In April 2017 I wrote “Apsiyon: Building a Profitable Community for an ERP-ish B2B SaaS”, and it was published in Sprint Stories, GV’s collection of design sprint case studies on Medium.
At the time I was a business development executive at Apsiyon, a fintech and SaaS startup in Istanbul that helped residential area managements collect dues and run their budgets. The software served the managements, but the residents living in those areas were barely part of it, and the founders wanted that to change.
So our COO suggested a design sprint, and I was the one who read the Sprint book over a weekend to facilitate it. We were a team of three, which is small for a sprint, but we just said “let’s do it”.
The interesting part was the map, because every time we tried to connect it, we ended up either rebuilding our own household app or rebuilding Facebook.
Then we had a real shift and started treating everyone as households instead of splitting them into customers and other people. That’s how our goal went from “building communities around buildings” to “building safe (and private) communities around buildings”.
The story’s moral, as I put it back then, is about understanding the many biases stuck in our everyday work.