The Solo Design Sprint
Validate Big Ideas by Yourself in 7 Days
Design Sprints are aren’t going away anytime soon.
Look at the trend graph for design sprint:
The term was coined internally at Google Ventures and then popularized by Jake Knapp’s book Sprint.
Design Sprinting is the art of collaboratively solving a design problem in 5 days. It’s for solving big problems only. It is to be done with a group of about 7 people.
People equipped to solve big problems are usually extremely busy, and need to dedicate about a week of their time.
Which is why it’s for big problems only.
Is there ever a time for a solo design sprint?
Sometimes the sprint team might not see the problem as big, important, or urgent. You might be proposing a design sprint for your very first time, and nobody understands what it’s capable of yet.
This is a 7 day solo sprint that can get you there in less than a week.
It’s possible to cramp it into a week if you can get fast feedback.
If you need more time, you split it over 2 weeks.
Either way, I recommend doing it in two phases. The entire purpose of a design sprint is to prevent wasting any time.
Splitting the sprint into two phases will waste the least amount of time.
Phase one is a proof of concept to get your main partners on board.
Phase two is to finalize the the details for launch.
Phase One
Day 1: Find Your Audience
- Find Your Superpower
- Calculate Market Size
- Find Your Audience
Day 2: Reverse Engineer the Product
- The Press Release
- Build User Personas
- User Journey Mapping
Day 3: The Elevator Pitch
- Sketch & Write
- Dreamscape
- Pitch Deck
Day 4: Prototype
- Storyboard
- Selecting Tools
- Design
- Stitching
- Animate
- Trial Run
Phase Two
Day 5: Script & Storyboard Video
Day 6: Animate & Edit Video
Day 7: Landing Page
The Solo Design Sprint
Name: Project Bonsai
Type: Information Product
Date: April, 15th 2019
Sprinter: Mason Lawlor
This particular sprint is for an information project I’ve codenamed project Bonsai. It will be pre-sold for validation before I ever build it. But without a good pitch, I don’t think it will hit it’s pre-sell goal.
This project would take up a good chunk of 2019, so I need to know if it’s going to be worth it.
Day 1: The Research — Finding Your Audience
Before we get started on the elevator pitch, we have to have a minimum viable audience we want to build a product for.
Morning: Find Your Super Power
You have to offer something other than just regurgitating what you’ve learned from someone else. Offer a new spin on things.
The easiest way to find your super power is to take 2–3 things you are good at and combine them in a way that most people can’t.
1. Minimum Viable Audience
“You don’t find customers for your products. You find products for your customers.”
— Seth Godin
Instead of building something cool and then trying to figure out who the hell wants it, start with the MVA in mind.
An easy way to do this is to scratch your own itch.
2. Scratch Your Own Itch
I can’t say this enough. It’s hard to try and make a tool for someone else. It far easier to make it for yourself. Make it so you can do something repetitive more effectively.
One of the hardest parts of creating a product is the amount of decisions you will have to make. If you make the tool for yourself, you’ll be able to make the right decisions a lot quicker.
3. Keep it simple
This course might seem pretty complicated given that we’ll be using hundreds of different tools throughout it. But the concept is simple: Create a web app from scratch.
Afternoon: Calculate Market Size
It can take a long time to figure this all out if you don’t do it the easy way.
Below, I’ve laid out an easy framework to follow based on an article written by Noah Kagan.
- Founder of Sumo and AppSumo
- Employee #30 at Facebook
- Employee #4 at Mint
The article is called: How to Create a Million Dollar Business This Weekend
The purpose of this post is simple:
“Teach you how to get a $1,000,000 business idea off the ground in one weekend, full of specific tools and tricks that Noah has used himself.”
-Tim Ferriss
Step 1: Find a Profitable Idea
Find the things people are willing to spend money on.
Noah lists a bunch of ideas on how to find profitable products, but since we are only scratching our own itch, it makes it even easier.
Break down your daily tasks within the realm of your superpower. Write down the most repetitive ones. Write down the ones you hate. Even if you don’t hate it, write down tasks that could be done more efficiently.
Repetition & Automation
Don’t repeat yourself (DRY, or sometimes do not repeat yourself) is a principle of software development aimed at reducing repetition of software patterns, replacing it with abstractions or using data normalization to avoid redundancy.
Look at which apps you spend the most time in. You can monitor these things using apps such as Timely or native iOS time tracking.
Think of which tasks you repeat the most often. There is almost always a way to automate something, so don’t limit yourself to dreaming big.
The DRY principle is stated as:
“Every piece of knowledge must have a single, unambiguous, authoritative representation within a system”
A layer deeper, you can think of which knowledge you constantly have to be recalling and referring to. How could you make that information more easily accessible?
Wet vs. Dry
Violations of DRY are typically referred to as WET solutions, which is commonly taken to stand for either “write everything twice”, “we enjoy typing” or “waste everyone’s time”
Just find the things you repeat the most, and write them down.
Step 2: Find $1,000,000 worth of customers
You can use a handful of tools to unlock these numbers.
