Getting to work with the CEO, Paul Lambert and team at Matygo was an experience that gave me a greater understanding of the process a start up business has to go through to establish itself. After Paul came to class a couple of Wednesdays ago and presented his business my partner, Joyce, and I met to fill out a business canvas. We pulled up Matygo’s webpage and we tried to understand all aspects of the company; however, we found this very difficult. We barely could answer any of the questions that were asked of us on the business canvas. We decided that we had best go meet with the Matygo team.
A few days later, we met at Matygo’s GrowLab office in downtown Vancouver. Paul sat down with Joyce and I and we went through all the questions on our business canvas. We tried to answer the questions based on the business at the time but we were struggling to get clear definitive answers from Paul. Joyce tried to ask questions in multiple ways as I tried to write down everything Paul said, but each time we got the same vague response. We talked to Paul for about an hour and got down as much as we possibly could, but we still felt very uneasy about the whole project. We hoped when we went to class the next day that some of our questions would be cleared up.
Next day in class we spent some time on the business canvas. We hung our posters up around the room and we got the opportunity to critique and to be critiqued by other students. We found that the other team we were working with was just as confused as we were with their CEO`s responses. We spent a long time discussing what the point of the business canvas was. We realised that we were all so used to coming up with recommendations of some sort in our program, we felt lost just mapping out a business. We couldn’t see the point of the exercise. When we learned that we needed to come up with some insight from our mapping of the canvas, the project started to make sense. We were trying to understand the business, which is rarely something we get to step back and do at Sauder.
Joyce and I met later that week to discuss what we had learned from Paul. We tried to answer the questions on the canvas as best we could. Also, we started trying to figure out how we would display the business. We realised that everything Matygo does relates to each other. Customer relationships and cost structure are just one example where we saw connections. In order to express this on our business canvas, we thought of making a globe but we realised this did not allow us to individualise each section. We ended up creating a box with 6 sides.
When it came to doing our final presentation everything seemed to come together. We were the last group to present in our room but I found it to be a very rewarding experience. Everyone was really interested in our box and once we explained it, we passed it around for everyone to see. We were able to come up with a lot of insight and from what we found provide some recommendations. At the end of the presentation, we had a class discussion about Matygo. It was interesting because Paul said that the company was continuously evolving and that they were going to change the name. At first, Joyce and I felt like we had put in all this effort for nothing but after reading this week’s articles, I realised that that was not the case.
After reading “Design Thinking” by Tim Brown, I felt like this whole experience working with a start up company and mapping their business really came together for me. In all the examples this article talks about were innovation resulted, brainstorming and rapid prototyping were involved. I can now see that the business canvas is a great way to prototype a business and it can be done quite quickly and you can easily manipulate it to meet your needs. This is the reason why Paul said the company was changing continuously. They are in the prototyping stage of their start up. They are still trying to match people’s needs with what is technologically feasible and what a viable business strategy can convert into customer value and market opportunity. The article repeatedly talks about being inspired by a deep understanding of consumer’s lives and paying close consideration to user’s needs and preferences. I find the creators of Matygo believed at one point that they had understood their target customers` preferences and needs because they had recently been in their position as students. When Matygo first started, the business was to create a new black board online learning centre that was far more efficient and added more tools that they had felt had been lacking on it when they went to school. However, it was a great idea but they had difficulty selling it to the schools that already had an established system.
The next article that we read was “Design-Driven Innovation” by Roberto Verganti. This article did not have as large of an impact on wrapping up the business canvas project as the article before but it did have a few good points that I took away with me. The whole point of the article is to discuss the strategy of design-driven innovation which does not look at market needs, but makes proposals to people. This is exactly the approach that Matygo is now taking in the evolution of its business. Part of the problem with being able to answer the questions that we asked was there really was no answer or the answer was continuously changing. For example, in the customer segment section it was very hard for us to pin point customer segments and this is because Matygo had never really thought about them. They put forward a vision. They didn’t decide which markets they were targeting; it just ended up a certain way.
The final article that we had to read was “Building Design Strategy: Using Design to Achieve Key Business Objectives” by Lockwood and Walton. I found this article to be very enlightening. When we first went and met with our CEO, Paul I was not convinced that he was really taking the right amount of time and doing the right things to run his business effectively. Slowly I saw that what he was doing seemed to be working and once I read this article I understood why. The article starts off by asking if it is possible that a business not keeping aggressive track of its numbers could flourish. Well the answer is yes as creativity develops in a more relaxed setting. Also creativity is the key to innovation which is the key to business success.
After doing the business canvas project and reading these articles my opinion on starting your own business is very different. I used to believe that it had to be a very strict process, that you had to keep close track of your finances and there was little room for changes once you implemented your strategy (that you had to get it right the first time). But now I see I was completely wrong and that start ups result from the continuous refining and changing of the current business strategy and that it is a more relaxed process that should allow for creativity.