The “next big thing” starts off with an idea, and from there, a series of discussions and experiments take off.
When my partner and I interviewed Lindsay Watt, Co-Founder of Placeling, we had set out just to understand his business and its components as laid out by the business canvas model. However, sitting in Calhoun’s over coffee and hipster vibes, what we got out of our meeting was so much more.
Following Tim Brown’s Design Thinking Cycle, Lindsay walked us through the Inspiration, Ideation, Implementation of his start-up company, Placeling.
- Inspiration
Lindsay loves traveling. He and his wife have traveled all over the world, visiting countless restaurants, shopping destinations, mountains, nature trails, you name it. Every time his friends asked him for recommendations of great places to visit in different cities, he found himself struggling to remember all those places and “hidden gems”. That is when he realized there needed to be some sort of way to easily record and share all the places that he has been to. - Ideation
He asked “what’s an easy way to remember every single place you’ve ever visited, and be able to share it with friends and people worldwide?”. His answer was a mobile app that could be carried around from place to place with the traveler. To gather more ideas and test out his thoughts with fellow entrepreneurs, he signed up for a Vancouver Entrepreneurs hangout/networking date. It was there that he met his future partner and Co-founder of Placeling, Ian. Ian’s idea was a more abstract version of Lindsay’s idea. But there was enough similarity that the pair decided to collaborate. - Implementation
After a decision to share their ideas and collaborate, Placeling was born. With a vision for their company and the value propositions to be delivered to consumers, the pair started to seriously work to get this project off the ground. Ian was a hardcore programmer, and wrote all the complicated codes for Placeling. Lindsay, an engineer with a business background, focused on finding business partners, finance streams, hiring their team, and doing some light coding.
Ian and Lindsay engaged in design thinking. As described in Brown’s article, Empathy is about taking a “people first” approach. The duo thought about what the world would be like if a mobile app like Placeling was widely used, and imagined the world from different perspectives. Optimism was an important aspect of their vision- In a market already full of many locations-based services and dominated by seasoned giants like Foursquare and Gowalla, Placeling has identified a niche and is trying to create value for the millions of mobile internet users who are not using Foursquare or Gowalla. Experimentalism— Placeling has undergone several versions, each with a little tweak or improvement based on what Ian and Lindsay perceive users to want. Collaboration— the Placeling team consists of engineers, marketers, designers, architects, and it is their human capital that is most valuable to the company.
This project was an eye-opener for me in that it provided valuable insight to how a start-up company is conceived, and what the implementation process is like. You should all download Placeling because the user interface and colour schemes are more attractive than Foursquare! I’m so not being biased here, haha. But seriously, I’m excited to see how Placeling will grow over the next few years.
Just like you and your partner met Lindsay for coffee at Calhoun’s and casually talked about his business, my experience for the business canvas project was pretty similar. It wasn’t in a suit-and-tie formal setting but more of a relaxed, open conversation, which I really liked. Come to think of it, I think that was what I liked the most about the whole business canvas experience. As business students, I think we are somewhat trained to see business owners as people to impress…potential employers…It’s true to an extent but sometimes we get so caught up in that thought that we forget that they are humans too. (at least I’m guilty of it!) Hearing about your experience – especially the inspiration part – made me remember that they are people just like myself but the difference is that they took on risks, followed their passions and have made livings out of them. Thank you for sharing your experience. Btw, have you actually used Placeling or do you just have it downloaded?
I really enjoyed this post – there is lots of great information included! One thing that caught my eye was the reminder about Experimentalism – that existing ideas can be tweaked slightly to change something for the better. Early in this semester, I was at the talk with author Malcolm Gladwell where he dedicated a good portion of his speech to “tweaking”. His arrival at UBC was just shortly after the death of Steve Jobs, whom Malcolm regarded as a master of tweaking. He pointed out that much of what Steve Jobs did – with MP3 players, with Apple marketing, with the Ipad – tweaked existing ideas and turned them into a series of unprecedented product offerings. I think that sometimes, we are caught up in the over thinking the design process and get so committed to creating a completely new idea, instead of analyzing how the current ideas could be improved, or what about existing ideas works. Perhaps if we considered tweaking, we could discover new possibilities in a much timelier and exciting way!