In this second conversation in this Mini Incubator Series, Dawn Delatte and Jordyn Bonds interview Ashley Sheble, the Founder of AvidFirst, about her experiences and progress in thoughtbot's Incubator Program, which aims to help founders like Ashley turn an idea into a viable product.
The trio talks about Ashley's experiences and progress in the program. She emphasizes the significance of user research and interviews in shaping product strategy and understanding customer needs. She also highlights the need to narrow their focus to specific customer segments to build a product that resonates with a particular group. Additionally, they discuss the complexities of the FinTech industry and how regulatory considerations are an integral part of their product development process. As they gain more insights, they are transitioning into the prototyping and testing phase to validate their product concepts and messaging.
Just catching up? Listen to Part I (https://www.giantrobots.fm/498) of the Mini Incubator Series.
Follow Ashley Sheble on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashley-sheble/).
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Transcript:
DAWN: Hello, everyone. I'm Dawn Delatte. I am a Managing Director here at thoughtbot. And I'm filling in for Lindsey. And I'm super excited to be here and chat with Ashley and Jordyn about how the incubator is going so far.
If you are tuning in, you're probably familiar with thoughtbot, but just in case you're not, we are a product design and development consultancy who works with people and products across the entire product lifecycle to make your team and product a success. We are currently running our second incubator session. If you're not familiar with it, we've got a ton of content from our first session that you can check out, or you can follow along in this one.
But our incubator program is an eight-week program that we take a founder through to validate or invalidate their new product ideas through lots of market research, customer discovery, interviews, and such. And then, we come out with a product plan that helps set them on the right path forward.
In the last update, we introduced our incubator founder, who's with us again today. In this session, we'll be talking with Ashley and Jordyn about digging deep into research and plenty of interviews and, you know, what they're learning and what the process is like so far. So, I'm excited to get started. How about y'all kick us off with some introductions? Jordyn?
JORDYN: I'm Jordyn Bonds. I'm the Director of Product Strategy at thoughtbot on Dawn's team, the Ignite team at thoughtbot. I'm a two-time startup founder myself. I've worked with a couple of other early-stage startups, so all about the zero-to-one startup journey over here.
ASHLEY: And I'm Ashley Sheble. I am the Founder of AvidFirst, and I am the second incubator founder. And working with Jordyn and team and thoughtbot to really accelerate the mission of our company, which is focused on simplifying college saving and spending.
DAWN: Ashley, why don't you recap a little bit for us what's happened since the last time?
ASHLEY: Yeah, I'd love to. So, the past three weeks have been really just getting into the weeds on user interviews, talking with different stakeholders as it relates to the problem we're looking to solve. And what we're finding are some key themes. And so, really trying to aggregate the data, focus in on those key themes, and find out where we can really pull at some of those strings to start creating some solutions that are meaningful and specific.
One of the primary trends that we're seeing is just lack of awareness around some of the resources and tools available to people as it relates to saving for college; 529s, for example, are a really great tool. And most people, 70%, aren't aware of them. And so, if you've never hear