Creating my First Startup at LaunchX

And the lessons on Entrepreneurship I gained along the way

Last summer, I had the opportunity to attend the LaunchX Entrepreneurship Program, an entrepreneurial summer program empowering young people to build the future, where I co-founded Blossom App with our team of five. Throughout the program, we learned about the fundamentals of creating and launching a startup through interactive lectures, speaker sessions, market simulations, mock board meetings, and more. (For more info, visit launchx.com.)

Now that it’s been almost a year since this all began, I wanted to reflect on my experience launching my first startup and share some key learnings, takeaways, and what I will do differently next time. Hopefully this will be useful to more people who are interested in creating their own startups, or are interested in attending an entrepreneurship program.

My journey at LaunchX began in March of 2020. At the time, I was extremely excited to join the cohort at Northwestern University! However, COVID changed all of that. I started to wonder if I would be able to have an enjoyable experience if I was just attending the program virtually and from my own home, rather than being on a university campus.

But I still gained so much from the experience, even before it started. During the same month, as our Slack workspace opened and we started giving introductions, something about being in an environment with people just as motivated — or even more motivated — to create cool projects, organizations, events, and companies gave me an extra sense of motivation and urge for fulfillment that I didn’t have before. We also had the opportunity to attend a few quick intro sessions, where we were able to hear from a LaunchX instructor about a market or industry that was of interest to us.

• A month before the program began, I met the rest of my team. We came up with our ideas of problems, and narrowed down to our initial idea:
  “We seek to solve the problem of high school students lacking a platform to organize short-term and long-term goals, as well as staying accountable for meeting these goals.”

This was what we pitched to our mini-cohort on the first day of the program. After we pitched the “idea”, there were all sorts of looming questions left unanswered:

• What does increasing productivity look like?
• What does “personalized” even mean?
• Working towards larger goals?
• Measuring both short and long-term goals?

Everything was WAY TOO BROAD, nothing was defined, and there was no clear mission solving a real problem a target audience has. In fact, even before we gave the pitch, an instructor (talking to the entire group, not just our team) advised everyone not to say something like “productivity” or “sustainability”, unless we took an extremely unique angle, because those will always be problems we were going to solve. That moment didn’t feel too great, yet it was alright; it was only the first day and we knew we had a lot to learn anyway (which was exciting)!

In addition, getting feedback from everyone else in our mini-cohort was useful, as it allowed us to get a view of our own ideas from the outside for the very first time.

We met with our mini-cohort leader for the first time later that day. Some key notes from that meeting: time management is already competitive, we should try to think of something we could “get a quick win in”; the path of least resistance would mean “less of a heavy list”. We should get on platforms to see what users like and don’t like, then talk with customers & read reviews to understand this further. And, ultimately, if there are established players, how do we differentiate?

Next, we met with a tech mentor, although I wasn’t one of the technical people on my team so I can’t speak too much about this. We looked into the technical aspect of what we could do, and he introduced us to different development frameworks, machine learning tips, and components that may be important when designing our product (although at this point, we weren’t exactly sure what features we would build out, so we threw everything on the table).

From our experiences that week, we learned to ask ourselves, “what specific need are we addressing?” (A want isn’t enough to make something stand out.) We needed to be specific with our mission and our offering, and needed to be able to clearly explain our feature set once it was developed.

That week, we refined our idea, refined our value proposition, signed a founders’ agreement, created an initial market research plan, and presented in front of our mock board for the very first time.

First Mock Board Meeting

At this point, we had already decided to meet the needs of a smaller market of people with learning differences, because we thought that current productivity tools met even less of their needs. We decided to focus on ADHD, and considered a potential pivot into the health and services market (because of high saturation in the education market), and presented it to the board. Here is some of the feedback we received:

• There is always potential, there is always saturation, but we need to get market data and facts to work. What is the problem we’re trying to solve here?
• Why does this target market need help? What specifically? What would happen if they continued to not be treated with a supplemental product?
• If some % of people with ADHD don’t get treatment, what happens to them? Need to be able to answer this question, to understand the impacts, the problems with not meeting the needs of our users
• Should conduct a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis to understand other solutions, go in parallel in order to understand the key differentiators as well as behavioral response
• Need to know more about the user — getting more specific with who the user is, which requires more research

Week 2

We came up with our initial customer persona and began to analyze competitors’ offerings. This week, the lectures were mainly focusing on creating a unique customer experience and standing out from the competition. As we were given all of this information, we weren’t sure what to do next — there were just so many factors to consider!

