The challenge Background
Imagine you are a FinTech startup company in London. You are currently a
team of two founders (one with technical background and one with business
background). Your team is currently supported by four interns and you are
based in a nice co-working space somewhere in Shoreditch.
You founded the company because you realized that there is a problem.
Everyone is losing track of their recurring bills & subscriptions such as your
electricity bill or your Amazon Prime membership. Because you dont have
the control over your recurring bills, you overspend a significant amount of
money each month, because you either are overpaying on too expensive
contracts (such as electricity) or you forgot to cancel the Amazon Prime
membership and have to pay it for another year. The problem is that it is so
difficult to keep track of these bills and even if you do, you need to call hotlines
to cancel your subscriptions or need to use price comparison websites to be
able to check for better deals.
Your company has one mission: Saving people like you and me money on
their recurring bills and subscriptions.
You have developed a tool which connects to the users bank account and
recognizes with a cool algorithm what your recurring bills & subscriptions are.
But even better, you not only show = your users how messy their finances
are, but you can directly through your application improve them. Your users
can cancel their subscriptions directly through the platform and can find a
better contract for other services.
The current issue you are facing is that in several instances, your users need
to transmit important information like your online banking credentials (like
with Money Dashboard) in an online form to connect his bank account. At the
same time, he might need to share additional information in order to cancel
his subscriptions or accounts. The application itself is fully secure, however
it is a challenge for a new company to attract users who trust an unknown
company. Even more, how can a company use the first traction to scale its
business and use the early adopters to grow the userbase quickly.
In order to see how this process works in detail, you can get familiar with the
process at www.moneydashboard.com
The challenge To Dos
First step: Please prepare a Business Model Canvas of the current
situation of your company to understand how the business model works in
detail. Use this Business Model Canvas to find out where potential
weaknesses are in the current model and where the business model needs
improvement. You can read more about the Business Model Canvas and
examples at the following links:
http://businessmodelgeneration.com/
http://diytoolkit.org/tools/business-model-canvas/
http://www.alexandercowan.com/business-model-canvas-templates/
Second step: Once you have made the Business Model Canvas and
understood how the business works and where its weaknesses are, use the
chance to interview other people (preferably non-friends) to find out what they
think about the problem. Using this feedback, you can now think about
creative ways of solving the imminent issues in your Business Model Canvas.
Third step: The Business Model Canvas is not a tool which you use only
once but it offers the biggest value if you use it on a constant basis. With our
new ways to solve the challenges which you gathered from the interviews
with users and your own ideas, prepare a new Business Model Canvas and
explore which challenges have been solved and why you have used these
new ideas. Additionally, please comment on the impact this had on other
components of the Business Model Canvas
Fourth step: Once you have refined the business model and laid out how
you fix imminent issues, please develop a plan on how you can easily and
cheaply grow the userbase. Given that trust plays an important role in this
role, can you imagine ways of how you can use the trust of your early
adopters to promote the application and grow.
Last Completed Projects
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