Bernie

The project

Bernie is the project we developed with five friends to validate our master's degrees. Briefly summarized, it's thought to be an internal training tool with a methodological approach that mobilizes teams to promote knowledge transfer. It's imperative for a company, and it brings value to both the company and the employee who shares. The employee feels valued and useful, and it ensures the company that information and knowledge won't be lost if this employee leaves.

My contribution to the project

• I participated in brainstorming about the future product

• I helped define the brand of the company and then design the MVP of the platform

• I worked a lot on the business side of the company, to define a TAM, a target, precise numbers on the acquisition costs, MRR and revenue projections, in order to have a clear vision of the needed funding. We were lucky to be guided with a precise methodology and experts in all these topics

• I worked on the pitch to have a precise and catchy presentation

• I defined the features of the future versions of the product to have a clear timeline

Challenges

Bernie was a very end-to-end project. We worked on it for half a year, from the first brainstorming to a working Proof of Concept, a precise business model, extensive mockups and prototypes.

Teach people how to teach

Teaching is not natural, you have to learn how to teach. It has to be structured, you need to have a way to evaluate the outcomes of it. We based our "Create a course" flow on the Bloom's taxonomy,

Made of videos, the courses are focused on the learner's practical application. They are always structured as follows: "Introduction of the topic", "Understanding of the topic", "Application of the topic", and are associated with a concrete objective, determining the success or failure of the course. The teacher is guided step by step with gapped sentences they have to fill. By doing so, they determine what the course is about, what's the target audience, the outcomes of the class that have to be a quantifiable action.

That way, the teacher has a defined scope with defined outcomes.

A new paid tool when companies try to reduce the number of tools in their workflows

After a boom of SaaS over the years, teams are trying to reduce the number of tool they use, both because of the overall cost, and its impact on productivity. It's way less time-consuming to handle every interaction within Slack, than having to work with Teams, Slack, WhatsApp, Telegram, and so on, if we take messaging as an example.

We couldn't have the "Create a course" or "Participate in a course" flows integrated on a messaging app as a third party, because you can't create a course with message prompts. That's one pain point that we can't remove. But we thought about the best way to mitigate it, by having notifications and discussions about the course directly in the messaging app.

That way, you would need to go on the website to start a course, but then could update your status, receive reminder, comment the course directly on Slack for example, using prompts.

As for the price, we will never know if that worked, but we leveraged on the fact that having employees feeling valued, by sharing knowledge and learn new skills from peers would make them more loyal to the company, reducing turn-over and increasing productivity.

What I learned

We all learned a lot during this project, mainly business/strategy wise, as it was for all of us the first glimpse of what launching a startup would be like. I didn't get into that level of details in this case study, but we defined a complete business plan, with cost evaluation, acquisition plan, and revenue projections. It taught us that with work, methodology, and the right idea, we could build our company.

Rather sooner than rather!