Huddle
This year I was part of a small team building a startup. The startup failed but it was one of the greatest learning experiences I’ve had. Our idea started as an online collaborative community to connect creators and morphed into a curated job hiring process for startups using collaboration, play, and simulations. Each change was influenced by customer feedback, logic, existing companies, and the market for each niche we targeted. I’ve learned how to let go when a blank slate is needed and how to extract all learning outcomes from the previous version failure.
After we morphed into a new approach to the job hiring industry, most of my time was spent on the drawing board. We curated the hiring process through a set of egalitarian experiences where companies and prospects would collaborate and play to learn about each other. One of the experiences was a simulation that evaluates how each individual attacks problems, works together, and responds to the unexpected. We ran tests for each iteration of the simulation with our personal contacts. Each test we iterated based on our desired learning outcomes. We had to start from the drawing board several times. There was a lot of psychology and sociology involved in our process. How to extract information about people such as personality traits that usually take months of work collaboration to manifest. Our goal was to prove these learning outcomes would yield a higher retention rate. This process was both frustrating and extremely stimulating. We stopped attacking this problem when we ran out of resources and time. It was too large a project for the number of people and available time to complete. However, I built great relationships with the members. Additionally, now familiar with the startup process, I cannot wait to use my creativity to improve the lives of people in my next endeavor.
Here is an image of the test we ran (without giving away game specifics)...
