Wandering Grove

OVERVIEW

Needing flexibility while I helped care for my ailing father, I started Wandering Grove Consulting. I worked doing everything from branding and helping create prototypes to securing seed funding. I allied with previous employers to help turn their service offerings into products. I also helped launch a new company making lead alternative x-ray vests with the aim of using the profits to fund healthcare in third world countries. Below are two stories from my consultant work.

Spaces

Yon Nuta and Mark Briggs were approached by a venture capitalist with an idea to create a travel portal. Yon & Mark were both concerned that there was little new opportunity in the concept. However, in addition to this project, they were developing a separate concept for a widget based workspace that combined functionality from popular applications like Slack, and Evernote with the intention of applying the concept to data analytics.

Yon approached me four days before his pitch to see what we could come up with.

The pitch went very well. Mark and Yon secured their first investor for $2 million.

THE BREAK DOWN

Yon and I had a call to discuss how he wanted to apply the product framework to data analytics. The Balsamiq wireframes resulted from our initial call. I felt the approach didn’t deliver enough value to differentiate it from the over saturated market. We discussed repositioning the concept as a workflow tool, which had more possibilities but also needed more thought.

Since the potential investor originally approached them about a travel portal, I suggested we take the same concept and create mockups to apply to travel. I quickly sketched out a rough feature list and flows and then began work on the designs.

We reviewed the designs and Yon made the pitch. Not only did they get their funding, the investor was so excited he arranged meetings with other investors.

Blue Rooster & Rise Foundation

Blue Rooster builds custom intranets for Fortune 500’s using SharePoint. After 12 years, they needed to streamline their operations and capitalize on their experience by productizing their offering.

I started by defining a standard offering based on analysis of their previous four years worth of projects. I created a three-phased roadmap, prioritized by immediate impact to their financial bottom line.

Within three months of the project start, the initial platform was launched and all product costs were recuperated in savings by the first month of the first project. Two months later, the platform--without any of the vertical solution completed yet--was sold for $4 million dollars.

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