Now the Wizard of Oz approach is something that I like to do. It gives me the best way to kind of tinker with the product along the way and really get something optimize where it's working well. Before I go to the time in the expense of building it in its full on process, or having to hire individuals or partner with individuals to do those deep automations, I want to know, does it work? So let's talk about that through an example. >> The product idea that I was interested in testing with this Wizard of Oz prototype is a concept called Campus Apprentice, with the aim of being the world's largest online community for connecting startups with college students for short term projects. So my hypothesis was that there are a number of high quality startups in the US and elsewhere that have projects they need to be done, and a project, by definition, would be short term. Maybe it would take a week or a month or two months, but it's not something that the startup is necessarily budgeted and or interested and hiring somebody that is a professional in that space. So instead of incurring the expense of working with a professional, there might be students, college students that have the skills and the interest of doing that project that would be compensated. So it would be something that would be paid but the expense associated with doing that work would be less than that startup would pay if they were hiring a professional. So it's a matchmaking platform in that context. The process that I thought would work was that startups could browse student profiles, they could post projects and they could interview students, and this would all be done online. Then, once in a match is made, they would agree on the scope of work and the compensation and then, lastly, when the startup project is done, the student would get paid and the startup would get that work, and maybe they'd want to work together in the future as well. So with that is kind of the basic idea, my thought was that I would have a form that the startup could fill out and inversely a form that the student could fill out. So kind of two different profiles, if you will. On the startup side, I wanted to give them two options. I thought there might be some startups that would have a certain project in mind, so I gave them the opportunity to go with option one and to write a project description. Here, my idea was that I would give them a template that they would fill out that would categorize exactly what they needed. I thought too that there might be a second option that startups would be interested in doing, which would simply be looking to browse students even if they don't have a specific project in mind. So in my experience, in working with startups and starting startups, there's always more ideas that I have, then there are resources or people or money that I have to execute on their ideas. Some of those ideas might be marketing related, or there might be communications related or there might be operational or technical. So one idea I thought that would be interested is that startups could look at student profiles and if they saw somebody that might be a good fit, project might come to mind that they could get that student to work on. So again to ideas that I was interested in with the form per option, one that people would fill out. They would have the company name the website if they had one live email information, and then they would pick if they were ready to submit a project description or if they were interested in viewing the student projects. So I was getting some sense then of what their focus might be. I gave them the option, if they did pick Part one of a project description of giving me a paragraph about what's the project. I then asked them to affirm that this project could be done remotely and out of office because that was the fundamental area too that I thought this service would align well with. Students that have a few hours here in a few hours there, but aren't necessarily of the mind or have the availability to travel into an office and work in person during a normal 9 to 5 workday. So the price point I mentioned, the students are getting paid, they're not volunteers, so I listed that here, and I included some optional dates as well. Now all of this looks like any other kind of Web form, but what happens with this Wizard of Oz is that I built this in a tool called square space. I created the form, but then I simply attach the form to a Google drive, which is a spreadsheet and so you can see here that for storage, as start ups are entering this form, it is going to a Google drive. It is not going into a central server, it's not going into a big database. It's not being auto crunched and auto analyzed. It is simply collecting data, just as you would collect data in any other Google sheet or in any other Google product or Microsoft Excel or something of that nature. And so then what I would do with this data is periodically, as I began to collect information on the projects, I would send an email initially once a week, and I would summarize these activities to the students that had signed up to learn more. And with that, it gave me the opportunity to see if students were interested in learning more they would contact me and that I would arrange an introduction via email to connect the student with the company. So in that way I kind of brought the idea of full circle without investing in any expensive technology build. To put together the website I think I paid something like $10 a month to use the square space site and to have the form connected to that. I used the templates and the imagery that was already available in square space, or that was on some free image galleries that were out there for commercial use and it gave me the opportunity to test the idea without investing in any technology. Just put me behind the screen a little bit in the context of doing some emails and some personal reach outs at the end to test the idea but again, that's the basic idea of the Wizard of Oz. >> So with that is kind of a story, and that should encourage you learn more about Wizard of Oz and think about how that might work for you as well.
