Ideation

It all starts with a big idea.

You recognised an opportunity to disrupt an industry or positively impact daily lives of your users.

We’ll help you clarify, validate and refine this idea before you invest in development.

This mitigates your risk, ensures that you’re building the right thing and speeds up your time to market.

Research

Before we start creating your product together, we’ll invest our time into intensive learning that will enable us to effectively work with you, your stakeholders and customers. We've used this approach to successfully co-create products for users and industries that we've had no experience with — like the water industry, sustainability sector, bioinformatic researchers or Canadian college students.

How Might We’s?

How Might We’s are short questions that we use to help keep brainstorms focused. They are broad enough to cover a range of solutions, yet narrow enough to help the team stay focused. E.g. “How might we design a flying car?”

Future Backwards

This technique allows us to analyze complex problems and come up with solutions towards a desired outcome — while avoiding cognitive biases that can lead us in the wrong direction. It provides clarity, gives a shared view, and breaks pattern entrapment.

Value Chain Mapping

Value chain mapping is a critical process in identifying the company’s performance improvement opportunities. The entire process may be different depending on the company, but steps typically involve a laser focus on user needs and include identifying all steps in a proccess, identifying opportunities for improvement and best methods to improve.

Customer Journey Mapping

Customer journey maps help businesses forge relationships with their customers by using their needs as connection points. A CJM represents the path or process the customer will go through to satisfy a need or achieve a goal with your company or product and it gives us a good insight into their motivations and pain points.

Experience Mapping

An extension of customer journey mapping, Experience maps help capture insights from a sum of customer interactions happening across different touch points within a one or more product or service — or even different online and offline channels. They enable teams and stakeholders to better understand the user and enables them to create experiences that delight across all touchpoints of a product or service.

Personas

While Personas are technically fictional abstractions and representations based on a composite of your target customers who exhibit similar needs, goals, obstacles and behaviours, there’s nothing fictional about the way we create them, We’re basing these fictional characters on very real users we’ll thoroughly research, interview and understand.

WhoDo

In large organisations or complex industries, it can be hard to identify WHO needs to DO what for our product to succeed. We utilize a simple and fun game that helps us identify decision makers, champions, gate keepers and other stakeholders in less than an hour.

Empathy Maps

We believe understanding and empathising with your users is the first step towards a successful product. Empathy Maps are one of the tools we use to gain deeper insight into our customers and what they are thinking, feeling and trying to accomplish.

Discovery interviews

Customer discovery is an evidence based, customer-centric process that uses carefully constructed interviewing techniques to confirm assumptions about your business and bring you closer to product/market fit. We recommend involving customers very early on, as that enables us to avoid developing features no one needs.

Ethnographic user research

What’s better than a user telling you about their needs? Showing you. Ethnographic research is a qualitative method where we observe and interact with users in the same environment in which they will use your product. We use this approach to promote a deeper understanding of the user and the problem we’re solving – including the audiences, domain, goals, processes and contexts of use.

Value Proposition Mapping

Value proposition mapping is a simple process that helps you identify your customers goals, the challenges they face and the gains they look for. It also helps you visualize the value your product brings to the customer and align the whole team around it.

Validation

Then, we’ll turn this idea into a product plan.

And we’ll make the plan works by involving your users and testing and validating every step of the way.

We’ll develop a product roadmap, create a prototype and test it with customers to make sure the solution works in real world conditions.

Problem/Solution Fit

Achieving Problem/Solution Fit is one of the first major milestones for a startup or venture. Achieving Problem/Solution Fit means that you’ve confirmed desirability and viability of your startup - or that there’s a problem in the market and that you’re capable of creating a solution for it.

Product/Market Fit

A major milestone in any startups’ journey and a necessary prerequisite for scaling. Achieving Product/Market Fit signifies that we’ve managed to build a product that customers consistently buy for a price that makes the endeavour profitable — making your business both sustainable and scalable.

Customer Development

The founders’ vision is the driving force behind every successful product. We make the way to success clearer by capturing that vision and translating it into a series of business model hypotheses. Then we’ll develop a plan to test these hypotheses with customers and turn them into actionable facts — at the same time establishing valuable relationships with your future customers.

Concierge Tests

Concierge Tests present an opportunity to deliver the value proposition of your product and test customer’s reactions to it without investing time and resources in development. In that way, they are similar to the Wizard of Oz, with one major difference — In Concierge Tests, a human operator (the concierge) openly interacts with the user, thus increasing the value proposition even higher.

