Small Fry
Building a Need-Solution Based Organization
New York, NY & Boston, MA
Not-for-profit, Economic Development
January 2014 - January 2016
Small Fry is a social enterprise that harnesses the digital skills of low-income youth to drive small business growth online. I founded Small Fry to create economic opportunity for both youth and small business owners in under-served communities. To create a scalable organization, I approached the development of the organization’s business model and programs using lean start-up and design thinking methodologies. I needed to understand what both youth and small business owners needed to succeed economically and what they would respond to in terms of solutions to those needs.
I worked with teams of volunteers from the Acumen+/IDEO Human Centered Design program, as well as with design thinking practitioners from The Design Gym’s community, to conduct research, create prototypes, test prototypes, and iterate based on feedback.
To test the youth-serving side of the organization, I conducted a 5-month pilot training program informed by leading industry expert’s content and feedback. The 14 students participating in the program were tasked with providing critical feedback after each session to create a repository of successful and unsuccessful learning projects. At the conclusion of the training program, they were interviewed by a third party to extract final insights. All learnings throughout this phase were frameworked and distilled down to insights statements so the program could be more effectively designed in the next iteration.
To create and test the small business owner-serving side of the organization, we interviewed 10 small business owners in Harlem to get a preliminary idea of their online needs. We frameworked this data to create a list of must-haves that were incorporated into the first lo-fi website mock-up prototype. We tested the first prototype with 8 small business owners and again frameworked their feedback to create an improved model. This framewokring lead to a slight business model pivot which necessitated a whole new round of prototyping and testing. I created the second website mock-up prototype to reflect this shift and tested it with almost 40 additional small business owners all around NYC.
This second round of testing lead to further insights that were used to further refine the model and mock-up. We used the final mock-up and our design thinking process to get accepted to both the Global Social Benefit Incubator’s Online program, and MassChallenge, the world’s largest accelerator and a top-ranking program in the US.