Product Design
Advicely Case Study
I got into the Founders Institute Toronto Cohort 5 with the idea of building a peer to peer knowledge sharing platform called Learnpost. Over the course of the program, the idea evolved into a video Q&A app called Advicely.
The basic assumption for Learnpost was that people are eager to learn new skills
To validate my customer archetypes, I conducted personal interviews to understand how the user approaches self learning and thus, test my assumptions. Soon, I realized that users were not as eager to learn new skills but on solving specific problems they encountered.
I pivoted Learnpost to Advicely, a platform where experts could share their knowledge in form of reviews for a nominal fee. I thought of targeting the digital services industry, for the low barrier to entry.
In 2 weeks, we had 3 customers and just about $80 in revenue.
I designed a quick landing page for Advicely, to start validating the video review as a service idea. I found a few early adopters and even made a small revenue of $80. However, I realized that in order to ask for a review, the customer needed to realize that they needed one done. Not having the design/UX expertise, many customers did not see the value in getting their freelancer’s work reviewed. However, they had quite a few questions around how to improve specific aspects/components of their digital product/website.
As I started to understand, that the users wanted a more quick & easy access to expert knowledge as a resource, it was an obvious decision to have mobile app as our primary platform. I’ve designed and prototyped the mobile app version of Advicely as a video Q&A community. For the MVP validation,I’ve decided to test with two different sets of target audience.
The first test case is for users seeking design advice.
The second use case is of expecting or new parents looking for parenting advice.