Looking back, I would say this was the week we were deepest in the trough of sorrow. But nonetheless, we slowly moved forward…

We conducted online Market Research, using Google Search (obviously), Mayo Health Clinic, ADDitude Magazine, and Reddit groups, studies from several universities, in order to learn about different therapies. This allowed us to learn about different therapies and exercises for people with ADHD.

Then, we found our market size and potential:

• Among children with ADHD, almost two-thirds (62 percent) were taking medication, and just under half (46.7 percent) had received behavioral treatment in the past year.
• At least one in five students with ADHD does not receive needed school-based intervention services
• About 5 in 10 children with ADHD have a behavior or conduct problem.

We began conducting research & SWOT analysis on existing apps for patients with ADHD.

At the end of the week, our mock board was actually impressed by our progress (or at least, more so than they were the first week). We mentioned that we conducted two interviews, and we’re planning to conduct more soon, and received some feedback on how to conduct market research interviews:

• Ask non-leading questions — “yes” or “no” tells you virtually nothing about the person’s experience, and causes them to come up with and be influenced by you & your team.
• Ask follow-up questions to understand more about the person’s experience
• Ask for second connections: who to go out and interview next? Chances are someone working to help people with ADHD know other people in the same field. Plus, in order to get enough feedback, “we needed to interview hundreds of people, not dozens”.

Week 3

This is when we really took off. Our mentality changed from “I don’t know how to do this” to “let’s go out and do all of this, and see what happens”. Instead of waiting after initially receiving no responses in the previous week

We were introduced to the ideas of brand strategy and marketing content by the amazing designers at DHD (David Henderson Design), a firm in Northern Ireland. And can I just say, the two slide decks they made for these lectures WERE THE NICEST SLIDE DECKS I’VE EVER SEEN (which is great, they’re designers after all). Basically, we learned about the history of branding, how branding can be used to tell a story for your brand, and to deliver a consistent message to your customers on who your company is and what you’re providing, and all of the different materials (e.g. flash drives, business cards, calling cards), where your branding will be found.

After the session, I was inspired to explore branding further. Our team continued conducting extensive market research, looking through dozens of productivity and wellness-related apps. Narrowing down my search to three competitors, the first, marketed towards parents of young children, featured a modern look and a young family. The second, marketed towards an older population, only featured pictures and branding for seniors. The third and most modern, was marketed towards young adults. Unlike the others, it had a strong social media presence, featuring self-care quotes and images of young adults in counseling.

After conducting 97 interviews with students, parents with children, and adults with ADHD, and ADHD counselors, I organized the recurring themes into three categories: Current Problem, Current Process, and Potential Solution. I developed the strategic business plan, allowing us to narrow down two customer persona: one, a teen with ADHD, and another, a parent with a young child having ADHD. We presented all of our findings in front of our Board at the end of that week, with current problem, current process, and potential solution, and explained the two customer persona we had narrowed down to by that point, promising ourselves that we would decide which customer persona to focus on by the end of that day.

Our team didn’t have as strong of a connection with the former, so we decided to focus on the latter — to focus on helping teens with ADHD make the most out of every day, to create a unique feature set that would work for their unmet needs.

Week 4: Marketing, Sales, and Prototyping

Even as we decided to focus on teens having ADHD, our mini-cohort reminded us of the importance of getting feedback from people on all sides — not just teens with ADHD themselves, but continuing to speak with doctors and therapists working with patients who have ADHD, adults with ADHD who have gone through the education system with the mental condition, and parents of the students having ADHD. Each one of these groups could still give us valuable information that the last group may not observe. Plus, therapists may be more important than influencers in making recommendations to parents and teens.

Thus, as we talked more directly to our target market this week (teens with ADHD), through Reddit groups, Facebook groups, Discord groups, and connections we had through LaunchX, we continued to speak with parents and therapists.

