berkeley, berkeley class, business model, business model canvas, customer development, engineering, lean launchpad, lean startup, startup, steve blank

1. IlluminateHelping to create teams of teams
Week 1: A personal “customer
relations management tool”
that aggregates all of your
services to help manage your
network
Week 12: An internal enterprise
software tool to help companies
pinpoint expertise throughout an
organization.
125 interviews

2. The original pain point: many people “hate networking”
What does that mean?
“It feels inauthentic”
“I know I should be reaching out to people regularly, but I just can’t motivate
myself to do it”
Our goal: make networking feel more authentic
Our very notional first TAM: $24 billion
Illuminate’s Starting Point:

3. Bryan Connolly
US Army Ranger
Haas MBA
Role: Hustler/Hacker
Matt Beale
CIA analyst
Haas MBA
Role: Customer Development
Valantis Vais
BCG consultant
Haas MBA
Role: Product Picker
Pooja Padmakumar
Engineering Consultant MEng
Masters
Role: Designer/Hacker
Our Team & Mentor
Paul Dawes
Mentor
iControl Networks

4. From A General Concept...

5. ...To “Reciprocity Rings”
A “reciprocity ring” is a
group of people
collaboratively working
together to solve each
other's problems

6. Our Initial Business Model Canvas
Week 3

7. Our Initial Business Model Canvas
Week 3
❏ We didn’t know our
customer archetype
❏ Not specific enough
(i.e. Parents &
Engineers)
❏ Value Props were
features versus Pains
& Gains
❏ Needed to ask
ourselves ‘why’
several more times

8. ● 31 participants in two
Facebook groups
○ All brought a problem
○ Each group had one
week
● Hypotheses:
○ Participants are
comfortable using
Facebook groups to help
each other
○ Each group will have
sufficient expertise to
solve >50% of problems
Week 4: Low Fidelity Facebook MVP

9. Evan Seale
“I need help finding a
dog walker.”
Graeme Close
“I need help learning
to program an
Arduino in Python to
practice building
smart hardware.”
Kai Hinson
“I want to know more
about regenerative
agriculture since my
job will be focused on
that after graduation.”
Eze Moralejo
“I need contacts in
the cider industry.”

10. Week 4

11. Only 19 out of 31 (~60%) joined the trial, 4 out of those 19 favors satisfied (~21%)
Reasons for lack of engagement
People didn’t really care about their favor (in-class handout experiment)
People only cared about their request
But the biggest reason was:
Our friends smiled and said they’d help us test our MVP, but they didn’t really care about the product
Week 5: Lessons Learned From Failed MVP Trial

12. New value proposition
➢ New hypothesis - We went back to our personal
frustrations
○ Expertise management
➢ Initial focus: Management consulting
○ We have expertise within our team in
management consulting
○ High value initial market with opportunity for
a larger market later
➢ Late pivot meant had to accelerate the Lean
Startup method

13. New Business Model Canvas
Week 7

14. Our Idea...
Week 8

15. Industry vertical
knowledge systems Collaboration
software
Petal Diagram - Expertise management
Takeaway:
Crowded space of
generic platforms;
Illuminate to target a
specific customer
segment and need

16. Strategy consulting
companies with greater
than 100 employees
Consulting
companies with
greater than 100
employees
Market Opportunity
Companies with
greater than 100
employees
TAM:
$1.37B
SAM:
$171M
Target
Market:
$56M
76M employees
101,642 firms
9.5M employees
12,691 firms
3.1M employees
4,188 firms

17. Interviews, Feedback, & Reactions
Consultant at Trinity Partners: “We
hired a knowledge management
expert to handle our information. If you
can come up with a software solution
that does the same thing for less than
$200K, then you’re golden”
Consultant at Parthenon: “Extremely
frustrated that our firm doesn’t have
anything to capture and disseminate
information”
❏ Market
opportunity
❏ Willingness
to pay

18. Multiple customers and decision makers
Customer
(Archetype)
Consultant
(Edward)
Staffing
(Jillian)
Partner
(Sam)
IT Services
(Richard)
IT head / CTO/CIO CIO Internal Tool
Developer
Pain point - Time to find people
to help me
- Time to update
resume
- Time to create
sanitised documents
- Time to pursue
people to keep CV
updated
- Identify relevant
people to staff on
new clients
- Identify relevant
people with
expertise company
wide
- Identify best
practise
- Managing a
sprawling set of
disparate systems
- Delivering cutting
edge capability
-Decide the best
way to allocate the
IT budget
-Is it best for me to
develop the tool
internally , purchase
an existing tool or
hire firm to develop
customized
software
Discarding a system
developed by me
❏ Broke down our specific
customer segment into the
key stakeholders
❏ Identified each stakeholder’s
pain point and associated
value propositions
❏ Actually got to ‘know’
our customer
archetype daily routine

19. Jack is a consultant at a
management consulting firm &
has a new mining-related client. He
knows nothing about mining.
Client
purchases
Illuminate
Illuminate sets up
on-prem server to
analyze emails &
Slack (backlog &
ongoing)
Client gives access
to add’l internal info,
such as project
databases
Purchase/Setup Workflow User Workflow
Illuminate generates
a continuously
updated profile of
every employee’s
expertise & project
experience
Jack knows other consultants
must have worked with similar
clients in the same industry, but
can’t think of who for the life of
him.
Jack searches Illuminate, entering
in the industry and other client-
specific information like
geography
Illuminate shows Jack other
consultants at his firm who’ve
worked on similar cases, as well as
any additional shareable/non-
confidential information like client
names

20. Illuminate - Expertise Management Software

21. The End of Our Journey:
➢ Pivot early, preserve late
○ Get’s harder to pivot the
longer you wait
➢ The team needs to be
extremely passionate about
the idea
○ Several years until this
succeeds
➢ Get away from friends and
family when testing an idea
○ Truly get ‘out of the building’
and interview potential
customers
➢ Good idea
○ The lean startup method
works!
➢ Good market
○ Relatively big for how specific
we targeted the market
➢ Good interview response
○ Positive feedback from
customer segments & key
stakeholders
➢ But we aren’t the right team
to see this idea through
○ The passion for this idea is
lacking in our team
Expertise Management software Course takeaways

22. Appendix

23. Forecast Financials

24. Investor Readiness
Readiness Checklist (Key Points) Scale (1-10)
Is it a high growth industry? 7
Is there a first to market advantage? 6
Is there a diversification of company directors and employees skill base? 4
Do you have innovative products or services? 2
Is there a global market for your products or services? 7
Is there clear evidence of market need for your product / service? 7
Is there a clear indication of the market size? 6
Overall Readiness :

25. Knowledge Management system components
http://www.knoco.com/knowledge-management-technology.htm

26. Activities and resources/partners to accomplish them
Email
servers
Billing
system
HRMS
Document
server
Skills
database
Illuminate
expertise
database
1
2
3
Software
Development
Privacy /
Data Security
Data Ontology
4
5
Customer
Integration
Regulatory
Approval
Access

27. https://tinyurl.com/ll6s4s3