AJ Picard — Entrepreneur & self taught designer.

I recently spoke in front of students that are Entrepreneur majors at Villanova University and the professor wanted me to go through the ways I’ve pivoted throughout my journey as an entrepreneur.

Creating the presentation made me realize how far I’ve come and I thought it would be a great time to share my experience.

I’ve been building a new social media app called Chad for the last year and a half now. It’s been so much fun and I’m here to show you how pivoting has helped keep us afloat.

January — May 2018

This is around the time that I started working on Chad full time.

At the time, Chad was a social media app that allowed you to connect with people & jobs in a specific location.

The idea was when a user signed up to Chad they picked from a bunch of keywords. These keywords were the type of jobs/users they were looking to apply/connect with. Once they were done signing up they were sent to the home page where things got a little crazy…

This was the very first designs I’ve ever created, it’s fun to see how far I’ve come as a designer.

As you can see there are a lot of bubbles…

The bigger the bubbles the more you have in common with that person/job (5+ keywords)

The medium size bubbles meant you shared some similarities (3–5 keywords)

The small size bubbles meant you barely had anything in common with that person/job (2 or fewer keywords)

These bubbles were meant to float around and the user could scroll left, right, up and down to explore more users.

I can’t stand timelines and I want them eliminated, I think it restricts users freedom in an app.

Users can press and hold on a bubble to pop it. Users could connect with a user or apply to a job bubble (Marketing bubble) by tapping a circle. When a user joins a job bubble they see job posts related to that bubble!

June — August 2018

I went through an accelerator program called 2020 Startups. During this program, I pitched my idea to a lot of my mentors who helped me focus on two things.

Making money & retaining users.

I was naive to think that people would automatically flock to my idea. I also thought the easiest part would be raising a round of fundraising by showing investors my beautiful designs…

The mentors at 2020 kept asking me questions like:

How is this different than Linkedin & Tinder, are these bubbles unique to draw users from these other platforms?

How do you plan on making money?

Is there a market for an app like this?

Have you done any testing?

Do you have any research people need this?

How are you different from Facebook?

What problem are you solving?

Do you have a tech co-founder?

Do you have a tech team?

I didn’t have answers to any of these questions and it was my goal to focus on creating a viable business instead of raising a round.

I was to focused on the idea of an Entrepreneur, instead of actually being one.

The most important advice I got from this program was that you can’t do this alone and you need a co-founder/team to succeed. I can’t emphasize enough on how important this is.

That summer I was both a sponge and a hawk, I soaked up mass amounts of information from 2020 while at the same time on the lookout for a co-founder/co-founders.

September — December

This is where Chad has pivoted the most, September was a big month for us. We got accepted into the Batchery and we started the development of our MVP.

I decided to focus primarily on chatrooms instead of suggesting individual users/jobs to connect with, I needed to narrow down my vision for Chad. If I can get users to create chatrooms it will be a great way to connect with locals, but at the same time, these chatrooms can represent schools, events, parties, etc.

I thought making this pivot was crucial to Chads long term success and I was right.

One of the two developers that came on board tried implementing the floating bubbles, but after testing the product it looked/felt horrible.

I started freaking out because these bubbles were the focal point of Chad and in my opinion, what separated us from the competition.

My developer suggested we add a map, that way people using Chad can still scroll around and more importantly they can see exactly where each user is located.

The only other platform that was offering this Geo-map was Snapchat, the only difference is there showing where your friends are located. Chad is allowing you to jump into chatrooms around you or one located all over the world, it doesn’t matter who you know our goal was to help you meet new people.

This is Chad now.

Here’s a preview of what Chad looks like, I wanted to get the app out there to see if people would even use it… so don’t make fun our design!!

The goal was to develop our MVP as quickly as possible, that way we could test as soon as possible.

The feedback we received has been insane! I had to create an excel sheet with a list of all the feedback we received from our users. We spent $0 dollars on marketing and have been able to get 800+ users into Chad through word of mouth!!!!

User feedback

January — Present

Our product is in the market and we were gaining traction/feedback which I loved.

Behind the scenes I was dealing with a lot, I had to find new developers since my past two couldn’t commit any more time due to their full-time jobs and Chad needed a redesign.

I started watching countless Youtube videos on how to become a better designer. I tried so many different tools and I was determined to learn how to implement animations into my designs as well.

I recently wrote a blog post on why I think every designer should be using Figma and Principle.

The motivation for me becoming a better designer was to help take Chad to the next level. I had to redesign our whole app along with the new features with the goal of scaling in mind.

How am I going to keep users in Chad?

I started with how the app looks and then focus on making it easy to use. Here’s what I’ve created so far (still working on chatroom page).