CS 294 - Research to Startup

Overview

Overview of project milestone deadlines (see details below)
Milestone	Deadline (at 5pm PT)
1. Submit team roster (max 6 students) and focus area	2/3
1a. Submit final team rosters	2/10
2. Submit customer interview plan	2/14
3. Report on lessons learned from the first round of interviews	3/3
4. Present learnings and opportunity in class	3/17
5. Report on lessons learned, solution, and big vision	4/21
6. Present final pitch to the class	5/5 and 5/12

Submission Instructions

All milestones must be submitted via gradscope (you should have received an invite).
There will be a gradescope assignment for each project milestone deadline.
The project is for enrolled students only.
For each milestone: first, one person per group must submit the assignment.
After submitting, the submitter must add their team members to the submission via the “View or edit group” link. Only enrolled students can be added as group members.

Project Phases, Milestones, and Deliverables

Form teams

Starting on the first day of class you will meet other students in your area of interest. Come with general ideas for potential projects: a problem, a technology or a specific area you’d like to work on.

Get to know your classmates and shop around for teammates and a project topic you’d like to work on. Continue over Slack after class.

Focus areas can be a specific problem you’d like to solve (e.g. energy consumption in buildings), a specific technology you want to commercialize (e.g. Spark) or a specific area you’d like to work on (e.g. developer tools for data scientists).

Milestone 1: Submit your team roster and your focus area

Due Feb 3rd.

LATE SUBMISSIONS ARE NOT ALLOWED.
If you are not part of an on-time project submission, YOU WILL BE DROPPED FROM THE COURSE, and in general auditing of the course is not allowed.
Project groups are flexible and can change for the next week. If you haven’t found a group by this first deadline, submit your assignment with just yourself as a one person group, and spend the next week finding another group to join or convincing people to join yours.
However, by Feb 10 (i.e., milestone #2 deadline), all groups must have at least 3 and no more than 6 team members that are enrolled in the course.
Projects are for enrolled students only or non-enrolled students that have been given permission from the instructors. If any waitlisters make it in, they will be given an extra week to join or form a team.

Milestone 1a: Finalize 3-6 enrolled student team rosters

Due Feb 10.

For this mini check-in milestone 1.a, each team must add a slide to the Project check-in deck (shared via class slack) with their team name, final roster, and current status of their idea/area.

Plan for customer/user interviews

Based on the User Discovery lecture on 1/20, you will build a plan for interviewing potential customers and users to learn about them and their needs. Your plan should include:

List of at least 3 people you will initially approach and your plan to find more candidates.
- For this first round of meetings, a group of size X will ultimately need at least X distinct user interviews. If you got permission to have a group with less than 3 members, you need at least 3 interviews.
- Multiple group members can attend each meeting, each group member must attend at least one meeting.
- Don't stress about this initial list too much. This list is just a starting spot. You do not need to interview everybody on this list. Your group can add and drop people from this list at your discretion as you work towards the required number of interviews for your group.
Your User Discovery Interview Deck (3-4 slides)
- Again, the User Discovery lecture on 1/20 had examples of these slides (near the end).
The list of questions you plan to ask.

This will require you to come up with hypotheses of who your customer might be, what some of their pain points are, what features they will want.

Milestone 2: Submit your customer interview plan

Due Feb 14

Make your Milestone 2 submission via Gradescope (don't forget to follow the submission instructions and add all group members to this submission as well!)

Conduct interviews

Conduct your first round of user interviews (at least 1 per teammate). Rotate through who leads the interviews so that each team member has a chance to lead at least 1 interview.

Start to collect lessons learned

Document the personna(s) you have met.
What user/customer pain points have you discovered?
What common trends are emerging?
What was most surprising?
Which of your initial hypotheses were right/wrong?

Milestone 3: Report on lessons learned from interviews

Due Mar 3.

Prepare a short slide deck (about 3-5 slides) or document (about 1/2 page) summarizing the findings of your first interviews and what you plan to focus on next. Have you uncovered a high-value user pain point?

Continue interviews

Continue to talk to potential users/customers to refine your personas and identify pain points. As you hear about potentially significant pain-points, see if other users also have those pain-points. Complete at least 2 interviews per teammate.

Summarize learnings & opportunity in a short presentation

Based on all of your interviews, come up with a summary of who is the customer/user and what are their pain-points. Prepare a short presentation on this to share with the class.

Milestone 4: Present learnings & opportunity in class

Due March 17.

Come up with solution & vision

Based on the personas and pain-points you’ve identified, come up with a feasible solution to their problem. What technology is required? What would be the minimal viable product?

From here, develop the bigger vision. If this solution is successful, what can it grow into? What is the long-term strategy? In 10 years, what could the product be and what impact could it have?

Continue interviews

Talk to more customers/users. Have you identified a persona that has the same pain-point most of the time? Share your proposed MVP solution with customers/users. What is their reaction? How much would they be willing to pay if you could sell them this today ($10/month, $100/month, $1000/month, etc).

Put together a short report on any new lessons learned during this second round of user meetings and also include at least one slide that summarizes your vision and solution. Extra points if you have a demo (even if it is just slides). This can be an updated version of your original report on lessons learned, but the new content should be called out clearly.

Milestone 5: Report on lessons learned, solution, and big vision

Due April 21.

Summarize into final pitch

Create a final presentation covering

Who is the customer/user?
What are their pain points?
What is the MVP solution?
What is your long-term vision?

Optionally, extend this a full pitch deck by adding the business model, market size, channels and differentiation.

Milestone 6: Present pitch to the class

Everyone must be ready to go by May 5, but some presentations will have to take place on May 12 due to time constraints.

Pitches should be no more than 5 minutes in length, leaving 5 minutes for feedback and questions.