Clover Awards -- A case study on awesomeness.

Clover Awards is a crowd-powered platform that rewards the commitment, effort and talent of everyday heroes through recognition and financial support for their individual causes. What drew us to Clover Awards was their mission of recognizing the ordinary individuals that do extraordinary things for their community – the unsung heroes of the world.

The talented team at Clover Awards had a lot of great ideas on how they wanted their platform to function. They had started developing an initial prototype of the product using NodeJS and Angular. PKL was approached to provide strategic thinking and technical & development assistance to get to market quicker.

Using the Lean Startup approach – build, measure, learn, repeat – we distilled down the core assumptions of their business model to arrive at the features for the Minimum Viable Product. Their main assumptions were:

• that people will nominate someone in their life that has been doing good in their community
• that nominees will participate in a friendly competition benefiting their individual causes, where the winner would receive a prize
• that the peers of the nominees would demonstrate their support by voting and raising funds for their nominee

“Using weekly Agile sprints we were able to release a functional Minimum Viable Product in under six weeks to begin gathering feedback, validating our assumptions, and learning about what our users really wanted.”

We went to market with the first Clover Award recognizing amazing stories in the animal rescue world – the Animal Rescue Heroes Award. We targeted a small demographic of social media users to test and gather feedback about the platform. The thing that became immediately clear to us was that users did not want to be involved in a competition - friendly or otherwise. And they did not want Clover Awards to be another “popularity contest” platform. We also learned that some of our nominees preferred to use Clover as a way to generate increased social awareness for their causes.

“What really stuck out to us was that, for many nominees, the act of being nominated by their peers was an award in and of itself.”

With these lessons learned, Clover Awards decided to shift away from the idea of awarding an individual winner and moved to making the cause the champion. Clover Awards has now launched several other awards recognizing everyday heroes and has grown the Clover user base through social media channels.

"Working with PowderKeg altered our entire approach to building a startup. We thought we 'got' the Lean Startup methodology but we quickly learned that we really didn't as they led us through a number of surprising Validated Learning experiments. PowderKeg protected our seed capital and helped us find our market faster."

-- Brennan Kelly, CEO of CloverAwards