WizKidsCarnival Case Study
Table of contents
Have you ever tried finding directions without a map application, GPS, or compass? The major problem with finding the right direction without any navigation tool is that you won't know if you are heading in the right direction. You might be able to find the destination, but not without wasting a lot of time and effort.
A navigation tool lets you know where you are heading as soon as you start walking or driving. It points where you should be heading, and if you start moving in the wrong direction, you can quickly adjust your course toward the destination.
Building a product involves two critical parts, first, identifying a clear big pain point or “problem statement” and second solving it in a way acceptable to the end consumer. The problem statement and the solution is something that often comes from an entrepreneur’s intuition, observation, or experience.
But chances are that a person(s) intuition, experience or understanding of a problem is only partially correct. Maybe the problem isn’t a big problem, or maybe it isn’t painful enough for the end consumer to pay for it.
Even if the problem is real, the solution to the problem - aka product - might or might be acceptable to the consumer. It might not solve the problem only partially or not solve it at all, it might be inconvenient to use or just too expensive.
The real test for any idea or product is consumer adoption. No amount of research, expert opinion or investor dollars can replace actual feedback from end customers.
A classic example of this is of course Webvan - the infamous grocery delivery startup that launched at the peak of dotcom bubble with much fanfare but quickly found the market for online grocery delivery just did not exist. .
Validating the concept before taking it to the development stage is like checking your directions on the map when you start your journey. It would not only save your valuable resources, but it could ultimately save your startup.
But the question is, how do you validate an idea?
Asking your potential customers would only help you partially. While it might help verify the problem to some extent, it won't verify whether the solution you are offering is acceptable.
In short, you need a product to validate your idea. Unless your customers have the product and are willing to pay for it, the validation is only partial at best.
However, building a full-fledged product to validate the idea can be a very costly affair. A large chunk of startups fail as they try different iterations of the product. Each iteration comes with a cost and with limited funds you only get as many tries.
Only if there was a way to lower the cost of these iterations….
The answer is - Minimum Viable Product (MVP)
An MVP is the basic version of a product with just enough features to solve the primary problem of your users. It allows startups to test the hypothesis and get feedback from early adopters to achieve product-market fit.
The goal is to validate the product, check user demand and collect feedback from early users before developing a full-scale product. Although the concept of MVP is not new for founders, only some startups leverage it correctly.
WizKidsCarnival is an excellent example of a startup that began its journey with an MVP and validated the user demand before taking it to the next level.
WizKidsCarnival started with solving the problem of parents being unable to showcase and encourage their kid's talent. The solution was to create an online talent contest platform where kids (aged 3-15) could participate, compete, and win prizes. Their product would enable children to compete in talent competitions like singing, dancing, drawing, and so on with their peers from all over India and, eventually, the world.
Their journey started with an MVP, a static website that provided contest details, collected contact information and relied on an operations teams to actually run the contest.
This case study of WizKidsCarnival is an excellent example of how an MVP can help a startup validate its product, find product-market fit and eventually scale successfully.
The Context: How it all Began
Showcasing kids' talent is something every parent is proud of. However, in a country like India, where grades are considered the only benchmark of a kid's abilities, it is tough for parents to encourage their kid's talent.
Finding a platform where children can exhibit specific skills and get appreciated is difficult. Many schools conduct competitive events; however, they are limited to only a few participants and popular categories.
Determined to solve the problem, the WizKidsCarnival founding team, Abhishek Awadhani, Mansi Awadhani, and Vinayak Palankar devised an idea - An online talent contest platform where kids can participate, compete and win prizes. The product would enable children to compete in online talent competitions like drawing, singing, dancing, etc., with their peers worldwide and get recognized for their talent.
Although the premise sounds exciting and reasonable, the success of WizKidsCarnival hinged on a couple of critical questions:
- Is showcasing kids' talent even a genuine problem?
- What is the intensity and frequency of the problem?
- Will parents even choose an online talent contest platform as a solution?
- Most importantly, is the problem big enough that parents are willing to pay for it?
Building a comprehensive product to test the hypothesis was risky and expensive.
Therefore, the founding team of WizKidsCarnival decided to build an MVP for product validation - a static website with bare minimum features that would allow kids to participate in online contests.
The web app had a simple interface detailing the various ongoing contests, an embedded form that collected basic contact information, and a payment gateway. Parents could let their children participate in any contest by filling out a form and making a nominal payment.
However, most of the actual operations of conducting the competitions were manual. The team had to communicate via mail and juggle through excel sheets to conduct contests.
Once the information was fed to the website by parents, the back-end team of WizKidsCarnival had to communicate with the prospect by mail, send payment confirmations and guidelines, receive the participant's artwork, and evaluate them manually.
Finally the team would select the winners based on submissions and send them certificates through mail.
