Kult + Bowie State [Micro-internship]

Hi Interledger community! I'm Helena, Kult’s co-founder :)
For over a month I have been working directly with 3 students from Bowie State University (Felicia, Jakerya and Anthony) for our summer micro-internship. Now I want to share with you some of our key learnings and insights.

Context

It has been a huge pleasure to conduct weekly sessions where we discussed the following topics:

• how to build, foster and engage an online community around common interests
• product management & innovation tools
• how to encourage users in an online community to support each other’s work financially, through an Interledger-based digital wallet that allows peer-to-peer payments in the form of (i) recurring donations, (ii) one-time tipping and (iii) access to exclusive/premium content
• product benchmarking on other platforms that explore similar peer-to-peer payment methods. Two strong examples that came up were Twitch (twitch.tv) and Fable (fable.co), not only for their visual interfaces and usability, but the language style used to communicate and encourage the community to support each other.

Twitch is the popular live-streaming social platform, where you can support the streamers with BITS. You can be a SUB (subscriber), a GIVER or a CHEERER. Twitch has a diversified business model, with varied revenue streams.

Fable is a book club app that allows for anyone to create their own club and be monetized for that. They have a freemium model.

Process

We created a Google Drive folder to gather different references and build our case. We also created a Slack channel for group communication. During our 4 weekly sessions, that happened every Thursday, I passed on Kult’s vision as a platform and as part of a larger community which is Interledger, and we brainstormed together strategies in the three main pillars of product innovation – design, business and technology – focusing on the product (app), while identifying marketing strategies as the bridge to guarantee the intersection between these areas.

These are some of the frameworks I presented to them which I learned from direct experience and also innovation courses I participated. There is one specifically that I would even like to recommend which brought me a lot of insight – it’s called Business Design for Sustainable Growth and Innovation, from the Service Design College.

Outcomes

I was very happy to see the dedication and interest from the students, and here are some screenshots of the documents we created.

Felicia's presentation slides with an overview of the entire process:

Felicia’s doc on Marketing & Monetization strategies for Kult with a UX/UI approach
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1u9LLZWFWLJyN1M8Sv378duGXx4NGiJd9/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=108955680908136115188&rtpof=true&sd=true

Our Miro board with brainstorming sessions:

If you are interested, feel free to check out in more details our Google Drive folder here:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1hJ9Uih43HoMAIEMFeUIn1UVAQJwXmgis?usp=sharing

Feedbacks
I asked the students to provide feedback of the experience for us. As soon as I receive it I will post in the comment section :)

Conclusion

I feel we got to the surface of everything, with a big picture of the entire process. It would be great to keep going deeper into each idea/strategy!

Thanks for reading!