CLIENT: Small Fry

DATES: March 2014 - May 2015

COMPANY
Small Fry trains and then directly employs digitally savvy youth to do online marketing for local small business for holistic community development.

CHALLENGE
Create a sustainable program that creates economic opportunity for both underserved young people and micro- and small-businesses in disadvantaged communities.

APPROACH
I approached the development of the organization’s business model and programs using lean start-up and design thinking methodologies. I needed to understand what both youth and small business owners needed to succeed economically and what they would respond to in terms of solutions to those needs.

I worked with teams of volunteers from the Acumen+/IDEO Human Centered Design program, as well as with design thinking practitioners from The Design Gym’s community, to conduct research, create prototypes, test prototypes, and iterate based on feedback.

To test the youth-serving side of the organization, I conducted a 5-month pilot training program informed by leading industry expert’s content and feedback. The 14 students participating in the program were tasked with providing critical feedback after each session to create a repository of successful and unsuccessful learning projects. At the conclusion of the training program, they were interviewed by a third party to extract final insights. All learnings throughout this phase were frameworked and distilled down to insights statements to use in later iterations of the program.

To create and test the small business owner-serving side of the organization, we interviewed dozens of small business owners in Harlem to get a preliminary idea of their online needs. We frameworked this data to create a list of must-haves that were incorporated into the first lo-fi website prototype. We tested the first prototype with a dozen small business owners and used their feedback to iterate on the model and create a product roadmap. The resulting MVP was again tested with 40 additional small business owners around NYC.

We used the MVP and our process to get accepted to both the Global Social Benefit Incubator Online program, and MassChallenge, the world’s largest accelerator and a top-ranking program in the US.

RESULTS
The result from this project was a pilot organization that trained 4 cohorts of youth in two cities to deliver online marketing services to approximately 3 small business clients each. The youth were paid a fair wage and gained marketable skills while the small business clients attracted more customers and increased their revenues.

LESSONS LEARNT
Interviewing users is an important and necessary strategy for any project, but user observation and testing is perhaps even more important. Small Fry very accurately demonstrated Margaret Mead’s adage “what people say, what people do, and what they say they do are entirely different things”. While users from both sides of the double-sided marketplace said they wanted the platform and demonstrated in early testing that they did, upon launch the business model faltered and ultimately destroyed its growth potential.