Success Finder

Brandon Straza is the founder of Success Finder. As a successful insurance businessman, Brandon has pursued his vision for Success Finder through his own funds. Brandon is a non-technical founder, so he needed to be sure that he found a team that could understand him, his business vision, and help him put his thoughts into action.

Brandon built a version of Success Finder with his previous company, focusing the product as a mobile application. The product didn’t take off as he had hoped as it didn’t include all of the proper features and had some broken components as well. Brandon ended up taking over a year break from the project.

After determining he wanted to pursue his idea again, he jumped back into the startup world and approached Aloa to help him redevelop the platform as a web application.

As a non-technical solo founder, Brandon had to run his business, work on every facet that would set him up for success, while also translating his vision into a comprehensible outline that a development team could first design and then ultimately develop.

Aloa’s first task here was to work with Brandon in helping him learn how to write a user story, providing him a roadmap as to the first step he needed to take to start fine-tuning his product roadmap.

Another avenue to navigate was working with Brandon on how to think about additional feature requests and managing expectations as to costs associated with additional requests as well as how more work impacts the initially provided deadline. Aloa helped Brandon think about limiting the scope of work to stay laser-focused on the MVP, only working to include core functionalities that would help him test his hypothesis and then saving feature request ideas for later iterations of development.

Brandon was able to leverage Aloa Manage’s Additional Requests function in order to open up tickets, get the feature requests estimated, and determine if he wanted to work on them now or later. This allowed Brandon to more efficiently manage the workflow of his feature backlog and properly determine what was worth pursuing and what was worth waiting on.

Aloa was able to identify the right development partner for Brandon and the Success Finder team. We approached this project in two phases: Design and Development.

Phase 1, Design, allowed us to take Brandon’s vision, put it on paper, and mock-up a full prototype of the platform to be.

Phase 2, Development, allowed us to assemble a development team that was equipped to build out what was mocked up in the prototype and turn it into a fully functional MVP.

The launch of the product allowed Brandon to onboard an initial batch of users while the Additional Request feature in Aloa Manage allowed him to manage his backlog of features that he continued to iterate on.

Brandon and his team were able to leverage the MVP to gain traction for their product, onboarding thousands of users who remain active on the platform today.

The initial success of the launch put Brandon in a position to kick-off a fundraising round for his seed-stage investment.

Success Finder now has a dedicated team that works on an hourly-basis who continues to iterate on the product as it is released and tested with more users. The development team follows the backlog outlined by Brandon with each additional request ticket that Brandon opens.