Problem Statement

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How should Stoa approach its admissions/onboarding process to achieve the following goals -

• Design a great consumer experience that allows them to evaluate whether Stoa is right for them
• Design a streamlined admissions process to help Stoa’s team evaluate if a person would make for a valuable member of Stoa community

Some context, I came across Stoa on Twitter and it seemed like a fun thing to do. The little child in me was convinced to do StoaMBA (because of the mission), that’s layer one, but going deeper into it I was not 100% percent sure about going through with this. I’m sure there are people who this has helped dearly. I’m from one of the sub-sets in the image above but for some reason I decided to drop off, surely there are people from other 3 sub-sets who drop off from Stoa because of this reason (not knowing if this would help me).

<aside> 🤔 This is the problem of trust on suitability.

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I spoke to about 10-15 other people on why they show interest in a learning program and decide to drop off, there were multiple problems and reasons quoted. Here is how I would bucket them (in no particular order):

1. Trust on Suitability
   1. Is this for someone like me?
   2. Is the content suitable for me?
   3. Will I appear to be going backwards in my career if I do this?
2. Trust on Faculty (🚨 Stoa does this pretty well, I will not cover this)
   1. Who are the people who will teach us?
   2. What have they done in their life?
   3. What makes them qualified to teach this topic?
3. Trust on Outcome (🚨 This is a sub-set of #1, won’t be covering this separately)
   1. Will I get the right job after this?
   2. Will I get the outcome that I’m looking for?

These three problems if attempted to solve correctly will fix one of the bigger problems which is-