Design a startup studio from ground up
2019 | #Startup #Service Design #Facilitation #Strategy #User Research
Unc Inc, an Amsterdam based digital creative agency, had had several successful cases of mentoring and invested in startups. The board and management felt it was time to create a brand that directly targeted early stage startups. This lead to the formation of the startup studio Startship.
My role:
My role in this almost year-long process was to support the CEO and business strategist with startup and business research, process facilitation, exploring business opportunities and intake. I explored business models and value propositions, did interviews and journey mapping with startups, I developed new service offerings, I created new tools and methods and I organised and facilitated external events.
Facilitating a canvas session
Reviewing a User Journey
How might we
How might we build a separate service brand that addresses the needs which early stage startups have to be able to grow?
One of the startup journey maps created from user interviews.
The Process
Clarification: Unc Inc is the mother company from with the startup studio Startship sprouted.
Like any process of building a new venture, it’s chaotic, intense and frustrating - but highly rewarding and insightful. We started off with a lot of passion, dedication and partial management support. The CEO of Unc Inc already had a clear vision where to go and my first task was to clarify it and make it more tangible as well as understand it enough to communicate it to the rest of the team.
Early on in the process I started doing research on how Unc Inc’s previous successful startup had been developed. I wanted to get an idea what the magical glitter was. I conducted in-depth interviews with the founders which were then synthesised into personas and journeys.
I then needed to understand the startup ecosystem of Amsterdam and beyond. A tedious but interesting process of desktop research and immersion methods were used. I attended events and invited entrepreneurs for coffee. All to better understand their pains and gains, wishes and dreams.
Somewhat parallel to this we started to iterate on the business model canvas and mapping the value proposition to get an idea of the services we would offer to our customers.
Iteratively as we worked we didn’t wait for the services to be fully finished before we built the website, the visual identity and communicating on social media. We had talked to enough people (for now) to start building something that would address the initial needs of the startup founders.
Some 5 months after we had initially started we would have the official launch of Startship at in connection to festival like tech conference - The Next Web. We started shifting focus from internal development to external communication. One product that bridged these two focuses was designed - the Conference Canvas, a canvas that supported conference attendees to identify and communicate their purpose.
The launch was well received and we started to get in contact with various startups.
Fast forward a few months and the undertaking was starting to show it’s true color. Due to a few early ill focused energy (having to broad focus), lack of management support (not communicating KPI’s and roadmap) and pressing priorities in other areas, tasks fell between the chairs and plans got delayed.
Developing our own value proposition canvas
Our own developed 2-day Brand Sprint
Process Challenges
Wrapping my head around the vision and approach my colleague had for this new venture was a challenge. It was solved with many visual thinking sessions and conversations.
Digging deep into the big field of startups and understanding the fast-changing environment.
Balancing the focus between Startship and other clients work.
The extended Startship family and collaborators.
The outcome
The new venture slowly became incorporated into the mother company Unc Inc with new learnings and insights, new processes and offerings.
New partnerships were created with collaborators.