work / station91

Station91

Founder education that fits between two meetings

DesignProducts Co-Founder · Design Lead · 2019

Led 4 devs

Worked with Co-founder (engineering)

Lesson player and tracks

5.0★ Play Store reviews at launch

Early user feedback, unprompted

Community reception

5–10 Minute lessons
4 Learning tracks
Practitioner Led content
TL;DR
  • Designed a bite-sized founder-education product end to end: competitor teardown → Job Scenarios → metadata spec → wireframes → 27 UI screens
  • Key decision: framed research as Jobs-to-be-Done scenarios instead of personas; founders hire content to solve this week’s problem, not to match a demographic
  • Validated with usability tests (15 users) and ~150-person feedback groups before a Product Hunt Ship launch

The real problem

Founders don’t have a learning problem, they have a time problem. Long-form courses assume hours that don’t exist between fundraising, hiring and shipping; most content is theoretical rather than practitioner-led. A five-person team (design, engineering, mobile, marketing, content) ran this as a structured sprint.

Goal

Deliver curated, bite-sized practitioner lessons designed for founders to absorb and apply in under 10 minutes.

Outcome

5–10 min expert-led lessons with actionable takeaways. Tracks across product, GTM, fundraising, and operations.

What was considered

Persona-led research
Why considered The default playbook for a new product
Why it didn't ship Founder demographics are noise; the useful unit is the job ("I need to scope an MVP this week"), so we wrote Job Scenarios instead
shipped Jobs-to-be-Done scenarios (chosen)
Why considered Maps content directly to the moments founders would actually open the app
Trade-off accepted Harder to source content against; every lesson needed a job it answers
Long-form expert courses
Why considered Higher perceived value per item
Why it didn't ship Directly contradicts the time-poverty insight that justified the product

What was built

Four learning tracks of 5–10 minute practitioner lessons. The design process ran from a competitor analysis sheet through a metadata spec (shared nouns/properties aligning designers and developers), eight wireframe iterations, and 27 final UI screens. Even typography was tested, the 12pt body type flagged too small in feedback and iterated, and the launch went through Product Hunt Ship to reach early adopters.

Learning tracks

Product StrategyBuild products users love and markets need
Go-to-MarketLaunch playbooks, growth tactics, customer acquisition
FundraisingPitch decks, investor relations, and funding mechanics
OperationsTeam building, processes, and scaling efficiently