The Setup

My client was a startup investment fund located in a quiet mountain town in North Carolina who contracted me to do customer experience research related to mentoring within their local startup and entrepreneurship ecosystem.

My Role

I was hired to perform (approximately) a 150 hour research project funded by NC IDEA. In this project, the client didn't have a ready crop of interviewees. When you're a UX team of one, that's a difficult challenge. They also didn't come to the table with much of any direction for the project other than they wanted to interview stakeholders across the local ecosystem to learn what they didn't know. So I developed a guerrilla research plan to schedule make interview contacts with relevant stakeholders in the region (university, private businesses, government support resources, etc.)— LinkedIn, LunchClub, and cold-calls.

The Outcomes

• I conducted 25 interviews about perceived need for local supports and sorted them through theme analysis.
• I completed a competitor analysis of various platforms that like-organizations can use to manage and administer similar mentoring programs.
• I performed a heuristic analysis of similar ecosystem-level mentoring efforts for upstart entrepreneurs.
• I engage in dedicated stakeholder interviews with employees of the local university (which serves as a the existing regional hub for entrepreneurship).
• I envisioned possible service offerings for the investment fund related to events, alumni engagement, land stakeholders, and corporate contacts.