TechCrunch Hangzhou: How to build a great product from scratch with Le Wagon
Creating a good product begins with answering these questions: What problem are you trying to solve? Is there a market for it? How is your product different from any other already existing product? The difference between a successful startup and one that falls short is the ability to pinpoint where the product and market meet. If you don’t first establish a clear vision and a deep understanding of the market, any amount of investment or development will only drive you further away from your goals.
This year at TechCrunch Hangzhou’s Startup Alley, three speakers from Le Wagon will share their insights on product development and operations, and UX/UI, in addition to conducting several workshops.
Le Wagon is the leading global coding school for entrepreneurs and creative people:
- World’s best-rated coding bootcamp (Switchup, Course Report 2016 & 2017)
- A vibrant community of 300 mentors and 2700+ alumni across industries.
- Launched in Paris in 2013 with just €1,000 and raised no funding to date
- Operating in 29 cities worldwide(Paris, Brussel, Beirut, San Paolo, London…), with over 150 startups in operation, a handful raised over RMB 10M
- Active in Chengdu and Shanghai since 2016
The first of three workshops, Product Specification 101 (Chinese), will be led by Sergio Rivas.
About the workshop:
We see lots of entrepreneurs struggling to explain their product in a clear and concise way. As a direct consequence, they often don’t know how to work with designers and developers because they don’t speak their language. The role of a good entrepreneur is to break those barriers when it comes to his product. Otherwise, he won’t be able to work correctly with the rest of his team.
In this workshop, we will cover all the important steps in the conception of a technical product:
- Product pitch: precisely define your value proposition (we’ll give lots of examples)
- Mockup: make a basic mockup of your app using Sketch
- Database: what’s the core database scheme of your product
- User stories: write and organize your user stories on Trello. As an entrepreneur, this workshop will give you a simple methodology to precisely define the product you want to build and work efficiently with developers and designers without unnecessary processes or misunderstandings.
About the speaker:
Sergio is a Le Wagon mentor, equipped with 7 years of entrepreneurial experience in China. Since he was 18, he has been involved in the creation of 6 profitable startups ranging from the music industry to education. He has fulfilled roles as a database architect, lead developer, and is now the CEO of a Hangzhou-based software development company. As Sergio first stepped into coding as a student at Le Wagon, he is excited to give back to the community that helped him get his start by teaching students how to become expert algorithmic thinkers. He hopes to help Le Wagon students develop the ability to make a backend strong enough to support an entire startup.
The second workshop, UX & Product design for beginners (Chinese), will be led by Sam Xia.
About the workshop:
User experience is essential to the success of your web product, yet designing a product interface that is both effective and attractive is not an easy task.
Would you like to learn the best practices on prototyping your app? Come and join us for a fun learning with Sam, former Alibaba Senior Designer who has over 10 years’ design experience.
In this workshop, we will cover use case design, core user journey design, zoning, mockup and prototyping.
About the speaker:
Sam is a designer with 10 years of work experience. He was a senior designer for Alibaba Hema. Curious about technology and product development and convinced that programming and design are both needed to solve real-world problems, Sam joined Le Wagon to up-skill and quickly become a full-stack developer.
Now Sam is taking projects as a freelance with a very rich toolkit of skills. From UI design to web and WeChat development, Sam is currently working on several projects and with Le Wagon’s global network.
The final workshop, Build a website in 2 hours (English), will be led by Lucas Porter-Bakker.
About the workshop:
A landing page allows you to guide your traffic into business with a clear call-to-action. Successful lean startups always test their value proposition through simple and effective landing pages before making decisions. They iterate endlessly, tweak it, gather data, and optimize conversion flow!
Join the workshop and explore the world of web development. We will teach you to code and design your own landing page using HTML5 and CSS3 elements.
This is one of the most satisfying experiences and only the tip of the iceberg of what you’re capable of in programming!
About the speaker:
Lucas Porter-Bakker is a full-stack developer and software engineer, award-winning photographer, and 3x entrepreneur from Toronto, Canada.
Currently, Lucas is the founder and CTO // CEO of GOJI, which is an online ESL marketplace and learning service provider; connecting language students from all over the world to native English-speaking tutors. The mobile platform currently has over 25,000 tutors and students from more than 150 countries (www.gojinet.com).
Prior to GOJI he co-founded 西思路 (Westgroup), as a wholly foreign-owned entity in Hangzhou, China. During his time as the CEO, Westgroup went from being newly licensed to the foremost Canadian education company in Zhejiang Province.
When Lucas is not working or coding, he is usually travelling, working at his photography and film making hobby, playing sports, spending time with family and friends, cooking, and all-things music.
We are excited to have Le Wagon join our workshops this year, bringing expert guidance to our brand new product courses. Come learn what it takes to build a product that meets users’ needs!