Prosper

Hey Product Hunt 👋I'm Krystyn and I'm so excited to share Prosper with you as we start on our journey to help millions of young professionals realize their potential. We built Prosper to help students make the leap from school to their career because college is no longer a guarantee of stable employment. We know that 1 in 2 grads this summer will be unemployed or underemployed within a year of graduation and no one goes to college with the dream of becoming a Starbucks barista ☕️. And with student debt rising and added social pressure and anxiety, it's clear the system is broken and we're excited to help fix it. During the design phase, we set out to uncover drivers of youth unemployment. We found that employers are hiring, but when we talked with employers, we found that most (1 in 5) said they couldn't find new grads with the soft skills for the job, such as communication skills. To solve this problem and help new grads stand out, we wanted to design a more accessible way to build soft-skills. Working with over 200 students, we designed Prosper on top of existing habits (i.e., texting, video, social feedback loops) to help students develop their professional voice to land the job. Prosper has been in closed beta for the past year. That means job-seekers have designed the experience with us, as we've built it. Two releases later, we were ready to say 'hello world' and hello, Product Hunt 😜 Please take a look at Prosper and tell us know what you think, including your most critical feedback - we need to make this the best possible experience to help solve this problem. You can chat with us in-app, @helloprosper on Twitter or email me at krystyn@helloprosper.com or @krystynharrison on Twitter. Our team is ready to iterate daily to make Prosper even better. Want to learn more about how we designed Prosper? Take a look at the comment below from my co-founder, @bthainblonk 👇

As someone who does a lot of coaching/counselling for new grads and job seekers, I'm thrilled to have met Krystyn and her team. I absolutely love the familiarity of a Snapchat-esque video stories environment, combined with a community of career coaches and job seekers to create a helpful mentorship environment. Really excited about the growth of this product, and wish the team all the best!

Hey Product Hunt 👋🏼 Starting on this journey, we asked one simple question. "How do we make coaching scalable?" To test this, we launched an MVP over Slack, we tested the thesis that mobile coaching for job interviews could deliver the same outcomes as the traditional coaching in-person or over Skype. Krystyn and I coached students using video and chat messages to help them practice interview questions and boost their confidence before interview day. We focused on being the "coach in their pocket", sending encouraging notes, quotes, songs and videos to boost each user's confidence along the job search. What did we learn? 🤔Users craved feedback and loved the positive reinforcement. We also tested Prosper, the chatbot. And, we learned that users were much more willing to engage with our live coaches compared to a bot. So, we let Prosper go for the time being. Next, we released the early version of Prosper in January 2018 to a closed group of users. Enter the Prosper career story feature. Here users recorded an answer to an interview question and sent it to a coach for feedback. Then, the coach provided feedback directly overtop of the video - just like an Instagram live story. We learned that users loved the in-context, personalized feedback because it felt natural. The result? Several active users landed their dream jobs! Now, we've released Prosper on the App Store with even more features - like training content and personalized chat. We would love to hear your feedback on the content and revised story feature. Going forward, we're excited about building some machine intelligence into future releases - if you have any ideas, we would love to hear it! We're a nimble team of designers and developers - let us what you think and help us make Prosper even better! 🙌🏻 If you want a fully unlocked version of the app, send me an e-mail at beckie@helloprosper.com and we'd be happy to share with you!

Hi everyone! 👋🏼Beckie here - Chief Customer Officer at Prosper. Thank-you so much for joining the discussion and for your interest in Prosper.

This app fills a need in the coaching market. Young people like millennials don’t want to spend their money on expensive and inconvenient time-consuming professional coaching - this app provides the perfect blend of convenient, accessible and effective coaching on-the-go. I also love the relaxed and personable attitude of the Prosper coaches, it’s refreshing and makes for a relaxed and encouraging experience.

Pros:

Intuitive, effective, and affordable compared to other coaching options out there. The perfect app for millennials and others!

Cons:

Currently not available on Android, but I’m sure it will be in the near future!

such a great tool! I have three kids in University and I will be recommending this to them as well as their friends!

Awesome idea! Unfortunately I use android...