Google Trends
Google Keyword Planner
Ubersuggest
Facebook Ads Manager
Step 3: Assess your customer’s value
Now we estimate the product’s potential using the TAM formula (a.k.a. Total Available Market).
(available customers) x (value of customer) = TAM
(3,700 customers- 0.01% of Facebook audience) x ($1,000 information product)= $3,700,000
It’s better to air on the conservative side, and 0.01% conversion rate is definitely conservative. 1-2% is usually the conservative standard. With certain niches and mediums, it’s possible to get 10%+.
Million Dollar Product Confirmed
This is a pie in the sky imaginary number of how many people we could advertise to. But I don’t plan to advertise until this product becomes profitable. It’s too risky, especially when we have other ways of marketing it.
Until then, we need to make these numbers way more conservative. We’re going to calculate concrete numbers from actual existing audiences.
Consider the Byproduct
Beyond the information product, this product has inherent value in the byproduct, which is the web app itself.
How much it costs to get a web app developed: $100,000 [source]
How much it costs to maintain an app: $20,000 yr [source 2]
Average lifetime of app: 2.5 years [source]
Lifetime cost of a web app: $150,000
Now we know roughly what a company will pay for a web app. [more info on app costs]
Evening: Find Your Audience
Find real existing audiences that overlap with the process. Set your aim high and try to get the best partners imaginable. If they aren’t interested, you can always go smaller and more niche later.
Human nature would have you believe you should start at the bottom and work towards the top. But I’ve learned that it’s best to start at the top because you never know until you try.
- The Futur
- AJ&Smart
- Google Ventures People
- Flux
- Pluralsight (or other similar tutorial platforms)
- Wordpress
- Roots
- Neil Patel
- Appsumo & Noah Kagan
- Backlinko
- Sketch, Abstract, Invision, Adobe, etc.
Affiliates & Partners
This is how you can test the idea for free. This is who the Elevator Pitch will be for.
Refer back to that list of audiences you made when finding your MVA. Compile them in a spreadsheet. Add them together. Calculate what conversion percentage you’d need from them to hit your goal.
Since the goal here is to make a million dollar product, let’s work backwards from that.
Consultants
Consultants are one of my secret weapons. Consultants are what have allowed me to create web apps that would usually cost $50,000 for less than $10,000.
A lot of people think consultants are a waste of money, but they are one of the most important parts to doing a project right. The thing is, you’ve got to find the right consultants. Sometimes that means hiring someone who charges $1,000 an hour for their time.
Getting the right person on the phone for half an hour could save you tens of thousands of dollars, so don’t go cheap on this step.
If money weren’t an issue at all, what would your ideal team of consultants look like? List about 5 people.
- Chris Do
- Jake Knapp
- Jonathan Courtney
- Neil Patel
- Noah Kagan
- Programmers: Ben Word, Austin Pray, Clay Griffiths, Anthony Coffey
We might not be able to afford them for a weeklong design sprint, but we might be able to purchase their time hourly for consulting.
Day 2: Reverse Engineer the Product
First, Make a Press Release
Apple has a top secret new product process called the ANPP.
It molds the team structured as a startup, and it details every step on building and shipping a product.
This document lays out every step in the development process of a product in detail. It’s not an original Apple concept but was first applied at the company during the development of the Macintosh. It maps out the stages of the creation process, who is responsible for completion, who will work on each stage and when they will be completed.
I’m not sure we’ll ever know what this process looks like, but this is my attempt at imagining what it might look like.
Our product process starts completely ass-backwards.
Reverse engineering the press release:
When Amazon builds a product ass-backwards, they start first by doing the last thing most companies would do– the press release.
If the initial press release isn’t promising enough to catch a superior’s attention, it doesn’t get built. Simple as that. That’s starting with the end in mind.
Press Releases aren’t very relevant anymore, so feel free to pretend this is for the landing page or even video format.
Morning: The Press Release
Write it out. Even if you don’t feel you’re ready. This forces you to light up your imagination and visualize the concept. Done is better than perfect. Just write.
- Heading — Name the product in a way the reader (i.e. your target customers) will understand.
- Sub-Heading — Describe who the market for the product is and what benefit they get. One sentence only underneath the title.
- Summary — Give a summary of the product and the benefit. Assume the reader will not read anything else so make this paragraph good.
- Problem — Describe the problem your product solves.
- Solution — Describe how your product elegantly solves the problem.
- Quote from You — A quote from a spokesperson in your company.
- How to Get Started — Describe how easy it is to get started.
- Customer Quote — Provide a quote from a hypothetical customer that describes how they experienced the benefit.
- Closing and Call to Action — Wrap it up and give pointers where the reader should go next.
Project Bonsai
- Heading — The Full Stack Product Design
- Sub-Heading — Make an MVP Web App from Scratch
- Summary — Get an inside look at how a web app is built from scratch– marketing, strategy, design, and code.
- Problem —It’s easy to find courses and tutorials on how to design apps, or how to program them. The strategy part is usually skipped over, which means you will waste time designing and building the wrong thing.
- Solution —In our masterclass, we start from scratch and take you through the entire product development process, touching on the high level tactics required.
