Stories of Us

We met founder Keisha Siriboe, a PhD candidate at The University of Hong Kong at the DreamCatcher mentor day. Keisha introduced her 2-year offline venture Stories of Us, whose solution is to solve the concerning problem of low parents’ engagement in early literacy in Beijing and Hong Kong.

Our first meeting with Keisha. She has been running her Minimum Viable Business (MVB) for two years and is now ready to scale up her startup further so after assessing the viability of her content, we ran one pilot MVP acceleration week with Keisha.

Keisha joined our team to go through an intensive day to refine the problem statement, the core product proposition and identify the early adopter user group for her MVP version 1.

The working team broke into two groups, while Keisha focused on writing one full demo content entry for the platform mockup, we focused on breaking down and distilling the most critical features to include in the MVP, which would impact the most of user acquisition.

Followed by a long and thorough session to come up with feature design, interaction and user experience on the MVP that will best fit to answer the user’s question, “why should I bother to use your product”, “what’s in it for me?” and “how easy can I use it.”

Before the end of Day 2, the two groups joined together to go through the key features for the MVP. It’s important for the founder to understand the rationales behind the features selection (which usually would include 3-5 key features) and to be given a chance to communicate with the team her concerns. Also, Keisha presented the content she wanted to be included in the MVP, which allowed our team to better visualize the product the founder had in mind. Everyone in the team had to go through reality-check and had their expectation aligned at all time.
Our team got on with the selection of the rapid tools to develop the MVP platform, while Keisha worked off-site to produce more contents to make sure all contents are ready when the website is ready for launch. In this case, we selected to develop the MVP quickly on WordPress for its easy integration with a proposed email campaign automation.

After the wireframe was finalised, the team transferred it quickly on InVision for a short remote catchup with Keisha to allow her to give comments back quickly for our further development.

When all concerns were cleared our Team immediately moved on to the development on WordPress.

Keisha kept sending over the contents to be published while the team spent the day developing. By the end of the day, the two key pages were completed on the staging site.

Finally, the team got together again to go through everyone’s work for the past few days. The founder was responsible for updating the progress on content creation, marketing planning updates based on the MVP dummy she’s seen so far and some updates to the team the go-to-market plan she had arranged for the MVP to be tested.

While we presented the preliminary platform. At this point, it was pivotal for everyone to keep an open-mind and not to be too particular about the UI. The meeting host would make an effort to stop anyone from dragging on any specific details.

In the case of Stories of Us, there are already 3 events and occasions which the founder has lined up to validate the MVP. The first one will be on March 25, when a pop-up reading event was lined up with a local bookstore where Keisha will be presenting the online platform to the attending parents.

A parent workshop was arranged with a local law firm, where Keisha will largely base her reading tutorial on the platform, leveraging this opportunity to showcase both the contents and all the functionality of the MVP. On top of which, 5 to 6 participants were invited to stay behind to conduct an in-depth product interview and usability test with our team for further product enhancement.

One key milestone for Stories of Us was when Keisha and her team pitched at HKU’s DreamCatcher competition for a HK$100,000 seed round.

By this time, our team and Keisha has developed the platform into a fully functional MVP. On the final pitch day of the DreamCatchers competition, Keisha and her team presented their business case and demonstrated both the functionality and contents with the online platform. Stories Of Us went on to win the HK$100,000 seed funding.

The Future and Beyond

Keisha has been validating the business case of Stories of Us for two years.

When we started working with Keisha, we are hoping to help her scale up her startup with an online platform. Through intensively working on the MVP and developing contents, we are able to build a real-world, functioning product in a month from ideation to presenting to a panel. More importantly, we obtained a seed fund from DreamCatchers and positive feedbacks from users.

The Stories of Us team is now ready to scale their startup.