Answer the following questions from the statements below:

1. What are the primary demographic/psychographic characteristics of the target audience?

2. What is the problem we are trying to solve or the opportunity we are looking to capitalize on now?

Below you'll find a real startup that is looking to start a woodworking training/community educational platform. You'll find that John has thought through his idea as best as possible, identified a co-founder to help support the technology build and focus on what he's most passionate about and what he believes the market needs.

The CEO and Founder (John Peters) have estimated $1M in annual revenues within the next three years. Because John is not a technical founder, he has brought on an equity partner in exchange for the platform build (Ryan McClure). This partnership is 50/50. For startup capital, John has allocated $100,000 to get this project completed and available for the consumer market.

Category Background

According to a report on the Andreessen Horowitz website entitled, "Social Strikes Back", one of the top three categories for Social App development is Vertical Communities. The message of the series is that Social apps, once thought dead for development because of the dominance of big names like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc., are anticipated to be a source of great growth. Not only are they seeing the rise of innovative new social networksfrom the earshare of Clubhouse to the seamless interactivity of cloud gaming they anticipate a fresh crop of specialized or niche platforms. But the key to all new platform development is having a social component that is ingrained in the app, not just layered on. The social component has become a powerful member acquisition and retention tool for every consumer-oriented, product-based application across education, shopping, fitness, food, entertainment, and more1.

As noted above, one of the top three categories of apps under development are vertical communities (those that enable further engagement around specific subjects or activities). Users can delve into their hobbies and passions with niche-tailored product features, and discover a community of like-minded people in the process.The article's authors believe an integrated social component will become a linchpin for emerging consumer companies and long relationships with their members.2

John and Ryan intend to address the adult learning market by creating a social platform targeting informal adult education, where adults who choose to pursue a specific interest or hobby, can follow a 10 step path along with others who share similar interests. This platform, where people can share learning experiences through social engagement and access to community provided materials, will be developed with the concept of members helping members. This community-based social learning platform will enhance the learning experience where adults who want to take on a hobby and along with other members of their "class" (I.e., people grouped by the software starting with relatively the same skill level) can progress over time through a consistent 9 step process to achieve their desired level of expertise. We also intend to build a way for adults to invite others and self-create their own classs if they so choose.

The concept is crowd-sourced education, that is, the ability to learn or improve a desired hobby or skill jointly with others who share similar desires within an open social environment.

We intend to take this concept and apply structure so that our members have a framework or process to measure themselves against. We mentioned the concept of a class, so let us explain how we plan to group members so they can meet and progress with others at the same skill level. As new members enter the system, we'll ask them a series of questions about their particular skill level and assign them a pre-set starting point. We'll then look for other members with similar skills and group them together so they can progress through the course together. We'll provide forums that are geared towards their class and quick access to projects other members of their class have completed. We see the competition and gamification strategies as a core concept of our app.

We also intend to build in advanced capabilities with what we're calling our Recommendations Engine. This ML/AI driven engine will be designed to elevate our members skills in their chosen field using the data we collect to recommend to members the next steps in achieving their goals. I.e., what forums to present, people that might work well together and other tasks that normally would be associated with skill mastery.

The core challenge is to attract already skilled members who can serve as a resource for beginning members and their progress. The expectation is to incentivize skilled users/influencers to join the platform. At their core, most people like to share and promote their skills so allowing them to do that in a forum like ours is one enticement, but we know that won't be enough. We have to provide revenue opportunities along with the ability to help other members through forum entries, 1:1 breakouts, and a platform to sell finished projects.