Research & Discovery in one’s Professional & Personal Life

Mobilosophy partners with startups and leading brands – including Nestle, Unilever, NFL, and Prudential – to create apps that get traction. We craft lean product strategies and execute on user experience, engineering, and user acquisition. Our approach is driven through metrics, conceptual prototyping, and user feedback gathering, all in our pursuit to validate business models and squash assumptions early and often.Planning is critical to our process. Many entrepreneurs work off blind optimism at first, so we coach our clients to make informed, data-driven decisions from the get-go. We perform deep “Research & Discovery” periods, where we explore concepts in every direction and pose challenges by asking the hard questions upfront. By giving lots of attention to understanding business goals, metrics and potential stumbling blocks, we minimize risk and ensure that all aspects of a project are aligned.This all took a while to dawn on me. Back in 2012 my focus was on the psychology of judgment & decision making: how do people make decisions? what’s a good vs bad decision? how can we improve our choices? A common path for this field was working in a research lab, but as a people person, I shunned the idea of crunching statistics. Instead I became a tech recruiter for New York City startups. I didn’t know what I was getting into but it would become my very R&D period in becoming an entrepreneur.Enter New York’s tech scene. I met with new and established startups, immersing myself in the abc's of what it takes to build a tech company: understanding the difference between a software engineer, programmer and developer, UX, UI and graphics designer, system architect and admin. Talking to founders, CEOs, CTOs, product managers, HR managers. Learning the importance of culture and grit, believing in oneself, startups as the source of innovation over corporations.Then an interesting thing started to happen. With my vantage point in the space, entrepreneurs were coming to me seeking advice for their ventures. A trusted friend introduced me to Neil a few weeks into that summer. He was building his own startup and recently transplanted to the east coast. We complemented each other’s skills and we naturally started advising startups together on where they should focus their attention and how to approach certain challenges. For those next few months, we bootstrapped our operation, until we saw that our advice was actually helpful and impacting entrepreneurs’ journeys. We realized we had something bigger on our hands - the opportunity to build a team that would guide companies, young and old, to ride to the top of the mobile wave without getting crushed by it.As a recruiter, I was constantly telling engineers to "take the plunge", "follow your dream", that "being a big fish at small yet growing pond is way more valuable, than being a small fish in an ocean like Facebook or Google." With all the pieces coming together, I internalized my own advice and made the leap, leaving my steady job. Having validated our offering with a few clients, we went in full-time, co-founding Mobilosophy which means the "Wisdom of Change.”In our first year of business we were blessed with the opportunity to develop mobile apps for Fortune brands. Though we quickly saw a much greater need in the space beyond simply designing & developing apps or websites. In 2012, everyone wanted an app to do anything and everything. Most failed. What many teams, entrepreneurs and clients lacked weren't budgets or time but experience, knowledge and ways of thinking through problems:Discovery & Validation: Is there actually a need?User Experience: No matter how pretty, do users actually enjoy this? Are they engaged? Do they come back?Building Lean: Don’t overbuild. Apply lean principles to accelerate failures which lead to success. Everything big starts small, so hone in, refine. Make data-driven decisions.User Acquisition & Distribution: We've built this app, how are we going to make it successful? This was an afterthought for most, but needed for be considered and tested upfront.These 4 principles are the cornerstones of our practice, which we vigilantly uphold and encourage our clients to embrace. Today we are leveraging these concepts to transform industries and empower stakeholders. The alternatives – relying on intuition, gut-feelings, assumptions and hunches – may seem promising, but they’re actually dangerous traps. Nothing beats data-led insights for consistently making good decisions. As a people-person this wasn't easy or natural to me at first. But as a product-perfectionist/junkie/obsessor my education has come full circle.Entrepreneurship is not for everyone but if you can stomach some risk then find a way to get your feet wet. Arm yourself with the right navigation tools (data, metrics), chart a course with measurable goals (validation). If you start catching fish (interest, customers), rev those propellers and go all in.Matt Lazarus leads strategy & client-success at Mobilosophy, a New York City mobile/product agency.