Grasshopperfund is a social crowdfunding platform for young entrepreneurs
I managed a team of designers & developers in developing Grasshopperfund’s MVP in 6 months. I also created our Figma design system, used React & Django REST to implement important features, and presented to stakeholders, mentors, and competition judges.
Timeline
January - June 2021
Roles
Founding Member
Product Designer
Project Manager
Frontend Developer
Results
1st place - 2021 UC Irvine New Product Development Competition ($10,000)
Selected for Techstars x Blackstone Launchpad Fellowship
Placement in the University of California Wayfinder Startup Incubator
Final Product
A social entrepreneurship platform designed to scale
Portfolios
Portfolios are like a Facebook page for startups, and includes an About section, pitch video, updates, and contact information.
Startups can also add Positions if they’re recruiting to find new team members.
Explore & discover
The Dashboard and Explore pages encourage users to interact with startups they already follow (Dashboard) or discover a new startup they’ve never heard of before (Explore).
These designs are intentionally simple in order to make scaling easy - we plan to add liking/following/commenting and recommend startups to follow in the future.
Learning
The Education Hub and FAQs help users get familiar with our platform & entrepreneurship, addressing our second pain point. There’s tons of potential to expand the Education Hub into a fully fledged learning tool in the future.
Problem
Young people are hesitant to start their own businesses.
An E&Y survey found that 69% of teens have a business idea, but have no idea how to go about building it. 13% of entrepreneurs start their businesses before they turn 18, and the average age of a successful entrepreneur is 45.
The barrier to entry is even higher for students who come from lower income & underrepresented backgrounds.
Research
What do existing entrepreneurship platforms lack that young people need?
Very few existing entrepreneurship platforms actually provide educational resources and social features.
Educational resources on Kickstarter didn’t cater very well to entrepreneurs that had no idea where to start. Product Hunt’s has social community features, but noticed they focused more on new product discovery rather than community building.
Pain points
Young entrepreneurs feel unsupported throughout their journeys
We conducted user research on entrepreneurs who have used competing products in our market space, and found the following pain points.
Lack of direction
Many entrepreneurs have no idea where to start, and lack a community of others in their same shoes to rely on.
No relationships between supporters & backers
Traditional platforms don’t provide a stable way for supporters & businesses to stay in touch over the business’s development.
High barrier to entry
Most established entrepreneurs are older, wealthier, and more experienced. It’s hard for young people to break into the entrepreneurship space when the odds are against them.
Ideation
Utilizing a growing trend: using social media for crowdfunding & building businesses
Something special about our target market of young entrepreneurs is that they overwhelmingly utilize social media for other uses like brand building, e-commerce, and - most interestingly - crowdfunding.
During my time in Greek life in college, we would often use Instagram “bingo boards” to fundraise for the charities our chapters support, which not only helped raise money for these charities, but also increased visibility for these causes.
Visual Design
Creating a thorough, scalable design system
Our design team collaborated to create Grasshopperfund’s branding. I then used these brand guidelines to build a scalable design system in Figma, whose components were then converted into React components and were documented using Notion.
Implementation
Learning React to help with implementation
These are some features I implemented on Grasshopperfund:
Account creation & login. I used Axios to send requests to our REST API so users can create accounts. I learned how to use JWTs to implement authentication protocols.
Startup portfolio creation form. I used Formik, a React library for creating complex forms, to create a three-page, multi-input form. I also added validation checkers to verify if users inputted legitimate values for important fields like email addresses and images.
Explore page. I implemented numerous search features, like filtering by category and keyword search.
Impact
What happened after we launched?
We had a few hundred users sign up within the first couple months after launching in June 2021.
Grasshopperfund won the Butterworth New Product Development Competition, winning the $10,000 grand prize, as well as earned a spot in the University of California’s highly selective Wayfinder Startup Incubator.
My reaction to us winning the Butterworth competition, haha
Conclusion
I learned a ton about teamwork, negotiation, & humility
While I learned a plethora of skills from this project, here are my top three.
Teamwork - I learned so much about collaborating with developers, designers, and mentors. None of this project would be possible without my wonderful team! I truly learned so much from working with them, everyone on the team was incredibly talented and kind.
Negotiation - Since this was a team effort, not everything is bound to go your way. At times I had conflicting opinions from my teammates, and we had to negotiate a common ground so we could proceed smoothly. Also, communicating my ideas and concerns to team members that didn’t have a technical background was something else I did a lot!
Humility - This process really humbled me (especially the implementation stage). My design ideas weren’t always liked by everyone. And React came easily to me at first, until it didn’t. I realized that I couldn’t implement everything I had originally designed, and had to improvise a bit.
And finally - thank you to my wonderful team at Grasshopperfund for the opportunity to work alongside you 😊
Thanks for reading!
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