- Quote from You — “This course could easily teach a team or 1–2 people how to make a multimillion dollar product”.
- How to Get Started — Go to our kickstart page and contribute to the pre-sale goal.
- Customer Quote — “TBD”
- Closing and Call to Action — Try out The Day Solo Sprint Course for a free demo.
Afternoon: Craft a Brand Story
Evening: User Journey Mapping
Map The User Journey
Start with the Customers on the left, put the end goal on the right. Then connect the 2–3 most likely routes in between the two.
Day 3: The Elevator Pitch
Deliverables:
- Pitch Deck PDF
- Customer Journey Prototype
- Dreamscape Infographic
Do the leg work by yourself and present a polished elevator pitch that can be understood in 60 seconds.
First, let’s start with making a pitch deck. We have to fully flesh out the idea before we can condense it down to 60 seconds.
Morning: Sketch and Write
Before we open up Keynote and start making slides, I like to start on paper sketching more abstract ideas visually.
Then I sum it up in a text editor. Sketch and write through all these details. Refer back to the press release for as much of it as possible.
- Elevator Pitch Video
- The Problem
- The Solution
- The Research
- Case Studies
- The Website
- The Product(s)
- Proposed Sprint Team
- Proposed Consultants
- Goals
- Timelines
- Press Release
This outline will vary depending on the project.
Afternoon: The Dreamscape
If you’re a designer or even just a doodler, this step is for you.
It’s time to dream up what it looks like. If it were real, what would the landing page look like? What about the product itself? What is the style of the brand?
You don’t have to nail down the whole design system yet. You just have to get a taste of the look and feel.
I will use this as the theme for styling my website, video, and possibly the app itself.
Evening: The Pitch Deck
If you want to get the design sprint green-lit, you’re going to want a pitch deck.
If you want to see some good pitch deck examples, look here.
You can download my free template here (coming soon).
Day 4: Build the Prototype
You want to have examples of what the app might look like. It doesn’t have to be anything close to the final app, but it will be used to solidify the concept.
Storyboarding-
1. Draw Grid
Draw or fold paper into about fifteen squares on a piece of paper of whiteboard.
2. Establishing Shots
How are customers going to come across your product? Think Medium post, email, or even as far back as an email notification. The further back you can go, the better. Think of where you main portion of the traffic will first stumbled across it.
- News Article
- Blog Post
- Ad: Facebook, Instagram, Google, Reddit, etc
3. Make a Shot List of the User Journey
- Email inbox
- Email from The Futur
- Kickstarter-like Landing Page for Info Product
- Product Selection Page (freebie, pay what you want)
- Credit Card Checkout Page w/ email
- Confirmation Page w/ downloads and links
- Course page
- Upgrade pre-order Product Selection (modal window)
- Credit Card Checkout Page
- Confirmation Page
4. Find Inspiration to Borrow From
Are there any websites or apps that would be a good template to borrow from?
- Gmail’s inbox
- The Futur’s newsletter on Gmail
- Kickstarter’s project page
- Kickstarter’s product selection page
- Kickstarter’s credit card checkout
- Generic confirmation page
- Pluralsight’s course page
- Kickstarter’s product selection page
- Kickstarter’s credit card checkout
- Generic confirmation page w/ Instagram’s countdown timer
5. Storyboard the User Journey Map
Rough sketches of all the actions the customer will take to get from the establishing shot, to when they actually have the product in their hand and are using it.
Keep the sketches rough, but try to fill in headlines and sub-headlines to speed along the prototyping stage.
Prototyping the User Journey
1. Picking the Right Tools
Design Tools:
Prototype Tools:
Non-Design Tools:
- Keynote
- Powerpoint
- Google Sheets
2. Wireframe the Prototype
I like to start by referring to step #4, Find Inspiration. I screenshot those pages. Then any pages I don’t have screenshots to refer to, I wireframe from scratch.
3. Design Prototype
This is where we recreate the screenshots, and customize the designs.
4. Stitch Screens Together
Now we tie the screens together in a prototype. I prefer to use the Sketch plugin Craft by Invision.
Tutorial: Build an Interactive Prototype in Sketch in Minutes.
5. Trial Run
Test the final prototype.
Delivery:
Now you’ve done all the work, it’s time to get eyes on it.
Who get’s to see it first?
Start at the top of your list.
Send them a video that sums up the concept in 60 seconds or less. Send them all resources, but don’t expect them to have the time to go through all that.
Deliverables:
- 60 second elevator pitch video
- User Journey Prototype
- Elevator Pitch Deck
- Press Release
- Brand Story
- All other resources (like this post)
Next Steps:
If the project gets greenlit by one of the top team members/partners, continue with phase two– the video and website.
You still need to validate the idea with your Minimum Viable Audience and all Affiliates, Partners, and Consultants that will be involved.
Phase Two
We are going to put off doing phase two until I’ve got the green light from key partners.
Day 5: Script & Storyboard Video
Day 6: Create Video
Day 7: Create Landing Page
Jackalope Media is a top Design Sprint agency based in the Silicon Slopes– Salt Lake City, Utah.
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