A Brief History of TechSphere
Everything you might want to know about the creation of TechSphere and the people behind it
It Starts With…
One post.
At that time, Vietnam Tech Society (VTS) was just a small circle of friends within the Vietnamese technology community in the United States. We understand the struggle of launching yourself into the technology stratosphere first hand, and we want to change the current status quo by making skill development and professional network building easier for Vietnamese.
After the rally cry by Nghi Truong, a founding member of VTS, in the group Viet Referral, many passionate people rolled their sleeves up and decided to join the cause. Anthony, Hoang, Linh, and Tuan Doan (our current Product Lead), became part of VTS, formed a product team to envision a new approach to support Vietnamese young tech professionals.
THE LONG JOURNEY TO PRODUCT-MARKET FIT
While the Mission of VTS has always been clear to us: Advances Vietnamese tech students and professionals’ careers by building and strengthening Vietnamese tech talents community, it was less than obvious what kind of product or experience would elevate and drive us towards the mission? So as you can imagine, we were on a long road to figure out a product-market fit, or in Marc Andreesen’s words, finding ourselves in the positions of “being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market.”
Our first attempt was to create a bespoke networking and referral system for Vietnamese people.
We quickly found out that there was no real demand for such a platform, given that there are many existing solutions to the problem.
Our 2nd, 3rd, 4th… attempt.
How about a Leetcode party event organization on Discord?
Or a resource hub?
Renew it into an “informational hub” product.
Market Research time
Unfortunately, none of these ideas took off since they are either not product-building viable e.g. the resource hub or being in such a small market that it’s hard to imagine us having a great impact beyond a specific community e.g. Leetcode party for CS students who seek jobs.
It’s time to get back to the drawing board by conducting market research analysis.
We have 2 main group of users: students and professionals. For each group, we want to identify their goals and most importantly, their pain points when it comes to develop their careers.
We put our sticky notes in similar themes to draw insight and noticeable themes. There’s a professional jargon for this: “Affinity mapping”
Repeat the steps with our second group of users: Professionals
We were quite close, but we were not getting there yet. The most important question we needed to answer is: “What kind of product would help these pain points from both students and professionals?”
A 1-pager idea of the product
And finally, we decided to build an on-demand mentorship platform that connects those who struggle to navigate their career with the experienced in a few clicks. Unlike other Vietnamese products, Techsphere lets mentees schedule calls with any suitable mentors seamlessly while giving mentors more flexibility (to set topics to discuss and level of commitment).
Visualization, of course:
After we knew what we wanted to build, we recruited some designers and engineers to flesh out our idea.
We created a very scrappy version of the product:
Directory in Notion
Profile in Notion
Booking through Calendly
Feedback through Google Form
After that, we wanted to playtest the current flow to gather feedback from our privately-recruited users.
It was a hit. With the feedback, we are confident that we are on the right track to build a useful product for our real users.
Do you know Otter is the initial name for TechSphere?
Henry, our founder, thought that the mental image of two otters holding hands together while they sleep is super cute and is an apt metaphor for our product and the vision of connecting Vietnamese youth it embodied.
However, in the end, we decided to pick the name TECHSPHERE, with the hope of biuilding a platform to launch our users into the Technology stratoSphere.
And this is Henry’s reaction with that news.
(just kidding, he also thinks TechSphere is a better name for our platform)
The Holy Trinity of Product Management: User Journey, Wireframe, Mockups
In terms of product development, while it is paramount to have a strong, proven idea, it is even more important to have the right execution. Building a product from scratch demands a strong sense of empathy for the users’ pain points, a good sense of product intuition to visualize and design product features, and a good sense of business acumens to prioritize ideas so we ship the features as quickly and as wholly as possible to our users.
Thus, at Techsphere, we follow a product development process of:
(1) First, we identify all the different touchpoints and meaningful interactions our users will go through to get to the desirable action.
(2) Then, we draw up a website wireframe, also known as a page schematic or screen blueprint, which is a visual guide that represents the skeletal framework of a website.
A website wireframe, also known as a page schematic or screen blueprint, is a visual guide that represents the skeletal framework of a website. (Wikipedia)
And (3) Based on our initial wireframe, we come up with our first mockup to create a better visual understanding.
Once we have these mockups, we allowed our designers to wave their magic wands to make them into beautiful, high fidelity Figma designs before entrusting our engineering team to breathe life into these designs.
And finally, we launch the feature after carefully QA everything.
Repeating these steps a few times through different features like signup, login, schedule a call, review a mentor, etc. and you start to have a product, ready to be tested in a public launch
The Launch(es)
We had our private beta launch in October, 2021. For this version, we wanted to recruit a limited number of participants (10 mentors and 60 mentees) to keep every engagement under close observation.
We pushed our engineering and product team to finalize and deliver many core features for the official version based on the feedback and usage we have.
On the business side, we recruit Nga Le as the Growth Lead and Theodore Le as the Marketing Lead to strengthen the team and build our Go-to-market strategy.
After 5 months, we knew we must launch our product to a larger audience, but we needed the right timing to make the most out of our launch event.
In March 2022, we partnered with VNNY (Hội Sinh Viên Việt Nam - New York) to organize a career event which was joined by as many as 35,000 abroad Vietnamese students (our main demographic).
We also open TechSphere to the public and everyone can create a FREE account on our website to become a part of our mentor-mentee network.
The event was widely featured in many newspapers and official channels as well.
The event created a modest boost to our launch.
And as they usually say, the rest is history.
Today, we keep working on our product to improve the user experience and expand the network effect on TechSphere.