Introduction

In October 2017 I attended 3 Day Startup (3DS) in Exeter, UK. The event is a 72-hour workshop / competition that is designed to teach entrepreneurial and product management skills to university students. 3DS operates 406 programs in 179 countries around the world.

As a team of eight, we created a business plan for a technology venture called ‘TakeNote’. TakeNote is an app that transcribes and summarises meetings in order to improve employee productivity. It lists actions points from the meeting and emails them to the relevant recipients immediately.

TakeNote uses an API and other software services from Google and IBM to translate audio into text. Key words could be spoken before an individual’s name to register the proceeding information as being a relevant action point. TakeNote could also be used as a directory to retrieve information from past meetings.

Some of the various stages of the weekend included: Ideation, Lean Canvas creation, Customer Discovery and Validation, Prototyping, Branding and Pitching.

Team: Alex Robinson, Claudia Martin, Teodor Necula, Lauren Viney, Sophie Myers, Alex Palmer-Walsh, Konstantin Delov

Product

The development of the product started with an initial ideation stage where the core values of the product were outlined. The ideas were developed and then the key information was condensed onto the lean canvas. A customer discovery stage in Exeter city centre followed. For this we targeted managers who worked in technology enterprises or SME after having little success in outlining our product to larger businesses. Several key pain points were identified:

1. Managers expressed a lack of focus from employees during meetings.
2. Employees highlighted a lack of clarity regarding expected action following a meeting.
3. Businesses were looking to reduce costs associated with a dedicated PA for meetings.

The questions were asked in a specific sequence to discover that the problem existed first before validation of our product. It was important to do this to reduce question bias that might arise by describing the problem or the benefits of the solution initially. One way of validating the products worth was to assess the range of prices that interviewees would be willing to spend on TakeNote for their meetings.

Market

Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) were identified for having the largest demand of our product. Our market research showed that larger organisations were more accustomed to having standard procedures to conduct meetings i.e. a recording system available throughout the offices of a company. Furthermore, the cost of a PA (to transcribe notes and summarise action points) was smaller for these organisations and the PA role was more established and practiced throughout business meetings.

The value of TakeNote was understood during the customer research stage. The product attracted the interests of employees and managers from a range of SMEs. The demand for the product was highest from technology startups as the feedback showed that they were interested in the potential gains in efficiency that TakeNote could deliver. They were also interested in the benefits that TakeNote’s could provide in highlighting trending data and topics from past meetings.

The strategy of the business was outlined in the lean canvas and the Share of the Market (SOM) focused on a core group of 204,000 technology enterprises within the UK. The initial strategy would focus on several local and national incubators that we have contacts with: techhub, Innovation Warehouse and SET Squared. This group would provide valuable feedback to the development of the TakeNote. TakeNote would also benefit from organic growth as external meetings used by our users would show the value of the product in meetings. Following this stage, an increasing number of SMEs in the UK would be marketed towards. Expansion into Europe and other global markets would proceed if successful in the UK.

Pricing, Competition and Future Development

The cost to the business was calculated at £1/hr for use of the API software. The revenue model uses a subscription-based service to incentivise customers to use the app. The £3-5/hr rate was based on competitor research and feedback from our surveys.
TakeNote has one direct and one indirect competitor who offer a similar service. Both competitors are newly established companies and will be competing with us in a large and expanding market.
TakeNote offers three major competitive advantages over our competition:

1. We are an app-based product which makes us portable and accessible to a range of different meeting environments.
2. TakeNote offers face to face meetings in conjunction with the transcriptions and action points.
3. TakeNote is targeting a different market to our competitors and is focusing on SMEs.

TakeNote offers exciting applications in the field of automated transcriptions and future developments of the app with artificial intelligence hope to enhance and improve upon TakeNotes core functionality.

The full slide deck from our presentation is included below: Download Link