Fyne Labs
Fyne Labs is an early-stage startup focused on streamlining the process of cross-platform development. Their tools seek to save millions in development costs by automating labour-intensive manual processes and reducing the barriers to cross-platform app development.
Objectives
- Define and design the MVP of Fyne Lab’s first commercial product, an automated build delivery web-app to start attracting customers and validate the business case
- Lead discovery of a new product in the low-code space so that the business could raise funds and embark on bringing this to market
- Establish Fyne Labs’ brand by positioning and deploying a marketing site tailored for the developer space
Scope of Activities
- High-level positioning
- Fundraising pitch decks
- Brand identity
- Copywriting
- Persona creation workshops
- Brainstorming workshops
- Wireframing & prototyping
- User flows
- Hi-fidelity product designs
- Illustration
- Marketing site design & deploy
Geoffrey: Build Delivery Tool
Fyne Labs’ first product is a service that developers can use to automate their app builds for multi-platform projects.
Pains & Gains
Building cross-platform app binaries and sending them to internal users or testers is a time-consuming and frustrating experience involving a good deal of manual effort. This is a pain point all too familiar to the Fyne Labs team. The basic premise for Geoffrey was to build binaries in a few clicks, eliminating busywork so that developers could free up their time and businesses would save money. This product was relatively low-effort but high-impact so it was a good place to start.
I facilitated workshops with the Fyne Labs team to both surface their domain-specific knowledge and give structure to our decisions. This exercise plotted multi-platform build processes linearly (x) against the effort involved (y), manually or using this product.
The value in using Geoffrey is in speed, so the platform selection experience needed to be demonstrably quick while balancing the needs of those developers also deploying to a specific sub-set of architectures. Here I grouped the choices by platform and then provided a shopping-basket style interface to confirm the specifics.
Build Results page which could be shared with users to download directly or with a QR code on another device. Again the focus here is on speed & utility.
Geoffrey product page emphasising the human-level benefits. As a product, Geoffrey’s value is not immediately self-evident unless you are in the business of deploying cross-platform apps, so we focused on this most easily addressable persona, the under-pressure tech lead. I designed & deployed this site, wrote the copy, and provided the illustrations.
Low-Code Collaborative App Builder
A more ambitious goal is to tackle the needs of businesses or individuals who lack the funding or desire to build a custom multi-platform app from scratch.
I facilitated workshops over a few days with the team to focus on what value could be delivered by an MVP. I felt it was particularly important to spend a good bit of time on this area because the scope of the opportunity is so broad and the team resources were limited. So my focus was on defining what could be shown to demonstrate value to investors.
Early storyboard to define the bounds of the experience and put it into context.
High-fidelity mockups of some key screens to make the product tangible for a wider audience.
Outcomes
Fyne Labs had a serviceable brand and compelling messaging with which to attract customers.
Over 20 app developers now rely on the Geoffrey tool to regularly deploy their updates automatically.
Fyne Labs was able to secure funding to develop the Low-Code App Builder which should begin this year.