Introducing bashfully

So in my last post on the "untitled side project" I said that I would elaborate more on the idea. When we started the project we had a strong idea of the kind of project that we wanted to do. And after settling in the area I started doing some reading around and thinking about who we could help. What change were we looking to make in the world? How were we looking to alter behaviour? (a litmus test for innovation) 

 The project is called Bashfully. Partially a play on the concept of being bashful and shy about talking about your achievements. Partially because the name could be part of the domain in the .ly TLD ;-) This project is to provide an online resume to help people shine in ways that the current sites do not. To help them be proud of what they have achieved. Finally, to allow them to see their career development as a journey and set their own narrative.

The Trello card entitled "what are we hoping to learn?" says:
MVP is to test the hypothesis that there is a market for a resume site and network for people in a creative role or within 3-4 years out of university. These people are not currently served by either LinkedIn because the format is quite restrictive/unispiring or Facebook because it is too informal and basic. Although both sites offer good networking and the target demographic are already somewhat established in at least one of these.
As the first step to sense check this I created a survey and shared on social media. Around the same time, we created a landing page. This had two purposes, 

  1. to share awareness of the project, including the survey 
  2. to build up the functionality iteratively
The first part of this functionality was the registration of interest. This is the foundation of the user authentication that the full site will use. It allowed us to explore the different APIs that we wanted to use and actually integrate with them.

The initial results from the survey were great. One idea suggested was almost word for word how I would describe it - with the caveat we need to be careful of confirmation bias! Another respondent gave us an idea that was brilliant and we hadn't thought of. 

The output of looking at these survey results also helped firm up the vision from the initial hypothesis.This was a vital thing to get in place. Any project and especially product needs to have a clear sense of:
  1. Who you are helping?
  2. Why you are helping them?
  3. How will this help them? What is the positive outcome for them?
Without this, any sense of prioritisation or ROI calculations that you will hope to do are likely to be a mirage at worst. At best you'll have a useful proxy, but that can change without you noticing. This is as true for a 2 person side project as it is for any commercial organisation. Probably more since we are doing this for fun and not profit, and launching is part of the fun!

Thanks for reading. The next instalment is likely to be on crafting the user journeys and mockups to test with real people (aka "users").

This is part of a series about my side project Bashfully, which aims to give graduates and other new entrants to careers a seasoned professional level way of expressing themselves through the super power of story telling. Following the core principles of being discoverable, personalised and guiding in approach.

Further reading


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