Wizard of Oz

The Wizard of Oz is a method used for testing a solution hypothesis in which the UX is a complete simulation of the intended product, with human operators behind the scenes executing the operations that software will in the actual product. This leads to a nearly identical value proposition and a high level of validation — without writing a line of code. Due to the lack of technology used in the Wizard of Oz testing, we can use them to rapidly test a wide variety of hypotheses.

Business Model Innovation

More and more companies are coming to understand the importance of business model innovation. Yet, many struggle translating high level concepts to actions they can use to design their business model. Through our structured process honed over a decade working with startups, we’ll help you research, ideate, create and validate multiple business models & evaluate multiple business models.

Prototyping

The iterative, explorative, evidence based approach we imploy and stand for relies on testing our solution with prototypes — quick & inexpensive versions of your product or feature that allows us to explore and confirm ideas and features before investing time and resources into development. Prototypes come in many forms — from simple drawings on paper (lo-fi), to clickable designs (functional), to even websites that look and behave like the finished products but use behind the scenes human operators that do the work software will in the final version.

User Testing

Prototypes are no good without real users to test them with. We rely on user testing to explore, refine and validate ideas, product features and business assumptions and provide user input that can help guide your product vision to success.

Agile Development

Now, let’s build that product.

We’ll help you form an Agile, truly multifunctional team to design, develop and launch the first version of your product or service.

We’ll focus on the most valuable features – those that will delight early customers, and give us enough feedback for the future development.

This approach minimizes development costs, while ensuring your product hits the market as soon as possible.

Agile

Agile is an iterative approach to product management and software development that enables us to deliver value to your customers cheaper, faster, and with less friction. Instead of building everything up front and putting all the eggs in one basket, we build in small increments and update the product often. This not only saves you money and time, but also makes your product adaptive and increases the chances of success.

MVP

We believe you shouldn’t pay for the development of features no one is going to use. That’s why we’re advocates of starting with a minimum viable product (MVP) — a version of your product with just enough features to satisfy early customers and provide feedback for future product development.

Web development

Being techies, we love leveraging the latest approaches to web development like Progressive Web Apps and AI bots. For every product we build we’ll form a dedicated team and bring front-end, back-end and architecture ability together to deliver your value proposition to your users.

Mobile Development

From native iOS and Android to cross platform and Progressive Web Apps, we can help you select the ideal technology stack to build and launch your product on time and budget.

User Experience Design

The design of your product should be about more than just colors and buttons. We believe that every product we build should provide a relevant, engaging and delightful experience for the user — from the moment the product is acquired beyond.

User Interface Design

Your product should not only provide a function to the user, but also look good while doing that. We create products that not only work well but look great too, and aim to create designs users will find easy to use and pleasurable.

On-demand tech talent

Using our connections in South and East European markets that have traditionally been hotbeds of tech talent, we’re able to source developers in record time and on very competitive rates.

Go to Market

Go to market – and beyond. Together.

Building your product is just the first step in your startups journey.

We’ll help you develop your go to market strategy, conduct marketing and acquire customers.

We take care of your startup operations, saving your time and energy to focus on what you do best.

Market Launch

Building the product is just the first step in your startups journey -- the real work begins once the MVP is ready for the launch. We support founders through the market launch by helping identify users and channels of promotion, preparing the campaigns and doing everything from customer support to App Store Optimisation.

Growth

Our partners include business development managers, sales leaders, growth hackers and analytics nerds that led growth and expansion for international tech companies for a better part of the decade. We know what it takes to get that hockeystick.

Fundraising

Hockeystick growth often requires fuel in the form of investment. We help founders prepare for and get seed and Series A and later stage funding by leveraging our experience preparing early stage startups for investments, as well as connections with venture funds and investors in Europe and US.

Startup Operations

Being a founder is not easy and requires you to wear many hats and be good at many things -- from sales to HR and accounting. We assist founders and act as an engine for your startup operations, enabling you to focus your time and energy on what you do best.

We’ve done this a few times before.

We helped startups, corporates and organizations like Societe Generale Bank, Scratchy, The World
Health Organization, World Business Council for Sustainable Development, Evoality, Taboozapp and The International Water Association delight their customers with innovative products and initiatives.

Here’s few recent examples.

Scratchy: Gamifying Business Intelligence

Water Statistics Platform: Visualizing Global Water Consumption

Taboozapp: When a pivot works

If you made it this far you might be ready for the next step.

We recommend a FREE opportunity discovery workshop.

It’s designed to discover your customers needs and uncover hidden opportunities in the market.

Get in touch to schedule.

Untangle is founded by Alex Covic, a veteran in the European startup scene - and supported by his vast network of product, growth, design and technology experts.

Established in Estonia. Made with ❤️ in the cloud.
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Startups are hard.