I wish to thank all the new followers who subscribed this week. It truly means something to me. As I said in Ep 0, I’m out of my comfort zone documenting and writing about building Studio. I hope my writing will improve along the episodes…
Anyway, thank you, and an even bigger thanks to those who engaged with me! If you want to support this project, subscribe to the newsletter or share it with your friends!
Studio’s North Star
Before talking about the North Star, I want to introduce a concept created by Simon Sinek that you may be familiar with: “Start with why”.
I won't be going too deep into what it is, if you want to learn more I suggest watching this old but still relevant Ted Talk 🎤
To get straight to the point, there is a Golden Circle with three components arranged from inner to outer. The first component is the "Why," which represents your purpose, why your product exists, and what you believe. The second component is the "How," which describes your value proposition and how you bring to life what you believe. The final component is the "What," which represents your product and what you do to make the "How" actionable.
Before starting Studio, I took the time to define my own Golden Circle. Here's what I came up with:
Why: To ensure that teams provide the correct answer to clients' requests.
How: By promoting full transparency between teams and clients and allowing them to iterate on requests.
What: A tool that simplifies the process of tracking and providing feedback on clients' request answers.
What do you think? I would love to hear your thoughts and feedback!
We will now discuss the concept of a "North Star" and how the Golden Circle can help you define it.
A North Star is a powerful tool for companies and product development that helps you align your business goals with the problems you are trying to solve for your clients.
It provides clarity on which features to prioritize and which ones can be traded off. If you want to learn more about how to find your North Star, check out Sandhya Hegde's article on Amplitude's website.
As for Studio, my North Star is slightly biased as it is based on my experiences and what I would like to see in the relationship between teams and clients.
However, based on the Golden Circle I defined earlier, I decided that my metric should be the number of feedback exchanges between clients and teams.
Just for fun, let’s put all of this in a nice card to look at when i’m lost!
The goal of the journey
The primary objective of the project is to create a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) of Studio that could be used by solopreneurs, indie hackers or freelancers.
An MVP should be the most basic version of a product that can be used. However, I came across a post by Enzo Avigo that struck a chord with me. The post stated that it’s not about putting the less efort possible required to create an MVP.
The focus should be on minimizing future risks, but still providing 100% of the main value. Thus, Studio will concentrate on its North Star features, which should be adequate for an MVP.
But… Studio will be used by individuals who already work with high-end quality products daily. Therefore, I still aim to give it a premium tool vibe, which comes with its own set of risks and added time which I am willing to take.
In contrario, and while I understand that my users could be power-users who prefer to work at a faster pace, I will not implement a shortcuts system for the MVP, even though it would be cool 😎
Main features
Now that we have set our goal, let's look at the main features of the product.
SaaS and Workspace
As a SaaS product, we need to have a user management system that follows the standard practices. We will allow teams to create workspaces and invite one or more clients to join those workspaces.
Request Sorting
Before a team can start working with a client, they need to receive a request. Studio will let clients submit requests through a form, which will then be sorted by the team and moved to the result definition process.
Result Definition
This feature will enable teams to transform a request into a document (available to the client) that will help them understand the request better by working with the client.
They can then define the result they want to achieve and keep track of the progress by setting its status to Not Started, In Progress, or Done. The document will also include a history of all the changes made and provide a way for teams to explain each update they make to the clients.
Feedback Loop
This is the most critical feature of our product. Studio will have special features for reviewing and giving feedback on each iteration of the document. This will allow clients to write comments, upload videos or audio files, and reference the work done by the team. Teams can also respond to the client's feedback.
To keep everyone updated, Studio will have a strong notifications system that will alert all parties about any progress made.
Other features
I have a feeling that the main features are enough to create an MVP for my product, but I have many ideas for additional features that could make it even better.
I previously mentioned shortcuts, but there are plenty of other features to consider, including a dashboard, a roadmap view to sort requests, client subscription information, Linear integration, the ability to create paid subscriptions directly in Studio, and more…
However, let's not get ahead of ourselves and focus on the main features for now.
If you have any ideas for additional features that could be implemented, please feel free to share them by commenting or sending me your thoughts.
Thank you for reading this episode. I hope you enjoyed it and perhaps learned something new.
Subscribe to the newsletter, follow along on Substack, and don't hesitate to reach out on social media to discuss Studio or any subject. I’ll see you next week !
Another great post, i liked how you talked about MVP, because i have been working at a startup and their approach was to build most basic version of the application, but it didn't have the premium feel you talked about. Eventually that product failed in the market. I am still early in my career just 6 months in.
I hope you keep writing these articles, looking forward to learning more and being part of this. I hope you have a amazing day Felix