact society moving forward. I thought this project was a great opportunity to think about the bigger picture and how we can go step-by-step to achieve that.

The means of getting there, however, definitely changed over the course of the past 9 weeks, and I wish we had secured a plan for our obtainable market earlier on. The interviewing process took time, and it often felt rushed since we would try to get sets of interviews done every week. I definitely learned a lot about the interview process, since that was an area I had the least amount of experience in. Specifically, I learned the value of asking certain questions and getting user insight from every little feature or assumption that we were making for our product. The results of our testing were not optimal, and I realized somewhere around the middle of the quarter that this might not be a product that everyone needs. It’s certainly a “nice-to-have.” Once we realized that, we wanted to continue building it out as a “nice-to-have” to see if it could blossom into a useful network and platform.

At the stage where we are at right now, it’s a bit difficult to wholly focus on one thing. What we are focusing on now is the actual website-building tool, but in order to one day compete with LinkedIn we need to compete with its network. I’m thinking, if we had more time, I would flesh out the community aspect of StudioHub (and probably change the name), so that it’s a more welcoming space than LinkedIn is and ever was. I noticed that our product is almost like the likes of Tumblr back in the day, where every item was a blog post but you could customize your blog however you want. I think there’s a lot of potential for this product if we had more time to also flesh out our freemium features, but this might be a “lose money first” kind of deal.