After we have defined the goals and understood basically what issues we are trying to solve here, under a specific brand, meaning message and language, we need to research the web for similar projects and map out the different features each site offer and why.

This exercice although long and annoying, is essential for you to understand where your product fit, in which existing ecosystem, maybe even find cool partners to co-work with!

So the way this works is in an excel shit we prepare the following fields:

site, brand, features, descriptions, positive points, negative points, ...

we can also add: tagline, ranking, plateform, ...

And we research the web to find at least 20 different sites that are similar to ours, maybe have the same intentions, maybe have the same type of audience, and we document them.

After this exercice, we guerilla research what type of audience we are targeting. 

And here we have to be more granular, meaning defining at least 3 different age groups, sex, and occupation that we will refer to when we design. Preferrably we have found these demographic while researching and analysing our data. We refer to this exercice as the Personas. But I like to have a more data driven design approach and pull out the demographics.

After you have taken the day for these 2 exercices what you could do is create Google docs and add me to it so I can give you specific feedback on each of your projects.

My email is designingforcommunities [at] gmail [.] com

Good luck!