By Anthony Buchanan and Caroline Roper | DSO Team
Thank you for your continued support of Development Solutions Organization (DSO). Although our students are on summer break, the work of helping amazing organizations continues throughout the summer as we continue to recruit professionals and exciting new clients. We look forward to welcoming the students back in September and applying their new skills to our work!
In this report, we will focus on our project with Hummingbill and discuss DSO’s next steps.
Featured Project
DSO had the pleasure of working with Hummingbill, an automated mobile billing platform, and their CEO social entrepreneur Adam Walker. DSO focused on helping Hummingbill understand their key customer market segments better, as well as improve their go to market strategy during a pivot from Kenya to India.
Hummingbill is an advanced mobile subscription billing platform designed to end manual invoicing by simplifying automated payment and invoicing and aims to be the leading mobile billing platform in their key markets. Hummingbill focuses on improving the invoicing and payment management process for Indian small and medium businesses (SMEs) and their customers. Among its feature are invoice and payment tracking, integration with multiple software packages such as Tally and QuickBooks Online, client payment reminders, and mobile access.
DSO provided market research on the Indian mobile market as Hummingbill pivoted from Kenya to India. The team started by developing a framework to view the competitive landscape and focused on creating a clear overview of the market based on three key segments. DSO then mapped the roles of companies in each segment and compared Hummingbill’s core functions to competitor’s feature set. Finally, the team created a customer preference analysis and honed in on key market needs to help recommend a market entry and go ahead strategy.
The team was led by professionals Anthony and Caroline, with impressive work from students Bethany, Daphne and Ellen, culminating in an engaging final strategy presentation where the team presented and received feedback on their work from the Hummingbill CEO Adam.
A Testimonial from Hummingbill
DSO was an overall pleasure to work with. The mentors like Caroline and Anthony were incredibly professional in how they managed the students and always hit deadlines on time ... and the students were great to work with because of their enthusiasm and the marketing content they discovered for me that I would not have otherwise found on my own. All in all DSO was a great support in doing the fact-finding, top-down market research that's so helpful for any new startup's product marketing and fundraising. - Adam, Founder & CEO
What’s Next for DSO?
DSO is preparing to start the fall semester strong with new students, professionals and clients. The San Francisco team will continue to build on the rich talent available in the Bay area by focusing on creating a technology hub to deliver best practices and software solutions, as well as forming partnerships with like minded universities and organizations. If you are a social enterprise or non-profit looking for technical help to scale your product please reach out to ssanghvi@dsoglobal.org. Additionally, all hubs are excited to share more of the work we are doing through the release of project white papers and one page summaries.
If you are interested in helping with the next steps above, have references, or would like to learn more about DSO opportunities please e-mail inquiries@dsoglobal.org.
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