Go out and Play!

Testing, Testing

This coming week is particularly exciting for Kognio. Why? Because we're doing user surveys! Wooooohooo! When I joined the team it was on the premise that I like to talk to people. And it's true. I've been pitching people's ears off. It's a lot of fun to hone the craft. But it's not user surveying. This is a bit different and new for me, and I've wanted to be creative about how to get talking to a lot of people. How are we going to do it? Well Abhishek (my co-founder) and I are going to set up in the lobby of Gutman library and entice people in with snacks. We'll get some feedback to test our hypotheses and put people down on a list for further feedback in the future. After a bit more discussion with the team, we've decided to take a step back and restructure our hypotheses. The main hypothesis contains the sub-hypotheses that we really want to be focusing on for the time being:

Main Hypothesis
# Currently, the search-to-learn method (ie, using Google to explore a new topic) is inefficient and impractical in some cases and therefore people would use a platform that alleviated the inefficiencies.

1. No guidance on which keywords to start a search with to best begin exploration. 
2. Web page info (Title, Description, Link) in result pages carries insufficient information to judge the web page accurately enough in terms of quality, difficulty, length.
3. No guidance on where to go after you performed first iteration of search 

Secondary Hypotheses

# Our solution, sequenced trails of content, will be a big enough value-add for users to get them shift away from their current methods of learning things on the internet.

# The AI we create will be "smart" enough to alleviate the inefficiencies in current search-to-learn methods.

Tertiary Hypotheses

# Enough users can be reached to create a "tipping point" to really develop the availability of trails (we don't know what that tipping point is yet...)

# This is primarily an AI problem... or it's primarily a UX problem... want to find that out.

During our session at Gutman (on Thursday 4/9!) we'll be surveying people on how they go about their extended searches. We'll be asking about the tools they use, how they do it, their frustrations they face when learning something via search. We know from our own personal experience and our discussions with people casually that this problem exists, but we want to hear how other people articulate it.

Also, on a very important note, I'm going to make t-shirts. Yes. It's important. Why? It's time for us to feel like a real thing--whatever that thing may be at this point. I'm excited, at least.

Costs

You may have guessed by now that if we're building this platform, it's going to be developer heavy. That means we're going to be very heavy with fixed costs. I imagine hordes of coders working ceaselessly to improve our algorithms. On top of that we'll need UX people to make the whole thing sing. I hope that these people will be our army of user testers. 

Since we're a service platform without any physical products to be delivered, it's smarter to approach this as a Cost of Revenue problem. That means our cost of revenue will be comprised of 1) marketing and 2) bandwidth from increasing users.

Employees

As I mentioned before, we're going to be heavy into developers, but we think that we can get to launch with just the three of us as co-founders. That puts a lot of pressure on Ashwin, the technical co-founder, and we may find that we need to bring in some other coders to help get us to launch. In general, we hope to pay people at around market rates for their roles (ie, $80k for a junior developer), but hopefully we can increase that as we go along. Hiring and onboarding processes are extremely interesting to me and my role at Kognio since it has so much to do with culture. We'll focus on culture-fit when hiring and initially hire junior level, with maybe mentorship pairing. I personally benefited from this while working at Magoosh, and I'd like to see it flourish at Kognio.