Additionally, there was no CMS to manage the content on the website. So every time the WizKidsCarnival operations team had to create a new contest, they had to rely on an engineer to help them with the same..
The MVP had many limitations regarding efficiency, usability, and scalability. However, it allowed WizKidsCarnival to launch and test their idea quickly and at an extermely low cost.
When the "Good Problem" Started
Despite the limitations of the initial solution, the idea proved its worth. The MVP worked like a charm. Even with a simple user interface and minimal features, many parents signed up their kids to participate in various competitions. Many parents turned into repeat customers to opt for other competitions.
Then the problem that every founder wishes for came knocking- Scalability issues.
To cope with the increasing demand, the team increased the number of competitions. With every participation, the work for the operations team started piling up.
The valuable time that the team could have utilized to focus on growth was being spent on repetitive tasks . It was becoming extremely difficult for the team to further scale their operations with the current approach.
While the operations team faced struggles, the customers were having their share of a hard time too. They faced challenges interacting via emails and the like, often leading to confusion regarding the competition details, submissions, payments, refunds etc. Contest submissions that would often include large videos was a hassle due to file sizes.
In addition, every time a parent needed their children to re-participate, they had to fill out the forms from scratch. This was significantly impacting the repeat participation rate as the friction to provide the same information repeatedly was too much.
WizKidsCarnival's team had seen the massive potential the product idea had, but it was impossible to realize the same without resolving the manual operation issues and improving the user experience. It was now time to upgrade their Minimum viable product.
As the pressure mounted and work hours got longer, the WizKidsCarnival team started, looking for solutions that could help solve some of these issues.
Given that Default solely focuses on working with startups and understands an entrepreneur's expectations and needs, the WizKidsCarnival team reached out to discuss possible ways of collaborating.
The Solution: Connecting the Dots with Tech
When the WizKidsCarnival team approached us, we spent some time understanding the problem statement, the vision, and the immediate concerns of the founding team.
The primary objective at this stage was to automate the operations process as much as possible while improving the overall end-user experience.
After multiple brainstorming sessions with the WizKidsCarnival team, we devised a plan. The solution included building a web app with three key modules.
User Accounts
Adding users' sign-up process addressed multiple limitations of the existing static website and improved the overall user experience. It allowed users to register an account and view all their information on the user dashboard.
Parents could easily store, find, and retrieve all the contests they have participated in, their performance, certificates (if they have won), and the ongoing competitions. They could also upload kids' content/artwork directly through the portal, eliminating the confusing process of uploading the file through file sharing services like dropbox.
The data could now be securely stored, and users could easily pick up from where they left off. The functionality to add multiple child profiles under the same user account allowed parents to participate in different contests for all their kids. Earlier, the parents had to fill out their kid's information for every contest, this feature allowed the parents to provide the details once and then participate in multiple competitions without needing to provide it repeatedly.
The Admin Panel
We added an Admin Panel for the operations team. The operations team could view, create, or close the contests, score and assess participants, categorize participants, upload certificates of participants, and much more with a few clicks. It curbed the tedious process of manual tracking, follow-ups, compilation, and assessment.
For users participating in a contest, all communication such as the onboarding and payment confirmation mail is sent automatically. Besides, all the participant's details can be directly viewed and need not be compiled into spreadsheets.
Content Management System
Creating and managing new contests was tedious for the back-end team due to the lack of CMS. The easy-to-use CMS allowed team members to create, modify or delete contests without depending on the engineering team.
The Final Out-turn: A Carnival of Happy Customers
The product we built in collaboration with the WizKidsCarnival team was able to address the scaling issues caused by running operations manually. The WizKidsCarnival team could now conduct more competitions with much less manual involvement. The updated web app features a dashboard that saves and displays all user information, eliminating the need for repetitive data entry and providing a seamless user experience.
With the new and improved Web app, WizKidsCarnival has witnessed a surge in recurring users. The customer retention rate increased, and the number of unique users signing up increased by manifolds.
The impact could be seen in the product metrics. Here is what we observed 45 days after the product launch:
- 40% conversion from accounts created on site to contests enrolled for.
- Enrolled users participated in 2 Contests on an average - within 3 months after the system went-live
- The number of child profiles created was 50% higher than the total number of active users.
Mr. Abhishek Awadhani, the CEO and Co-founder of WizKidsCarnival had this to say about our work
"Default has quickly become a valuable partner for us. Their plug-play model allows us to quickly ramp up or ramp down the development process like an in-house team. In just a few months, they were able to automate our back-end processes and improve our web application's user interface. This has made a huge difference in our business, and we are delighted with the results.”
From validating their concept with an MVP to building a remarkable product, WizKidsCanival is a perfect example of how a startup can turn their idea into a successful product with optimum utilization of resources.
If you liked reading this case study and are wondering how you could use the MVP approach for your startup, please feel free to get in touch for a free consultation call with our startup MVP experts.
