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.
In the third part of the Mini Incubator Series, they talk about user interviews, data analysis, and prototyping to validate ideas. They emphasize the importance of being open to user signals and adjusting their approach accordingly. They also discuss the upcoming weeks of the program and the goal of refining their story and business strategy.
Just catching up? Listen to Part I (https://www.giantrobots.fm/498) and Part 2 (https://www.giantrobots.fm/499) 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: Thanks, everybody, for joining. We're glad that you're here. If you've tuned in before, great, welcome back. You're probably familiar with thoughtbot; if you're not, we're a product design and development consultancy that helps make you, and your team, and your product successful.
We are currently running the second session of our incubator program, which is an eight-week program that takes you through a lot of different activities and exercises to help you identify market and product opportunities, experiment with them, and ideally come up with a solution that you can move forward with.
I'm Dawn. I'm a Managing Director here at thoughtbot. And I lead a team that works with very early-stage products, and founders, and companies. And I'll hand it over to Jordyn.
JORDYN: I'm Jordyn Bonds, and I'm the Director of Product Strategy on Dawn's team. And I'm kind of the...I don't know what, founder in residence for the incubator trying to bring my experience as a former founder to bear for our participants, in this case, Ashley.
ASHLEY: Okay, my name is Ashley Sheble. I'm the CEO and founder of AvidFirst and have been working with Jordyn and a great team in the second incubator session. So, removing all bias from the statement I'm about to say, but if anybody's thinking about applying to the next incubator, just do it. It's an amazing experience. You're going to learn so much. There are so many smart, helpful people who really care about building cool products that make a difference. And so, do it.
DAWN: I love it. Thanks for the impromptu promo.
JORDYN: Yeah, thank you [laughs]. It's good to hear.
DAWN: Yeah, I'm excited. Cool. Well, Ashley, why don't you maybe kick us off with a little bit of a recap of these past two weeks? What have y'all been working on?
ASHLEY: Yeah, so, just for a little background, in case anybody hasn't been following along, AvidFirst is a technology company aimed at simplifying college saving and spending. Our goal is really to make 529 accounts more usable broadly and then, more specifically, attractive to next-gen consumers.
And for those who aren't familiar with 529 plans, that's okay because neither are about 70% of Americans. But essentially, they are college savings vehicles. They're investment accounts that allow people to contribute money. The money grows tax-free and then can be withdrawn tax-free when used for qualified education expenses.
And over the past few years, the term qualified education expense has really expanded from beyond just tuition and fees to room and board on and off campus, computers, technology, supplies, apprenticeships, K through 12, like, the list is getting longer and longer. And so, our goal is just to really help simplify a really complex system and savings vehicle to make them more appealing and attractive to people.
So, the past few weeks, specifically, we have been aggregating all the data from our user interviews. We've done a lot of user interviews with different stakeholders and have been ta