Problem
The progressive-minded among us is preoccupied with the idea of saving humanity from extinction: climate change is a top concern among democratic voters, Bloomberg mentions Elon Musk and his ventures every other day and Existential Risk is a key focus for Effective Altruists (the majority of Effective Altruists is under 35 years old).
Unfortunately, there is little we can currently do to save humanity apart from voting for politicians with better climate change policies, signing petitions and donating.
Opportunity
According to some of this generation’s best minds, including Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking and numerous Ivy League Professors, the future of humanity will be most affected by sustainable energy, space exploration, artificial intelligence and biotech.
Other conducive market trends:
1. $1 out of $6 are sustainable investments ($6.57 trillion).
2. 62% of people worldwide would take a pay cut to work for a company with social impact.
3. All companies need talent and investment.
Product Vision
Mankind connects talent and investors with curated ventures in the fields of sustainable energy, space exploration, artificial intelligence and biotech – things that will most affect humanity’s future, to quote Elon Musk.
Product Discovery
Key Assumptions:
1. All ventures need talent and investors, even ventures in the fields of sustainable energy, space exploration, artificial intelligence and biotech.
2. People, in particular, the tech start up community, want to support ventures that have the potential to help us colonize Mars by working, sharing and investing.
Learnings & Test Results
I conducted various tests, including creating a Twitter account, email newsletter, cold call emails, surveys and landing pages to validate my assumptions.
I learned from these experiments that companies were interested in Mankind as they replied to cold call emails and inquired for more information (46%); they even tweeted about Mankind to their network (54%).
Assumptions about talent and investors was more difficult to validate. Qualitative and quantitative feedback from landing page tests and interviews informed me that people were enthusiastic about Mankind’s mission. However, they were not taking action to support these ventures beyond reading about the venture’s needs. Through user interviews, I learned that people’s lack of action was because they were not interested enough in the needs posted.
Landing page engagement: click-through - 41%, pages/session - 5.5, avg. duration/session – 4 minutes
Email conversion: open - 64.5% (industry avg. - 22.3%), click-through - 34.9% (industry avg. - 4.6%)
