How we placed top 3 in a female entrepreneurial program.
New Wave Program @ UNSW Founders
Date: 31 Aug–22th Sept, 2020
Organiser: UNSW Founders
Type: Product Design
Tools: Framer, Webflow, Canva, Procreate, Adobe Premier Pro and Photoshop
Team: Lingnai Cai (me), Sanja Stegic, Madeleine Wainwright, Oshadhi Paranavitane, Dhriti Nathella
Role: Ideation, Persona Profiles, Rapid Prototyping, Competitor Analysis, Visual Communication
At the beginning of this September, I joined a cohort of 81 passionate, aspirational and creative women to deep dive into creating and building our entrepreneurial endeavours.
I am honoured for our team to have placed in the top 3 out of 23 teams! I feel priviledged to be a part of this journey with Sanja Stegic, Madeleine Wainwright, Oshadhi Paranavitane, and Dhriti Nathella, whom are all incredibly dependable, determined, and passionate individuals.
The New Wave Program — which runs twice every year — is a 2 week entrepreneurial project sprint to help empower women in their entrepreneurial endeavours.
I was drawn to Sanja’s idea of making gardening easy and doable for aspirational non-gardeners (including myself!), and actively worked with the team to validate our product market fit, market opportunity, competitor analysis and solution.
Though I have previously created app prototypes using Marvel, I challenged myself to create an interactable app prototype on Framer, which was a meaningful and fun rapid prototyping experience. Please feel free to explore the app prototype via this link.
The reason for our success: a problem-solution and problem-market fit
I believe one of the key reasons for our success was how our problem was worth solving and we delivered this message clearly in our final pitch.
Including our team members, we knew there were many out there who wanted to grow their own produce and/or had an interest in minimising food waste and the ecologic footprint of the produce we consume, but haven’t yet because of lack of time and knowledge.
Following a lean canvas model, we validated this via outlining our hypothesis by testing our assumptions through surveys and activities lead by the program mentors.
Alongside this, we provided evidence to market opportunity, feasibility, competitive advantage and impact of our solution.
Check out our pitch here (timing 29:48–33:11).
Wireframes
As this project was a continuation of Sanja’s original idea, I was able to base our prototype on existing wire frames, as well as an updated, thorough user journey and user flow created by Dhriti.
The app was built based on the user experience and user journey, for which our team member Dhritri had created, and the original wireframes by Sanja.
Feel free to explore our product features and register your interests via our landing page.
Reflection
I felt extremely privileged to be able to receive the guidance, network opportunities, and mentor sessions provided by such incredible female leaders. I particularly enjoyed being able to hear past instances of failures and learnings from each presenter — it really is about iterating your ideas or products, again and again. I have experienced and felt the power of agile thinking and hypothesis testing as we followed our lean canvas model. I also felt each team member’s strengths were leveraged effectively in formulating Sprout’s mission and delivering this in the final pitch.
We have plans to roll out our first MVPs in the coming weeks, and I am thrilled for our team to have come in the top 3 during this incredible journey!
#rapidprototype #startup #femaleleaders #UNSW #entreprenurship #sustainability #learning
