Better DiscourseTroy Bjerke, Moses Hohman, Sue Kim

Chicago Lean Startup MachineNovember 7, 2010

The Pitch:

An online tool to facilitate informed conversation on political topics

Assumptions

Assumption Lesson Pivot

P: No time to be truly informed True for most people, therefore they disengage

Make it as simple as possible, push rather than pull, mobile

P: Unhappy with voting decision process

Not enough to do something about it?

Different customer? (journalists, campaigns, aldermen)

P: No way to keep track of what they learn

We had this problem, people didn’t seem to ditto

P: Polar conversations are a problem

Yes, but people are resigned, suggested finding common ground first

Focus tool on finding common ground?

S: Painkiller Vitamin, or home remedy It matters how you coat the pill

Other lessons

CustDev approach: Talk (abstractly?) about problems, or give them something to react to?

The “cheapest possible experiment” is more expensive for difficult problems like this

Assumptions

Assumption Lesson Pivot

People have important conversations on FB

that they lose track of

Occasionally, but people have good enough workarounds.

Memorialize “epic” conversations

We can charge people to store their valued conversations

(from FB, email, etc.)

If young people are the target audience of “epic”, they

probably won’t use a paid tool?