In the end, they would all play into our marketing and sales process. Our marketing channels: Students (end user), Parents (customer), School Counselors (recommendation effective), School Educators (recommendation effective), Therapists (recommendation effective)

This week, we thought about our brand strategy, and how we would convey our brand to both customers and investors. Even if we could hypothetically create solutions to dozens of problems our target market was facing at once, it was important to focus on a few features in order to create something a unique product addressing needs more than existing products that only addressed them in a shallow way.

“You don’t want to give it all away in the beginning. It’s best to start with something more manageable, and to choose features most relevant to the customer”. — Kenny Smilovitch

To redefine — or define — our brand, we came up with our first logo and our first name, Blossom — something that could be associated with learning, growing, and being productive.

We updated our Value Proposition and determined our main features:

Our company, Blossom, helps students with ADHD reach their maximum potential in everyday life through helping them keep track of classes and assignments as well work efficiently to complete work.

We do this by creating an application which is specifically tailored to these students which has

• An easy import of assignments, including relevant information such as when it’s due and how and where to turn in
• An intuitive to-do list that brings focus to specific assignments through auto-break down of projects
• Engage feature that helps students better utilize their time and stay on track
• Simple yet effective reminder system that is customizable in order to help students focus and stay on top of assignments

After this, we created a wireframe and initial prototype using Figma, while our app developers decided on using React Native, a framework that would allow the app to function on iOS and Android.

Our team presented this and our initial pricing model to our Mock Board that week, where we were given additional feedback on how to conduct user testing, create a unique brand identity, and create a product that is not only distinctive, but something customers also recognize to be distinctive.

• To determine our online presence, we were told by our mock board that week to ask ourselves the question: “what do we want people to see at the first point of contact?” This would guide the development of our social media presence, which we initiated the next week.

Week 5

Demo Day was fast approaching, and our time at LaunchX was quickly coming to an end. That’s why we scheduled meetings with all of the LaunchX instructors, mentors, and interns as we possibly could to receive more feedback on our product and the pitch we began to formulate for our presentation.

We compiled thirty pages of notes in our meetings with instructors, mentors, and interns, so I won’t share all of the details and key takeaways. One thing we learned, however, was about specific word choice and semantics, and how much of an impact it could have on how our product would be perceived by the customer. An example we were given is if we were considering a free version and a paid version, we should avoid the words “basic” and “paid”, instead using “free” and “premium”. Here’s why:

Having to go out of your way to pay for something seems like a hassle. Instead, by using the word “premium”, the user feels as if they’re actually gaining something special.

While it is reasonable to call your free plan “basic”, the contrast between “free” and “premium” versus “basic” and “premium” is more likely to get users to convert to your paid plan — even though “basic” literally means the base, or the most fundamental you can get, for “free” the user is getting what seems like literally nothing.

Financial model — On the other side, our team ultimately decided not to pursue this model proposed to us (the example above). As we delved deep into our financial model, pricing, and projections this week, we found that customers would find a free plan too limiting in functionality, while paid plan users expect too much more because they were paying for something they had for free, with only slightly less features. This is why we decided to go with one monthly fee.

In order to incentivize people to come to the app, we would offer a free trial for one month. The amount of users continuing to use the app to the point where they feel like they can’t live without it, going on to pay for the app a month later, could prove to be a good measure of traction, because it would allow us to focus on our most loyal potential users.

User Testing & Iterations — We continued to conduct more user testing, and created more iterations of our app. Some of the changes we made this week:

• Users preferred muter color tones → changed the app color from purple to light blue.
• Users thought the dashboard (front page) should be more effective → added a primary task featured at the top of the screen and included an overview of gamification.
• Users thought interface had too much text → Included more icons, limited the text on certain features, increased size of everything
• Users want more gamification → Added levels and points

Marketing — Now that we decided to go with a comforting blue color palette and decided on the logo we wanted to move forward with, we launched our Instagram @blossomapp.us, and made progress with our landing page!

