Monday, July 30, 2012

Workshop Launch! - 27th July, 2012



This was it! The big day - our first 'Manage What' workshop. It was the launch of our offerings. There were 6 participants who we personally invited to come and experience the workshop. We decided to cover a key topic from the 'Manage What' program - Personal Effectiveness!


Office Space

Initially during our pre-setup discussions which were taking place in a borrowed conference room at a friend's western suburban office, we would splash out ideas as to what would be an ideal location for our startup. For the matter of fact we also thought if it would be ideal to simply follow a work-from-home model. But then, call it a blessing in disguise we found out that our alma mater Sardar Patel Institute of Engineering had started an Incubation Centre. This helped us lay our first stone in the foundation of our company.


We wanted the office to be a one stop shop which incudes office space for the staff as well as a learning lounge for the cohorts. Right from the word 'Go' we started scouting for the furniture, keeping in mind comfort, aesthetics, experience and ofcourse costs (remember the 'Lean and Mean Start-up Strategy').

Parallel to these activities we also had to finalise the gadgets for the lounge such as a high quality projector which could display images and videos flawlessly. The partition for the office alongwith the electrical works was completed within a week, with the furniture delivered in the following week.


W.E.B.S.I.T.E - Our immediate learnings!!!

After we launched our website, we received a lot of 'praise' emails. It was motivating for us.
While, most of the feedback was positive, there were a couple of questions around our offerings. This was definitely something we had to analyze and take care of. We immediately sat down and brainstormed on our initial purpose of the website, how much we achieved and also revisited the feedback.

After our analysis, we found the feedback that we recieved fell in line with our observations. We completely missed out on explaining our offerings clearly to our 'Last-Bench Learners'(Customers). This included the What, Why, Where, When, Who and How of the offerings. Now, it was time to get down to actual business and get this issue fixed. The changes included revisiting the page layouts, content, content organization and the interfaces.


Monday, July 2, 2012

The W.E.B.S.I.T.E!

It was a proud moment and a huge relief when our website went live! :) After weeks of brainstorming, mock-ups, paper prototypes and conceptualization, we finally saw it come to life. Of course, without the contribution of the tech team this wouldn't have been possible.

It was a great team effort because everyone did their part and ensured that we stuck to our schedules. Some things that I personally like about our website, one is the bench-y feeling, second the custom font and the sketch pad on which all the info is put out and finally all the images that were developed.