What— the product:

• An on-demand concrete mobile app — 'The Uber for Concrete'.

• A concrete marketplace allowing concreters and builders to book and manage concrete jobs from various suppliers, in a slither of the time it used to take using traditional methods and with much more ease and control.

• See product — here.

Why— the reason for the product:

• Concrete is an old industry, similar to what taxis used to be like prior to Uber and other such platforms.

• Traditionally, if you want to order a concrete job you have to call around and look for availability, one supplier at a time. 

• The process can take up to 20 minutes per call and you have to go through it for every little change, which in this industry happens multiple times per job.

• Moreover, the management of such jobs is often chaotic and the information exists somewhere between the concreter's mind and some rough notes on a page.

• The industry has been ripe for innovation for quite a while.

Our role:

• We led the project from a post-it note idea to a successful product in market.

• We then kept working with the team a few years later and helped them think about where else the product might go.

context

The Context

• A few years ago, Boral set up an internal innovation team (B-hub) with intention to diversify their offerings to the market and create a series of digital ventures.

• Boral contracted Fusion Labs (a boutique design and innovation agency) to run the first few projects and Fusion Labs contracted us to do the work (Shay, the founder of Pebble used to head Fusion Lab’s consulting arm).

• Pour (later renamed Found Concrete) was one of the ventures that came out of this process.

The Brief:

• We were given a very simple brief—take the following concept, flesh it out, test it with customers and see whether it has any value.

• The concept given was — ‘a digital concrete brokerage/marketplace ’.

• There was no more information than that, the rest was up to us.

What was done:

• Our team spearheaded the process and guided the concept from from a post-it note idea to a successful product in market. 

• Through a process of ongoing design, research and iteration cycles we explored the various users in the market, decided on a target to design for, developed appropriate propositions and brought them to life through screens, prototypes and eventually a working product.

• In parallel, we built the business models and overarching business case as well as worked out the legal and operational components behind the venture.

• Step by step, we turned the post it-note it into a product and then the product into a venture.

• The project ended with a company being established around it (a subsidiary of Boral) and a team being hired to run the company and keep working on the product.

• The product itself had product-market fit from the very start and the team that was hired to work on it spent most of the next few years focusing on relationship building, marketing and sales and very little on changing the product itself.

Brief:

• A few years later, the Found team came back to us (this time directly) and asked us to help them think about where they could go next.

• They told us that they needed to make very few changes these past few years and that it was now time to think about what else could be done.

• Knowing that we were the ones behind the initial product, they asked us to help them think about what’s next.

What was done:

• We got to work doing what we do best, mapping out users, developing new value propositions, exploring new business models, bringing it all to life and then conducting user research to see if any of it had any value and see what we could learn from the feedback

• The work informed the team and helped them develop their future product plans.