Financials — As mentioned above, we ultimately decided on a monthly subscription fee for our users. We found it difficult to price our app: after pitching in front of our mini-cohort, the average fee that another student was willing to pay was $11/month, which we believe was largely skewed by the person who inputted the highest amount in our entire group — $45/month. At this point in time, we decided to go with $4.49/month (which we soon lowered), and considered offering slight discounts if you paid for six months or a year at once. We said no to adding on a download cost, because this would ruin the entire reasoning behind offering a free trial — so we can build up trust with our users to the point where they are confident and will continue to use our app.

Our customer acquisition costs would potentially be determined by the expenses for social media promotion, sponsor & relevant influencers (down the road), Instagram paid ads ($7/1000 views), email lists, and advertising costs through relevant organizations such as (CHAAD — Children & Adults with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder). This was determined to be (at the time) ~ $25 — $30 per customer in the beginning, which may sound high, although (1) we predicted the lifetime value of a customer would be long, since they already used our app enough to rely on it/pay for it on a monthly basis, and (2) CAC would eventually go down through word-of-mouth referrals.

We planned on putting ~ 15–20% of revenue into marketing and customer acquisition, where each customer has a lifetime Value of ~ $140, meaning we would still make a reasonable profit.

Our plans for the final week of LaunchX were as follows: we would continue user testing and design iterations, work on more defined feature for ADHD, finish creating a functional prototype through React Native (not just on Figma), start compiling an emailing list of potential users, and most importantly prepare for Demo Day.

Week 6

During the final days of the program, we continued to speak with everyone we could for pitch feedback and user testing. On the technical side, we were able to get the Google Classroom API working, completed a functional prototype with the primary navigation and basic UI (the layout for dashboard, task lists, and add new task pages) completed in React Native.

About halfway through the week, as we were working on developing our pitch video for Demo Day, we were able to integrate an animation of a walkthrough of our functional prototype to the right of one of our team members talking! (And yes, it wasn’t a live pitch — all the startup teams created their own pitch videos since Demo Day was virtual — eliminating a focus on live internet connectivity issues and pitch decks in the background of the “pitch stage” the day of.)

In addition, we came up with our Exit Strategy, Company Next Steps, and Additional Considerations for the future of our company.

• Exit Strategy (in the far future) — if a larger competitor is interested, after establishing a strong customer base and becoming financially stable, we would be willing to sell our company. We planned on keeping our company more of a lifestyle business, keeping it up and running but not looking to grow largely; with each team member’s various commitments, we decided to focus on dedicating appropriate time & resources to sustain the business, but did not plan on exponentially growing with marketing and development.
• Company Next Steps — we would continue & start new outreach to organizations, therapists, school counselors, parents having students with ADHD, and students with ADHD, increase our social media presence, get more user testers & potential customers, and on the tech side, work on full integration of Google Calendar before moving on to Schoology and Canvas by Instructure.
• Additional Considerations — to continue our company, we would have to consider legal & accounting costs, including the cost of incorporation, cost of insurance, registration & licensing (if necessary), and tax filing requirements. Our key questions were:
• How would we get more traction and grow a customer base?
  How would we enter the market at the right time (would we be able to launch the app by the start of the school year when students are returning to their routines again? The answer was no.)
  And, on the technical side, what would it take to fully integrate the API?

As we met with our mini-cohort leader, intern, and Mock Boards for the last time, we realized how quickly the six weeks had passed as we prepared to answer questions live during the Q&A session that would come after our video was shown.

Our Last Startup Framework Weekly Update

Demo Day!

For Demo Day, the LaunchX teams were divided into different sessions, where a different LaunchX Instructor would moderate each session with interactive polls, questions, and introductions for each team. Then, a team’s three-minute pitch video would be played, and followed by a live Q&A from the panel of investors.

Our group was included in the Data and Tech Startups batch, alongside Urban Harvest (tackling food insecurity with hydroponics and vertical farming), DRISA (a modular device preventing fatigue-caused road accidents through steering wheel biometric monitoring), Neuro (an app detecting early warning signs of Alzheimer’s with free, accessible physical/sleep-related tests), Vylet (a tracker combatting the issue of drink spiking and sexual assault in nightlife culture by monitoring body vitals for drug-induced abnormalities), and Remedium (app for chemotherapy patients that improves treatment outcomes with frequent, data-driven symptom tracking).

