Interviews:
For my first interview, I interviewed Matthew. Matthew is a freelance developer who got most of his work experience through working in DAOs. DAOs are decentralized autonomous organizations, essentially mini startups that are run by the people in a decentralized manner. While Matthew has been working freelance for the last few years, with the recent market shift, he’s looking to do a full-time job somewhere with more stability.
Matthew had a lot of pain points when it came to doing freelance work for DAOs. For one, Matthew found most of his opportunities through word of mouth, so there were periods of time when work dried up. Sites like UpWork and Fiver had clients that cared mostly about finding the cheapest price rather than caring about the holistic individual. He said he loves being a freelancer because of the agency and self-autonomy, however, finding stability through this lifestyle was too difficult.
The main issue, according to Matthew, is to be a freelancer, you have to be good at marketing yourself. The best freelancers, in his opinion, had large Twitter followers or wrote free blogs to get their names out. Matthew doesn’t have a personal website, mainly because he hasn’t had enough time just to sit down and do it.
For my second interview, I talked to Victor. Victor is the pioneer of Experience Institute – teaching students to be leaders and leaders to be students. After Victor graduated college, he took a gap year where he designed his own master’s program by working on 12 projects in 12 months. He mentioned that during senior year of college, there’s a lot of pressure to “figure out” what you want to do. His hypothesis was that you should design your career around your interests rather than design your interests to fit a career.
While Victor learned a ton during his “gap” year, he said it was not a walk in the park. It required a ton of planning, building an audience, holding himself accountable, instability of projects not going through, and more.
Market Size:
In order to narrow down our initial product and market size, we pose the following question: How might we enable Bay Area college students with experience in product/design to better highlight their portfolios, interests, and personalities through a standardized, multidimensional, professional platform? Think LinkedIn for young product/design professionals.
Our SOM is Bay Area university students and recent graduates who have a product/design career focus. We calculated the market size by finding the number of Stanford, Berkeley, USF, and Santa Clara upperclassmen college students as of 2022 x percentage of product design majors at each of those schools to equal a rough estimate of the total number of product design upperclassmen college students in Bay Area.
- Stanford: 7,500 / 2 * 0.05 = about 200 product design upperclassmen (0.05 of Stanford students are product design)
- Berkeley: (.05 product design students x 40,000 total students) / 2 = 1,000 product design upperclassmen
- USF: 5,500 total students / 2 * 0.05 = 137
- Santa Clara University: 5,500 total students / 2 x 0.05 = 137
- = About 1,500 total product design upperclassmen college students
- Note: we assume that 5% (0.05) of students at each university in the Bay Area (Berkeley, USF, Santa Clara) study product/design based on the fact that 5% of students at Stanford study product/design
For our SAM, we wanted to target all university upperclassmen and new grads across the US. There are roughly 19 million university students and new graduates (1-2 years out of college) in the U.S.
Finally, for our TAM, our product will be a personality-focused LinkedIn for professionals. Therefore, we aim to have the same market size as LinkedIn, which is about 850 million.
