Scicademy

• www.scicademy.org

• Early 2015

Scicademy's goal was to create an open-access, open source, student research database for high school students so their research does not fade away into oblivion after a science fair. The value hypothesis was that high school students wanted to share their research online to benefit humanity.

This was the first entrepreneurial venture I ever conducted. As a result of our inexperience, I did not conduct any user/market research or customer interviews, unwisely leaving me in the dark.

Instead of developing in a lean and agile way, I simply built out all the features for the full product that I believed were essential without any user testing or talking to customers along the way.

I pushed the site heavily within my own high school and through online media sites such as Reddit and Hackernews. Through this, I were able to get 9,500 monthly page views, 200+ users, and 38 stars on Github. I had around 20 papers submitted to the site.

While I had some action on the website, most of it required extensive marketing. I did not provide much value at all to users, so people were mostly posting because I pushed them to not because they saw value in this. I could have easily found out that my value hypothesis (students want to put their research online to help the world) was false had I conducted user interviews or built an MVP.