Protoletter EN#1

Take a deep breath and look back at the last month events

🇬🇧 ➡️️ 🇫🇷 Protoletter FR#1

It’s been a little more than a month since we published the first Prototypers article. Time to take a step back and review the progress of our general project and of each idea we began to explore. It will be called Protoletters, it will be a monthly exercise, and this is the first one.

The Prototypers Project

Business model: Create companies and sell intellectual services

The first economic objective of Prototypers is to create companies. Publications and prototypes help “auto-incubate” our ideas. They allow us to:

• Meet experts and potential partners
• Test how technological solutions work
• Validate if a concept can generate traction

To fund these experimentations, we may offer consulting and development services in areas that we are experts of, such as:

• Design and development of web prototypes
• Design, development, and maintenance of Messenger Bots
• Deployment, integration, and animation of Workplace
• Team or individual coaching on new ideas identification and maturation

Publication tools: back to basics

When designing our website, we took the quite radical decision only to publish “headers” on it, linked to full articles published directly on
the leading social platforms (Medium, LinkedIn, Facebook).

Read more on social platforms

Our idea was to test the organic reach that these platforms would offer and to be “where the persons we wanted to engage with where.”

However, because of the typology (long articles full of words, in French and English) and frequency (once a week) of our publications, the result has been:

• Difficult SEO, as planned
• Way smaller organic distribution than planned

We want to give our ideas as much chance as possible to get discovered by the right persons, so we will soon switch back to basics:

• Bring our full contents back on
• Use social platforms for sharing and comments

Share and discuss on social platforms

Contents: The discipline of letting go

There’s a balance to be found when writing about a new idea. We tend to over-explain, bring on too many details, try to anticipate too many objections. It takes a lot of time, generates lengthy articles that few people have time to read, and makes us miss opportunities of more intimately documenting our project and exploration.

We are still too shy for Facebook lives, but we have taken three steps of action to improve direct and authentic sharing of our projects:

• Work on articles brevity
• Set up a new format for quick ideas introduction
• Use this Protoletter for regular feedbacks and updates on the current explorations

Current Explorations

: Soon to be prototyped

Thanks to the article, we had an interesting , and we got in contact with ProntoVR founder. He agreed to add animated gifs import to the roadmap of their VR apps sketching tool.

If all goes as promised, we should be able to create a basic prototype of the LiveHumanVR experience in April.

: A keynote on “the question.”

I had the opportunity to further discuss the “” with the IMM students. The objective was to study the trends of the GAFA and to highlight creative questions inspired by these trends.

I should have confirmation soon of giving the same keynote for ESSEC students.

: Pivot towards other Workplace based concepts

The feedbacks gathered after publishing the article taught us that:

• Cross Company Workplace groups are not familiar enough yet to justify the creation of a dedicated directory
• A new version of Cross Company groups may soon be deployed

The CrossWorking concept is on hold, but we do not abandon the Workplace platform. Two projects will soon start:

• A Workplace deployment and animation service for “local communities” that are not as connected as they should (employees of shopping malls, local commerces associations, local associations). We will test this service with
• An association Workplace based tool deployed and managed for groups that are homogeneous for other reasons than their employer, such as freelancers.

: Prototype night is coming

The prototype development with Chatfuel is well on its way. Don’t forget to follow , as well as , not to miss the testing night.

We have no certainty about the way the night will go. Bots are not that readily adopted. If the concept sticks well, however, we will have an excellent BtoSmallB business opportunity on hands.

Also…

• Meetings planned to discuss the impact of autonomous transportation on real estate
• An idea that excites us: A tool to help premium hotels provide excellent guest experiences to kids of all ages
• And many more ideas to be published! , we will discuss them soon, in less than 5000 words ;)

explore promising technologies and exciting business opportunities to uncover new ideas and give them attention, work, and resources.