present: JH, RJ, Marco
After a short introduction we quickly turned to the main meeting point: the pitch-deck. The problem and the value-proposition was discussed in depth. The second item, the advertisement site did not hit a presentable milestone. Deliverables, in followup to last week, were again defined at the end.
Content is online at user-staging.offcourse.io. Right now it needs stylesheets mimicking the actual platform in greater detail. As RJ hates to do work twice, he opted to figure out the actual platforms inner workings first, causing a delay.
Two different perspectives on pitch decks where positioned. Firstly the perspective by Guy Kawasaki containing 10 points:
- Title
- Problem / opportunity
- Value proposition
- Underlying magic
- Business Model
- Go-to-market plan
- Competitive analysis
- Management team
- Financial projections and key measurements
- Current status, accomplishments to date, timeline, and use of funds
The second perspective was offered by a conversation with an investor whose name I didn’t get contained four points:
- Person - who
- Problem - why
- Solution - how
- Revenue
First and foremost we tried to make the problem very clear. We aimed to discuss it without going into criticism on a textual level. Our first reaction offered two perspectives. The first perspective stated that students do not learn and do not know what to do next: The education system is broken. The second stated that students are made reactive by the system, waiting to be spoon-fed. To these two perspectives the issue of educational costs was raised, but this was unanimously not seen as the problem we solve. We are free to use but we are not defined by that fact.
The problem start with the general notion of “people”. This generality is not desirable. Firstly it should be a target audience that is easily imaginable and somehow captivating or identifiable. The intermediate coder is seen as the best group to be put here. The name of this audience is open for debate however. “Intermediate” should be defined, as it’s uncertain whom is meant by this. It should probably be somewhere in between the person whom just finished a bootcamp / CS50 and someone whom is just starting on his or her first coding job.
It was quickly apparent that the problem was leaking into the value proposition. Again two perspectives and one elaboration. All content is online and is already learned by someone else, we provide that in a curated fashion. This perspective seemed to be aimed at discovery, looking out onto the future driven by identification with the future and with authors. User profiles are quite important in this perspective and perhaps even considered part of an MVP. The central notion to the second perspective was “We provide structure and actionability to curated content”. This mode uncovered a different way to judge content: based on it’s immediate value and statistics. To close this of two central notions to Offcourse were defined: curation and sequentiality.
As a side note it became apparent that we probably want to bootstrap content with the same intermediate users. This audience offers three main advantages. They can easily create the simpler content, secondly there is little support in this intermediate space, third point I missed.
Code-ching was discussed shortly as well. The idea advances, but there are problems with planning and motivation. There is a doubt about wether is a good fit right now. It might be smarter when Bits, for instance, tries to expand to another city.
- Robert-Jan: Advertisement site
- Jan Hein: Pitch-deck
- All: Try to read and improve upon the pitch deck
Call next week will be dedicated for a large part to the pitch deck again.