Alumni Finder: A Rapid Prototyping Spike
A school's alumni network is one of its most valuable assets, but connections often fade over time. We hypothesized that the public internet holds a wealth of data—job changes, news mentions, home purchases—that could empower development offices to re-engage their community. The question was: could we build a tool to find it, and would it be valuable enough to become a product?
From Hypothesis to Prototype in Two Weeks
The Business Question: The challenge was less about building a massive, perfect system and more about answering a crucial business question: Is this scattered data valuable enough to be useful? Before investing heavily, we needed to prove—or disprove—the concept quickly.
The Tech Spike: We launched a focused, two-week "tech spike" to build a functional Minimum Viable Product (MVP). The goal was speed and effectiveness: aggregate data from a handful of public online sources and present it in a clean, actionable dashboard for a pilot school to evaluate.
5+
Public Data Sources
2 Weeks
Idea to Functional MVP
Actionable
Data for Startup Owners