Synature’s technology is bringing together like-minded people online.
Social networking and Web 2.0 might be the talk of the town today but, two years ago, things were very different. An ambitious start-up was finding that its idea of ‘adaptive retail’, based on web users’ psychological profiles, was a hard sell.
The company, called Customiser, had an idea that would allow people to pick and choose products based on recommendations from like-minded users. Co-founder Andrew Fraser recalls their situation: “We were like a sandwich without the filling. At the top, we had done a lot of business planning to try to convey the concept and its value. And at the bottom we had done a lot of groundwork built on patenting.”
The difficulty was getting the message across and turning the technology into a concrete online tool. “The missing middle part of the sandwich was a translation of our value proposition into either sufficiently coherent business speak or a consumer understanding of what it might be,” says Fraser. “There was no real design input, from the point of view of presentation, visualisation or prototyping. We were finding it difficult to explain what we were doing or to get any traction with potential investors.”
Customiser only discovered the missing bit in the middle when it joined a pilot of the Design Council’s Innovate service for hi-tech start-ups. “Initially, we had an absolutely terrific two-day session, which was a no-holds-barred step back and appraisal of the company,” says Fraser. “Those sessions opened my eyes to identity both in terms of brand and presentation. We didn’t come up with answers necessarily, but a lot flowed out of those two days.”
The penny dropped for me about how much design can do, and that design decisions could maximise the value of the company
John Boult, director of consultancy Product First, then stepped in as design mentor. Boult was instrumental in focusing the company on new markets, explains Fraser: “We had something that was broadly applicable to many different situations and John helped us figure out which ones made sense.” He also worked on Fraser’s pitch with him, looking at how he could convince investors without a prototype. “He really helped me get the external business look sorted out,” says Fraser, who developed an engaging, animated PowerPoint display of Customiser’s proposition, featuring audience participation, to translate the social aspect of the technology.
This strategy would secure the vital backing in 2005 of ANGLE, a consultancy that specialises in commercialising high technology. ANGLE, “run by a couple of very clued-up guys” according to Fraser, grasped Customiser’s potential and agreed to invest up to £500,000, setting up a new company called Synature as a vehicle for the technology.
Digital development specialist Itineris helped forge Synature’s technology into a viable online tool – the Qubox – providing an engaging front-end to their psychological profiling. Instead of relying on users ticking endless boxes to determine their profile, the Qubox is a fun and intuitive interface which functions like an animated puzzle, determining the user’s personality in an engaging way. It can be embedded within traditional sites (such as early adopter MyTravel’s Holiday Matchmaker Qubox, which suggests holiday destinations in response to the user’s answers), generating a vital revenue stream for the company.
At the same time, Fraser has turned his attention to the less hard-edged sales aspect of the technology, re-thinking its usefulness as ‘attitudinal matching’ rather than ‘adaptive retail’. “Our whole proposition – find and be found by like-minded people – is perfect for social engagement on the web, so we set up a search engine based on the criterion of like-mindedness,” says Fraser.
Synature’s progress has convinced Fraser he was right to get involved with the Design Council programme. “The penny dropped for me about how much design can do, and how broad the idea of design is. Understanding that design decisions could maximise the value of the company is exactly what I needed to do.”
Article first published in Design Council Magazine, Issue 2, Summer 2007