Steer
Fall/Winter 2023 (12 weeks)
A personalized all-in-one marketing tool for your small business. Start-up co-founded by me and three other undergraduates.
Skills: User Research, Interface and Visual Design, Figma
Role: Co-founder, Graphic Designer, UX/UI Designer
Team members: Jasmine Wang, Yasmine Kettani, Sachin Chadha
Overview & Problem
In the Fall of 2023, my team and I started to ideate and conduct market research in the thrifting problem space. After interviewing 30+ local thrifting stores and small businesses in Philadelphia, we started to notice a recurring problem pattern in our conversations and decided to pivot to the small business area
We have narrowed these problems down to one main question: How do you deal with digital marketing and content creation as a small business owner when you have plenty of other responsibilities to handle and/or lack money or resources?
Product
Introducing Steer, the All-in-One digital marketing tool for small businesses. We are a B2B, AI-powered mobile app that generates personalized content, marketing strategies, and short video tutorials for your small business.
We are one step further from a generic AI generation tool and one step below a marketing agency. Our goal is not necessarily to make your product stand out but to streamline the content creation process, following current trends and competitors.
In the design, our main goals were to enhance storytelling and playfulness while remaining accessible and easy to use.
Customer Journey
Our data collection is fully powered by LLM, so the user can freely tell us what they know about their product. We then ask about their target segment or help them come up with one, taking a look at their competitors, similar brands’ aesthetics, and their current branding.
This information will be the input into our model, and the output will be personalized content catered in an Instagram feed layout. You can click on each post to modify it to your liking, generate a caption, and just upload it!
After gathering information about the company, we ask the customer about their target segment:
Then, we gain ‘inspiration’ from their competitor:
If the customer has any brand materials or descriptors, they can upload them as well so our output will be more personalized :
Finally, we analyze their feed, and based on all of the input, Steer will recommend strategies and trends to follow:
Not only producing recommendations, but Steer will also implement these ideas as templates into the user’s feed so they can edit and post them immediately:
Problem Validation
For our MVP (Minimum Viable Product), we replicated the product for Goodlands Food Company, a small food business in Philly, and gathered the information through an interview call. We then generated content based on her goals and inspiration, what we have seen work through her analytics, the current trends in the season, and the top trends in her niche. For the video content, we provide a step-by-step tutorial on how to film it and then take care of the editing and captioning
It turns out that Anna from Goodlands is just one of the 13 beta clients we’ve acquired in just three days of cold outreach to 120+ Philadelphia-based small businesses on Instagram, bringing us to a 10.5% conversion rate.
Key Takeaways
During these three intensive months, I learned how building a start-up requires so much patience and good teamwork and that it is not linear progress. Designing the product requires thorough user and market research to implement features that customers would actually use.