Our panel of investors included (but was not limited to):

• Jai Malik, 208 Seed Ventures
• Tom Mastrobuoni, Big Idea Ventures
• Sudhir Kadam, Venture Partner at FYDA Ventures
• Aarthi Ramasubramanian, Venture Partner at Opes

We received generally positive feedback, including one of the investors telling us that he definitely thought we were addressing a real need, that he would want his kids to use it, and that we should raise our subscription price (we had dropped our price down to ~$2.50/month). The last part goes to show how difficult it was for us to price our product (which I talked about above, in the descriptions of the weeks right before demo day). As we received a question about licensing, and were surprised that almost all feedback was positive, we felt like the panelists didn’t fully understand our idea. Yet all in all, we felt like we did a decent job presenting our app and proving there was a real need in the market.

Overall, I’m proud of the work that our team was able to accomplish over this six-month period, especially saying that all of us were new to entrepreneurship and had never created our own startups before. Although this piece’s focus was on retelling the founding weeks of Blossom App in chronological order, to help others to get an understanding of what the intensive LaunchX program is like, or what to consider when embarking on your own startup journey, there was one more aspect of LaunchX I wanted to mention — speaker events. Bringing in real professionals in marketing, accounting, business strategy, neuroscience, social entrepreneurship, nonprofit management, and more was extremely eye-opening and inspiring; many shared their stories of starting their own businesses, and we were able to compare where our startup was to where this (now-turned) professional was in its founding days.

If I were to give you my biggest takeaway from the LaunchX program, it would probably be from an hour-long elective given by MIT faculty member Sanjay Sarma, titled “digital learning”. This session introduced me to the neuroscience behind how humans truly learn & engage, how we grow from our experiences (and when we do & when we don’t), what mind-wandering is, and how a combination of digital learning and in-person learning can be used to spark our curiosity, enhance our creativity, and unlock the potential within our minds. This was all so fascinating, and it led me to think about how to adapt TeenTechSF and Bentley DTE workshops (which were already moving online) to make them more interactive and engaging.

In addition, the elective given by MIT Professor Martin Culpepper about the institution making mass-3D printing face shields comes to mind now, as I am working to create my own face shields & am organizing the team behind TeenTechSF’s own PPE Initiative, where we’re sewing masks and 3D printing face shields for SF’s most vulnerable community members.

Another thing I realized at LaunchX was the power of networking. On the second-to-last day of the program, another Co-Founder at Blossom convinced me to join the community on LinkedIn. Leveraging connections and using LinkedIn as a resource to reach out allowed me to set up my own speaker series on Tech & Entrepreneurship, hosted by TeenTechSF-Bentley DTE. Two of the speakers came to LaunchX electives during the 2020 Summer Session, while another was a LaunchX 2020 alumni herself!

For more information on the Speaker Series, visit ttsf-dte-speakers.eventbrite.com.

Focal: What Blossom Could Have Been?

Source: Focal.app. Hopefully they’re okay with me using the photo :)

I wanted to conclude this by briefly comparing us with Focal, a similar app that came out of the LaunchX program in 2020, before sharing a few of my key takeaways for what we should do differently next time.

While we started with the problem of “not enough productivity”, instead of narrowing down to a specific market segment within teens, this team decided to take another approach. From their pitch: “existing solutions are confusing, ineffective, or both. They offer you tools to organize your tasks, but provide you with no motivation to focus, buckle down, and actually get them done, forcing students to rely only on their self discipline.”

From there, they focused on developing a unique solution that would “actually help you be productive, not just plan out your productivity”. With this, their target market was still broad enough where they didn’t have to make as complicated differentiated features, and they were able to drill down the “simplicity” aspect of their app. (Although like Focal, we ended up with an app that was extremely simple, intuitive, and easy to use, we were continuously concerned that we were not building enough features specifically tailored enough to our target market of teens with ADHD. Plus, it took us much longer.) The simplicity of their design allowed them to launch alpha testing in the week leading up to Demo Day, where they had some version of their product launched, with 50+ people completing 300+ tasks before the pitch. In our case, we were able to do user testing based on a prototype, which wouldn’t produce as valuable feedback as a lean MVP, or a product that was put directly into customers’ hands so they could test it out themselves.

