Alchemy - Business Model Design
Alchemy is a workday plug-in that helps hiring teams connect with new grad candidates through their data aggregation technology that captures data points from job descriptions and student course information to find the most accurate matches.
Objective & Scope
As a part of our business models design course, we created business model options that helped Alchemy monetize its technology from a consumer and organization's perspective. Here are the key activities we outlined as the scope of this project:
Roles & Responsibilities
I, along with three other team members worked in the capacity of business designers on this project and shared the responsibility to:
Just skimming through?
Watch our recommendations to Alchemy in our Final Business Model Pitch.
Phase 1
Understand
Alchemy's Current Business Model
We divided the customer segment into Student, Organization (hiring company, and Institution. We were able to nail down value props for each segment.
We started the BM with the golden triangle that helped us understand Alchemy's current customer segment. By digging into these elements, it helped us recognize and act on areas that can be improved.
Context Analysis
Mapping trends and collecting the team’s perspective on the drivers that affect Alchemy’s business.
The canvas helped us capture the top-of-mind external environment trends. It became easier for us to add evidence for trends, or to actively hunt for trends that we did not identify the first time.
Design Criteria
The design criteria canvas was used as a scorecard. When we wanted to evaluate a Business Model Option, we evaluated it against how well it fits the design criteria.
This canvas allowed the team to evaluate the right set of features to focus on.
Bold Steps & Vision
The team created a positive, future-oriented canvas that brought us to a shared agreement about what you are going to fight for together, and what steps you are going to take to get “there.”
This method helped us design the business vision and bold steps to achieve that vision. We were able to clarify what supports the Alchemy's vision, what challenges the vision, and what opportunities are created in working toward the vision.
Phase 2
Ideate
Individual Career Journey
Going through the career journey of a student and solving for the missing holes in this journey with new value props and customer relationships. Of all things, students shouldn’t worry about the nuances and loopholes of the process. They want to be walked through the process step by step so they can focus on what they’re good at - their skills.
Growth Within Current Employment
We explored a model for individuals who want to elevate their careers and grow within a company and learn new skills. This is a smaller segment and a niche group of people, ultimately we decided to stick to students for the immediate future.
Career Coach
Understood a prospect opportunity that we eventually took forward, of providing career advice to students in the job search process. This process will take time to automate as we would need to study responses of career advice experts and build an automated algorithm for it. Instead, we can just suggest alternative career paths based on existing data from professionals.
Multi-channel
Leveraging other channels of motivation for a student to help recommend Alchemy as a reliable platform. Alternatively, they can use the tool on behalf of the students to help them through this process. Parents seem like a good next step, but it would require building a new design process to cater to the language parents understand. The others would require group log-ins that might take time to implement.
Phase 3
Validate
We created a microsite that behaved like a survey in order to determine which of our business models was most appealing among our audience. Creating an engaging prototype that is easy to make and use, allowed us to collect insights at scale. Quick & informative.
Phase 4
Final Pitch
We adjusted the current scope of work with new value propositions we found through our validation and research process while making sure the primary value of the company isn’t lost, and isn’t a drastic shift to implement.
Canvases complete, we moved onto the design and putting together our pitch. It involved custom graphics, sounds and our point of view. We shared the customer journey through the eyes of our power user - “Faan” and received a positive response on our storytelling tactics.
Our recommendation to Alchemy was to pan out a timeline in the backlog, that lays out a - near term, ambitious and future strategy - that they can then implement over the course of 5 years.
Final Business Model Recommendation
Final Pitch
Other Business Model Ideas
Entrepreneurs x Investors
In seeing what our clusters were we focused on what Alchemy in space could be. The customer segment of startups was a space of big interest. A niche group, after sharing the idea with the client this business model is not a right now actionable item, but something the company could look into years down the line.
Financials
This shot in the dark approach was nerve racking but helping to see approximately how much money could this customer segment make. While we are a team saw a potential value in this customer segment after understanding the inner workings of Alchemy this customer now is not right target.
Industry 4.0
Evaluated our positioning in Industry 4.0 (a tech heavy solution) where all processes are automated and only maintenance will be done by engineers. It’s too soon to remove human interaction in the process. Students (and parents) may not trust this system yet if we lean towards an extreme. We shall consider a portion of this for the future.
Financials
We based the finance structure for this model on the Virtual Reality Training Simulation Software by Mursion. VR is an expensive initial investment and requires constant maintenance and improvements but has the potential for profitability with annual contracts.