Have you ever tried finding directions without a map application, GPS, or compass? The major problem with finding the right direction without any navigation tool is that you won't know if you are heading in the right direction. You might be able to find the destination, but not without wasting a lot of time and effort.
A navigation tool lets you know where you are heading as soon as you start walking or driving. It points where you should be heading, and if you start moving in the wrong direction, you can quickly adjust your course toward the destination.
Building a product involves two critical parts, first, identifying a clear big pain point or “problem statement” and second solving it in a way acceptable to the end consumer. The problem statement and the solution is something that often comes from an entrepreneur’s intuition, observation, or experience.
But chances are that a person(s) intuition, experience or understanding of a problem is only partially correct. Maybe the problem isn’t a big problem, or maybe it isn’t painful enough for the end consumer to pay for it.
Even if the problem is real, the solution to the problem - aka product - might or might be acceptable to the consumer. It might not solve the problem only partially or not solve it at all, it might be inconvenient to use or just too expensive.
The real test for any idea or product is consumer adoption. No amount of research, expert opinion or investor dollars can replace actual feedback from end customers.
A classic example of this is of course Webvan - the infamous grocery delivery startup that launched at the peak of dotcom bubble with much fanfare but quickly found the market for online grocery delivery just did not exist. .
Validating the concept before taking it to the development stage is like checking your directions on the map when you start your journey. It would not only save your valuable resources, but it could ultimately save your startup.
But the question is, how do you validate an idea?
Asking your potential customers would only help you partially. While it might help verify the problem to some extent, it won't verify whether the solution you are offering is acceptable.
In short, you need a product to validate your idea. Unless your customers have the product and are willing to pay for it, the validation is only partial at best.
However, building a full-fledged product to validate the idea can be a very costly affair. A large chunk of startups fail as they try different iterations of the product. Each iteration comes with a cost and with limited funds you only get as many tries.
Only if there was a way to lower the cost of these iterations….
The answer is - Minimum Viable Product (MVP)
An MVP is the basic version of a product with just enough features to solve the primary problem of your users. It allows startups to test the hypothesis and get feedback from early adopters to achieve product-market fit.
The goal is to validate the product, check user demand and collect feedback from early users before developing a full-scale product. Although the concept of MVP is not new for founders, only some startups leverage it correctly.
WizKidsCarnival is an excellent example of a startup that began its journey with an MVP and validated the user demand before taking it to the next level.
WizKidsCarnival started with solving the problem of parents being unable to showcase and encourage their kid's talent. The solution was to create an online talent contest platform where kids (aged 3-15) could participate, compete, and win prizes. Their product would enable children to compete in talent competitions like singing, dancing, drawing, and so on with their peers from all over India and, eventually, the world.
Their journey started with an MVP, a static website that provided contest details, collected contact information and relied on an operations teams to actually run the contest.
This case study of WizKidsCarnival is an excellent example of how an MVP can help a startup validate its product, find product-market fit and eventually scale successfully.
The Context: How it all Began
Showcasing kids' talent is something every parent is proud of. However, in a country like India, where grades are considered the only benchmark of a kid's abilities, it is tough for parents to encourage their kid's talent.
Finding a platform where children can exhibit specific skills and get appreciated is difficult. Many schools conduct competitive events; however, they are limited to only a few participants and popular categories.
Determined to solve the problem, the WizKidsCarnival founding team, Abhishek Awadhani, Mansi Awadhani, and Vinayak Palankar devised an idea - An online talent contest platform where kids can participate, compete and win prizes. The product would enable children to compete in online talent competitions like drawing, singing, dancing, etc., with their peers worldwide and get recognized for their talent.
Although the premise sounds exciting and reasonable, the success of WizKidsCarnival hinged on a couple of critical questions:
- Is showcasing kids' talent even a genuine problem?
- What is the intensity and frequency of the problem?
- Will parents even choose an online talent contest platform as a solution?
- Most importantly, is the problem big enough that parents are willing to pay for it?
Building a comprehensive product to test the hypothesis was risky and expensive.
Therefore, the founding team of WizKidsCarnival decided to build an MVP for product validation - a static website with bare minimum features that would allow kids to participate in online contests.
The web app had a simple interface detailing the various ongoing contests, an embedded form that collected basic contact information, and a payment gateway. Parents could let their children participate in any contest by filling out a form and making a nominal payment.
However, most of the actual operations of conducting the competitions were manual. The team had to communicate via mail and juggle through excel sheets to conduct contests.
Once the information was fed to the website by parents, the back-end team of WizKidsCarnival had to communicate with the prospect by mail, send payment confirmations and guidelines, receive the participant's artwork, and evaluate them manually.
Finally the team would select the winners based on submissions and send them certificates through mail.
