<aside> đź’ˇ This is a reflection blog that document the journey of building an audiogram tool from zero, to launch, get the first 1000 users and so on. The ups and downs and most importantly, the learning.
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There was a time we didn’t know what to do. To be precise, it was May 2021. I was traveling from the lockdown London back to Hong Kong with all the quarantine mess. The whole world was a mess and so do we.
After working for almost a year on networking, we were left with an ugly truth. There are nothing worth being solved in networking - human relationship are fundamentally complicated, while networking is a fairly vague term. Don’t want to put too much emphasis on this cause this blog is not about this. Anyway, for the context, we want to make the pivot.
We were thinking a lot of different stuff and something caught our attention - audio and non-googleable insight. We figured this world would probably be great with something like Quroa in audio. People answering each other question using their engaging and authentic voice. But wait, we’ve been there, you know that if we want to build a new social platform we have to solve the chicken and egg problem — creators comes for audience and audience comes for creators. It won’t make sense without each other.
the audio-Quroa idea.
The way we wanted to navigate through this challenge was the “come for the tool, stay for the people” method. We want to build a tool that content creators can easily create and share to their audience on their own way. A typical use case we imagined was a career coach and sign up a profile on Jupitrr website and take it as an Ask Me Anything portal for their audience - received question and record answers in audio.
We brought this idea to many content creators, career coaches and we realised that audio isn’t really a popular option as content format. Yes, they understand that making content with audio recording is undoubtably fast and easy. But they also concern, is their audience going to adopt to audio-only content. This guided our big iteration from just create audio to creation audio content and export it as video which becomes an audiogram tool. We went a bit more in-depth to figure out what feature our target users want like subtitle transcription and video format etc. Then we started to build the tool.
At this point, our CEO started getting busy taking care of other business, I took up the role of Product Manager and work closely with my CTO and our talented developer to build this new version of Jupitrr. Being in an early-stage startup, building the MVP is not the hardest part - figure out what not to build is. After previous building experience, I’m pretty clear this time that we need to build something that focus on delivering value to users. Any that’s not directly related to users’ value, I cut it off. I would say this is very counter-intuitive as a designer and it was a bit hard for me to switch the mindset.