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.
Need-finding Interviews
We wanted to focus on university graduates and upperclassmen looking for more creative roles, so I interviewed people in that demographic. My first interviewee is a senior at Stanford majoring in English, with interests in working in content writing and publishing, as well as grad school. Her primary experience has been in writing lots of grants, creative writing in fiction, academic writing, coverage, and manuscript work, and she mentioned that for her field, the traditional route to get a job at one of the big 5 publishing companies is to know someone, or have someone vouch for you. A lot of the job prospects are through networking, and she doesn’t typically rely on platforms like Handshake, LinkedIn, Glassdoor, etc. other than to look at jobs. She mentioned that having a portfolio would be helpful, but in her line of work it’s much more recommendation based. Finding collaborators in creative fields sounded useful to her.
I then interviewed a design MFA student who had just graduated from Stanford. She practices creativity through artistic outlets like sculpture, but is also very interested in design thinking and research, as well as building her own brand through content creation. She has previously worked as some design consulting firms and enjoys design consultancy still, but now mainly focuses on project-based work where she can meet many people with many different skills. She says that it’s rough to stay organized across her different mediums, from art to industry experience to content creation, and wants to show people the “behind-the-scenes” of her processes through videos and content on social medial. She also mentioned that her peers feel the same way, that there is a “balance struggle between representing the hard skills they have and putting those easy to understand, really valuable skills at the forefront, and projects that are more art based and conceptual.” She mentioned that there are different layers to projects that are meaningful to different people, and it would be helpful to have a place that consolidates it all.
