Before founding WINII in 2015, Minki Jung BC ‘06 worked as a management strategy consultant by day and a pro bono consultant by night. Enthralled by the electric energy of the entrepreneurs she worked with after hours, she decided to take the plunge and branch out on her own.
After quitting her job as a consultant, she found inspiration in an unlikely place: a tango lesson in Medellin, Colombia. Her instructors introduced her to the “saving circle,” a common practice in Latin America in which, as Minki explains, “friends and coworkers come together and save together.” She has iterated on the concept of friends motivating each other towards better financial management. The result? WINII, a social platform that supports young professionals with sticking to a budget and financial planning through peer benchmarking.
Once she was back in NY and shortly after tapping into the entrepreneurial network at Columbia, Minki took part in a workshop at the Design Studio@Columbia Entrepreneurship. She sought fresh perspectives on her concept and the chance to test her idea in the real world — the Design Studio turned out to be exactly what she was looking for. “As a thinly stretched solo founder,” she says, “the Studio became my de facto advisor and first test users.”
The studio’s founders, Alice Bosley and Adam Royalty, were particularly accessible, graciously collaborating with her after each sprint to improve her product. Minki also expressed gratitude for other workshop attendees, “who agreed to use WINII as a test case for the sprint experiment, providing valuable feedback and advice.”
In addition to the built-in advisory board provided by the studio, the workshop focused on actionable initiatives. Thanks to this emphasis on immediacy and real-world application, Minki not only learned about best practices in the abstract sense; she put these new principles to the test in order to fine-tune her product. “After each sprint, I would try to apply what I had learned,” Minki recalls.
“For example, after the sprint on ‘testing,’ I went to Central Park that afternoon and grabbed unsuspecting New Yorkers to see which value proposition people gravitated towards.” Armed with valuable feedback from Alice, Adam, her workshop peers, and the general public, Minki was able to sharpen WINII’s focus and ensure its future success.
So what’s on the horizon for WINII? After a successful first pilot, Minki is currently readying a second pilot for launch. With feedback on this pilot from millennial test users, she aims to roll out the digital platform in September 2016.