4th Feb- Interviews and Experiences

The opportunity

With the arrival of the new month of 2020, there are new challenges and opportunities. Today, I was contacted by my senior Namita Kumar, a fourth year ADM student at NTU. She is pursuing this course called News Media Practicum. As a part of the course, they are running a Google sprint in Wee Kim Wee School where there will be clients from The Business Times and Head of strategy from Facebook. I was asked to be one of the guests to the event, so that they could get insights from my experience and learnings in setting up this business of Alpaca Brewery. I was told that this interview and feedback will be compiled to form a product that may be funded by Google in future.

This is the detail of the product that they are making and of the event. I am pretty excited for this wonderful opportunity and I will be going for the event on 11th Feb.



Background of Garage @ The Business Times:

  • Content vertical/portal under The Business Times, focused on the region’s startup ecosystem
  • Launched in May 2019
  • USP: Able to give audiences credible, in-depth analyses of start-up business news and insights in the region
  • Has a paywall that restricts some readers from premium articles
  • Digital readership has increased from 16,000 in 2017 to 18,200 in 2019.
  • Current channels - website, app, Telegram channel, newspaper, and audio
  • We have developed 3 user personas - The Start-up Founder, The Investor, and The Tertiary Student.


Key Takeaways from Interview with News Partner

  1. Writes for a business-minded audience: simple, but also with jargon that most would understand
  2. Wants their content to shape audience, and wishes to maintain their brand voice


After much discussion regarding the news partner’s need to renew their audience demographic, we have decided to hone into The Tertiary Student as our main target user. 86.1% of current BT readers are tertiary educated, and this provides an opportunity for us to engage them as an emerging user base.


  • Diving deeper into the needs and pain points of The Tertiary Student, we have conducted an online survey among 39 students:
  • 93.9% of them have not heard of Garage
  • Most students prefer to get business news from social media platforms
  • Most students find business news interesting, but a significant number of them found it boring
  • Those who found it boring mentioned that business news can be “dense and heavy”
  • Most of them also wish business news can be delivered to them in a “bite-sized” manner on social media.


Taking into consideration that Garage has low visibility among tertiary students and that students prefer accessing business news on social media, we have inferred the following:


Problem Statement

Tertiary students need new ways to be engaged because they are becoming increasingly passive readers due to information fatigue.

Design Challenge

How might we efficiently connect business news to students in a way that captures their interest and ensures stickiness?





**Google Spring is essentially a Google's design thinking framework.