statement
Raising capital for startups has never been easy, it involves cycles of rigorous searching and cold outreach. Hockeystick aims to simplify the process by giving startups a warm introduction directly to the funder through criteria matching and user preference.
MY
ROLE
My role for this project was to lead the entire design process, including user research, user interviews, personas creation and validation, interface design and prototyping and user testing, leading and mentoring junior designers during the entire process.
Also, I coordinated all the design deliveries with PMs and the development team during the implementation and worked hands-on with PMs with metric analysis and KPI definitions.
THE
PROBLEM
Startups need funding. Funders need a better way to make deal flow.
Using this statements as our north star, we started defining the foundations of our research to find a solution for both sides of this equation. During the research we interviewed several startup CEOs and a handful of different funders (angels, venture capitals, lenders etc.) and decided to dedicate our design efforts to build and validate personas.
Finding out our users made easy for us to define which one to serve first. We could then start ideating the possible solutions for the problem.
THE
WINNING
IDEA
Our AI team is really good.
Let's use our expertise to reduce our discovery time.
Having our problem well defined and a good understanding of our users, we decided to use our development team large expertise with AI to build a ML driven recommendation system for our users to interact, this approach would not only find the best funding matches for our startups but it would also allow us to learn the users' interests by measuring their connection requests and passes.
Mobile app? Web application?
The experience should be as important as the quality of the leads.
On our initial research we discovered that our users were, in their vast majority, desktop based and with a particular set of behaviours.
This way we defined our experience to be a desktop-first application, but with a great usability for mobile browsers. Also, the users' behaviours thought us that we should limit the number of leads/interactions using a time-based refresh rate, this way the experience could be fitted in their busy schedules without being overwhelming.
Measuring
& Improving
The design process doesn't end with the product implementation.
Designers are responsible for ROI and user satisfaction.
After 6 months of hard work, we launched the 1st version of the product and started to measure.
This was the moment that we would validate our problem solution and start tweaking the experience to improve.
Heatmaps
Screen recording
General feedback
NPS Survey
THE
RESULTS
After 6 months the numbers proved us right.
1,200
STARTUPS
2,000+
CONNECTIONS
MILLIONS
IN FUNDING