uDoc — Defining the Strategy
Exploring the business possibilities for the uDoc app.
Business Model Canvas
Projecting a product that provides a good experience to the user is also related to a risk management, to get a better understanding of our product’s business perspective and avoid market rejections, our team used the Business Model Canvas, a tool that helps organizing the strategic management, because it allows us to develop and sketch our new or existing business models on a single page.
A Platform as a Source of Revenue
After developing our own prototype we started thinking how would we obtain revenue from it.
For our app to work, we depend on the cooperation of Educational Institutes, and in that manner it would be necessary to develop a platform, integrated with our app, that would work as a virtual secretary, where it would be possible for the institute to manage enrollments, to monitor tax payments and administer the documents of all students.
Our team used desk research and benchmarking to get a better understanding as if the platform really was a necessity in the market and to evaluate if what our competitors were offering. This research revealed that the existing scholar management platforms offers much more features than we would offer in an MVP (Minimum Viable Product), but this would not be a problem, since the higher the quantities of features, higher the price would be for the user, which is an important factor considering that with the pandemic, many educational institutes lost their students, and consequently, don’t have enough money to keep paying the monthly subscription for a platform such as “Sponte”, for example, which would be one of our competitors, which shows a lot of negative reviews from the users about the high price for the quality of service offered.
It was in between this context where we imagined that our platform would be a good fit. The educational institutes, which had a lot of decrease of their revenue during the pandemic, needed to get new students. The app would help in the acquisition and customer retention step, and the institute would not have to pay a high price for a monthly subscription.
In the face of everything we had thought and supposed, we decided to make a quantitative research through forms shared in Facebook groups, targeting people who worked as secretaries in educational institutes and could help us to better understand issues related to the enrollment process and the documentation that these professionals have to deal with in their routines.
We concluded that the creation of a platform is necessary so that our team could receive revenue through our app, but at the moment we don’t have enough financial resources to present a solution aiming at the business, which is according to the UX Design guidelines.
