Born and raised in Istanbul, studied Product Design in Milan. Three-year Experience Design experience with brands across different sectors and continents. Now graduating as a Service Designer to tackle societal issues and deliver quantifiable impact. Especially interested in applied technologies and the startup ecosystem.
Berkin Gurakan
I like to explore opportunities, where I can make use of my self motivation and creativity with regards to diverse competencies and entrepreneurship. I enjoy collaborating with people from all walks of life on challenging projects, learning with them while doing and sharing my knowledge.
Let’s discover, define and solve problems of anyone, anywhere, without getting noticed.
CHALLENGE & PROCESS — Months of efforts behind building new solutions fail because they can’t generate the few insights they need from people who they actually build for. In the UK alone, 42% of startup businesses fail because there’s no market need for their solution. What if we enable early communities to help startups validate and reduce risk, so startups adapt and deliver better solutions?
EXPLORING OPPORTUNITIES — The project started with trend analysis and exploration of emerging examples in the market around personal data sharing and digital privacy. To assess potential directions, 11 probable future scenarios, and provocative concepts were refined for contextual interviews. Reflecting on the outcome with various experts, we realized there is potential to build communities and crowdsource data for startups based on communal values and privacy preferences.
ITERATING TO REFINE A PLATFORM — First I prototyped a platform that helps startups crowdsource quantitative data in exchange of equity or long term discounts to their target demographic consumers. Consumers were highly interested to share their data based on transparent consents from startups. However, the platform failed from the startups side. For startups the challenge of finding early people interested and generating deep insights from them is a more fundamental problem. So, the platform pivoted to crowdsource insights for validation.
TESTING FOR FURTHER DEVELOPMENT — Owl offers three core elements as a platform. A community hub with startups proposition, matching people based on interests and starting collective discussions. Customizable question templates to crowdsource insights. Private chats between founders and community for deeper insights on the go. I created a concierge MVP. 4 startups from different cities generated community hubs and asked questions to a community of 20 people. 156 responses were generated for 4 startups in minutes.
NEXT STEPS — Owl is presented with its minimal viable scenario, 4 initial case studies, and a roadmap to implement based on further validations and metrics. We are planning to run refined sessions of Owl as validation sprints with startups backed by an early stage VC and incubator on the following days.
A community powered validation platform for B2C startups inside incubators. It connects communities with startups based on interests. Founders test their startups viability via community sourced insights. The community discovers new startups and gets paid while interacting with them. Incubators observe the early traction and de-risk their portfolio of startups.