In addition, they were able to reach more people and grow faster because they were more active on social media and acquired potential customers, while in our company, we wanted to wait on releasing an app until we got more of our complex features sorted out. For example, one of our main features was integrating the API for Google Classroom, Canvas by Instructure, and Schoology — we didn’t feel like it would be okay to release the app on the Apple Store or Google Play for customers to download on their own phones without us completing the integration. If we had focused on getting the scheduling of tasks and timer to work first (like Focal did), our users would be able to comment more about how it felt as they scrolled through the app, instead of a group of teens who made the product showcasing it in a computer screen (not allowing the user to truly interact with the product).

In reality, it’s about getting the product into customers’ hands as soon as possible so they can provide you with valuable feedback; if you end up developing one of your “main complex features” when all the users are satisfied with what they have already, or all of their comments tell you that they’re not interested in that “main complex feature” at all, you’ll be able to save a lot of time. There will always be problems, which will make you think that your product is not ready to be released yet, but this becomes the case even more with more word-of-mouth referrals because people liked your product and recommended it to others — when more people enjoy the product, they’ll have more comments to address, suggestions to listen to, and bugs to report. Something our team realized after a few months was how much we convinced ourselves that getting API integration of multiple platforms to work before releasing the app on the App Store and Google Play, because we came up with the idea that “many schools use multiple learning platforms, so we want to create a place to list the tasks all in one place”, when in reality, most schools only use one. When you’re caught up in attempting to make everything perfect, and you feel as if you need to get all of the features in so the app works perfectly, it’s not true. Listen to customers so you don’t waste your time.

TL;DR: Key Takeaways

• Competitive differentiation — what makes your product unique? How will your team deliver something different than existing products on the market, or products that existed in the past with similar problems they intended to solve, which were not successful? Although our team developed a great answer to this question, I wanted to make a note of it because it’s something that almost every investor (and many customers) will ask you.
• Creating a lean MVP — as I mentioned above in my comparison of Blossom with Focal, our team shouldn’t have tried to overload our developers with features, albeit offering more than what was already on the market to solve our specific problem, it did not let us get our app into the hands of users so they could interact with it, use it in their own time, and provide us with honest feedback. It’s not essential to have all the features you’ve imagined will create a perfect product that solves all of the users’ problems built out — keep it simple, release it, and iterate based on your feedback from customers.
• Next, we should have talked to our customers more from the very beginning. One of Y Combinator’s mantras is “talk to your users” — this is in order for your company to take a user-centered approach. In our company, because we wanted to wait until the complex API configuration was sorted before release, we planned to wait until “we made enough progress” to double down on getting more people to test our app. At the same time, many of the product decisions we made were created by ourselves, and we asked the few “user testers” we had what they thought of the layout (and the changes we made — indirectly).
• Being more open-minded — why did I feel like I needed to push back when we changed the color of our app to a comforting blue? (I felt like blue was waaay too overused because it’s featured in so many startups, and wanted to create something unique. Although I’m not sure why I became slightly frustrated when we made the color change.) Why did I feel like I needed to push back when the rest of my team members wanted to remove the background image on the dashboard (which is visible in Iteration #2, but not in the next image of our interface showing the same screen in a later iteration). As Ray Dalio explains it, every human has their own “two you’s” — one that is defensive whenever someone says something that contradicts what you believe is right, and another “you” that listens to the other person. When we look back, we often wonder how we got so caught up over little decisions in the moment.
• Solving a problem that matters to you — Our team initially started around the general idea of “productivity” — a challenge that all teens face. Then, we narrowed our target market down to a smaller audience in order to create a more specialized product that addressed problems which this subset of customers were facing that have not been addressed by products already on the market (which is good), but in doing so, narrowing it down to a target market that we were not a part of (not so good). Yes, we did talk to many teens with ADHD, adults with teens who have ADHD, and counselors specialized in ADHD, and created a unique set of features not seen on the market before because we worked to understand the core frustrations of our target market, and yes, we could relate to some extent with our customer base; however, it would have been much better if we also directly faced the problem we were trying to solve. During part of the six-week program, some members of our team weren’t sure if we were going down the right path, because not all of us could connect or gain the same immediate motivation that would come with solving our own personal problems.