Our product, currently named StudioHub but will probably be renamed very soon, is geared to serve new grads and current upperclassmen studying design, and/or are interested in creative roles. For our SOM, we want to focus on Bay Area students and new grads interested in design/product. The market size for this ranges from 886 to 1,500, focusing on the top 5 schools in the Bay Area. For the next tier, our SAM, we would want to target all people interested in design and product roles, giving us a market size of 252,807. For our TAM, we want to be a competitor for LinkedIn, providing a creative, professional platform to connect with the new generation of workers. LinkedIn’s market size is about 774,000,000 (number of customers).
We will be using React for our main framework because we intend the MVP to be a web application. We will be using Firebase as our primary backend because of its ease of use and integration with React.
Starting with our value props: we want to provide an easy-to-create personal website/portfolio that allows employers and potential employees as well as collaborators to connect with each other. It would present the user’s holistic professional self, visualize past work, give employers better insights on all the candidate’s platforms, and create a central hub for all parts of the user (for example, personal projects, blog articles, photo and video content, work experience). We want work experience to be more than linear, especially for people who are working on many things at once.
As far as our revenue model goes, we want to go with the “freemium” approach. We will provide a basic, free version of the site that allows users to get a taste of what it does. For extra features such as a custom domain name, better access to employers, sponsored posts, users can pay for a subscription. We are also considering a marketplace for those looking for project work.
In order to get users, we want to make it free initially. We want to do portfolio workshops on campus, encourage use in classrooms, TikTok marketing and social media ads, as well as just through word-of-mouth/referrals. To keep our users, we want to provide insights and interesting data about content from different platforms, and encourage updating and reuse of their hub.
We will likely have to pay for the first few iterations of users in regard to database usage and marketing, until we have a loyal user base and can provide the premium version.
Some ethical challenges may depend on how our “algorithm” will work to properly market users. Taking diversity and inclusion into account, we would want to give all users an equal playing field despite systematic barriers. Our goal is to mitigate the “word-of-mouth” method of finding a job that many creatives need to go through.