Additionally, there was no CMS to manage the content on the website. So every time the WizKidsCarnival operations team had to create a new contest, they had to rely on an engineer to help them with the same..
The MVP had many limitations regarding efficiency, usability, and scalability. However, it allowed WizKidsCarnival to launch and test their idea quickly and at an extermely low cost.
When the "Good Problem" Started
Despite the limitations of the initial solution, the idea proved its worth. The MVP worked like a charm. Even with a simple user interface and minimal features, many parents signed up their kids to participate in various competitions. Many parents turned into repeat customers to opt for other competitions.
Then the problem that every founder wishes for came knocking- Scalability issues.
To cope with the increasing demand, the team increased the number of competitions. With every participation, the work for the operations team started piling up.
The valuable time that the team could have utilized to focus on growth was being spent on repetitive tasks . It was becoming extremely difficult for the team to further scale their operations with the current approach.
While the operations team faced struggles, the customers were having their share of a hard time too. They faced challenges interacting via emails and the like, often leading to confusion regarding the competition details, submissions, payments, refunds etc. Contest submissions that would often include large videos was a hassle due to file sizes.
In addition, every time a parent needed their children to re-participate, they had to fill out the forms from scratch. This was significantly impacting the repeat participation rate as the friction to provide the same information repeatedly was too much.
WizKidsCarnival's team had seen the massive potential the product idea had, but it was impossible to realize the same without resolving the manual operation issues and improving the user experience. It was now time to upgrade their Minimum viable product.
As the pressure mounted and work hours got longer, the WizKidsCarnival team started, looking for solutions that could help solve some of these issues.
Given that Default solely focuses on working with startups and understands an entrepreneur's expectations and needs, the WizKidsCarnival team reached out to discuss possible ways of collaborating.
The Solution: Connecting the Dots with Tech
When the WizKidsCarnival team approached us, we spent some time understanding the problem statement, the vision, and the immediate concerns of the founding team.
The primary objective at this stage was to automate the operations process as much as possible while improving the overall end-user experience.
After multiple brainstorming sessions with the WizKidsCarnival team, we devised a plan. The solution included building a web app with three key modules.
User Accounts
Adding users' sign-up process addressed multiple limitations of the existing static website and improved the overall user experience. It allowed users to register an account and view all their information on the user dashboard.
Parents could easily store, find, and retrieve all the contests they have participated in, their performance, certificates (if they have won), and the ongoing competitions. They could also upload kids' content/artwork directly through the portal, eliminating the confusing process of uploading the file through file sharing services like dropbox.
The data could now be securely stored, and users could easily pick up from where they left off. The functionality to add multiple child profiles under the same user account allowed parents to participate in different contests for all their kids. Earlier, the parents had to fill out their kid's information for every contest, this feature allowed the parents to provide the details once and then participate in multiple competitions without needing to provide it repeatedly.
The Admin Panel
We added an Admin Panel for the operations team. The operations team could view, create, or close the contests, score and assess participants, categorize participants, upload certificates of participants, and much more with a few clicks. It curbed the tedious process of manual tracking, follow-ups, compilation, and assessment.
For users participating in a contest, all communication such as the onboarding and payment confirmation mail is sent automatically. Besides, all the participant's details can be directly viewed and need not be compiled into spreadsheets.
Content Management System
Creating and managing new contests was tedious for the back-end team due to the lack of CMS. The easy-to-use CMS allowed team members to create, modify or delete contests without depending on the engineering team.
The Final Out-turn: A Carnival of Happy Customers
The product we built in collaboration with the WizKidsCarnival team was able to address the scaling issues caused by running operations manually. The WizKidsCarnival team could now conduct more competitions with much less manual involvement. The updated web app features a dashboard that saves and displays all user information, eliminating the need for repetitive data entry and providing a seamless user experience.
With the new and improved Web app, WizKidsCarnival has witnessed a surge in recurring users. The customer retention rate increased, and the number of unique users signing up increased by manifolds.
The impact could be seen in the product metrics. Here is what we observed 45 days after the product launch:
- 40% conversion from accounts created on site to contests enrolled for.
- Enrolled users participated in 2 Contests on an average - within 3 months after the system went-live
- The number of child profiles created was 50% higher than the total number of active users.
Mr. Abhishek Awadhani, the CEO and Co-founder of WizKidsCarnival had this to say about our work
"Default has quickly become a valuable partner for us. Their plug-play model allows us to quickly ramp up or ramp down the development process like an in-house team. In just a few months, they were able to automate our back-end processes and improve our web application's user interface. This has made a huge difference in our business, and we are delighted with the results.”
From validating their concept with an MVP to building a remarkable product, WizKidsCanival is a perfect example of how a startup can turn their idea into a successful product with optimum utilization of resources.
If you liked reading this case study and are wondering how you could use the MVP approach for your startup, please feel free to get in touch for a free consultation call with our startup MVP experts.
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