Dawn Delatte, Vendela Colavecchio, 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 discussion covers various aspects of the program, including the evolution of the product idea, insights gained from industry conferences, the importance of listening to customers, and the ongoing development of the go-to-market strategy. Everyone emphasizes the value of the Incubator Program in helping founders connect with their market and refine their strategy.
Just catching up? Listen to Part I (https://www.giantrobots.fm/498), Part 2 (https://www.giantrobots.fm/499), and Part 3 (https://www.giantrobots.fm/501) of the Mini Incubator Series!
Follow Ashley Sheble on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashley-sheble/).
Follow thoughtbot on X (https://twitter.com/thoughtbot) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/).
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Transcript:
DAWN: Hello, everyone. So, since we have a bigger crew here today, slightly bigger crew, we should just jump right in, right?
If you're not familiar with thoughtbot, we're a design and development consultancy who create and build products from the very earliest stages.
We are currently in our second incubator session. This is actually our final week. We're wrapping up this week our second program with Ashley at AvidFirst. And I'll let everybody go around and say hi and give a little intro.
Today, we're going to be chatting about how the program has been going, any new recent activity, and things that we've learned and done, and, you know, what's going to happen here after the session ends.
I'm Dawn. I am a Managing Director here at thoughtbot. And I will shoot it over to you, Ashley.
ASHLEY: Thanks, Dawn. And my name is Ashley Sheble. I'm the CEO and Founder of AvidFirst. AvidFirst is really focused on helping people save and spend for college in a modern way. We're simplifying the process, modernizing the experience, and really, with the end goal of helping families avoid student debt.
So, I've been working with the thoughtbot team for the past eight weeks, really refining our strategy, and we'll talk about this here in a minute. But pivoting a little bit on the strategy just based on what we learn from the market from talking to users, from talking to experts, from talking to people with just insight around what's needed in the space. And so I'm excited to share more about the past eight weeks.
DAWN: Awesome. Thank you. Jordyn, do you want to hop in?
JORDYN: Sure. I'm Jordyn Bonds. And I'm the Director of Product Strategy on the Ignite team. And I am a two-time former co-founder of tech startups, so whence I come to this work. Vendela, I'll let you go.
VENDELA: I'm Vendela Colavecchio. I'm the Design Director on our team here running the incubators at thoughtbot. And yeah, should I talk about my role on the incubator [chuckles] more?
I guess the incubator is sort of funny because, you know, as a designer, typically, my tasks fall under more of a traditional design category. But I think with the incubator, we're, like, all hands on deck, just trying to get lots of things done and help out in any way that we can. So, definitely some design things, but also just a bunch of participating in discussions and getting all sorts of tasks done.
DAWN: I'm sure we'll dive more into that. As usual, though, we're going to let Ashley kick us off, kick our discussion off with a little bit of an update on what's been going on in these past two weeks since we last chatted and, you know, where we are now.
ASHLEY: Yeah. So, the past couple of weeks have been pretty exciting. I went to an industry conference. It was a 529 and ABLE conference. So, 529s are tax-advantaged savings accounts specific for education expenses. ABLE accounts are tax-advantaged savings accounts, specifically for peo