From platform idea to requirements and a working prototype, before launch.
StoryMachine is a platform that supports content marketing with AI, from research and strategy to creating and managing the content itself. Baboon Labs helped its founders sharpen the idea behind the platform ahead of launch, so they could validate it right away with potential customers and investors.
The starting point
StoryMachine was founded by two B2B content experts. They know from experience where the time goes in content work, from research and strategy to the articles and posts themselves, and which steps lend themselves to AI support and speed-up. They also know where that support ends. Content without human expertise behind it is generic, so the decisions and the quality control stay with people. That interplay is what the platform needed to support.
Between an idea like that and something you can actually build sits a step that’s heavier than it looks. “A tool that does this for me” is easy to say. The real work is pinning down exactly which features it includes, what happens at each step, what the user sees, where the system suggests and where a person decides, and where the tool deliberately stops. Until those requirements are fixed, every build decision is a guess. At that point StoryMachine was in the ideation phase, with the platform still pre-launch. The founders chose to nail down the requirements first and test them against the market straight away.
What we did
Baboon Labs worked towards those requirements over a few sprints, following the sequence we use for this type of engagement. First came gathering context: conversations with the founders about how the work gets done today and what the platform should take over, plus research into what already exists on the market. That context was then turned into structure: the steps the platform goes through, the output of each step, and the technical choices and integrations underneath.
Next came a working prototype in StoryMachine’s brand style, covering the core of the platform. In this phase, the prototype is the real instrument. A written spec leaves room for interpretation. A screen you can click through leaves far less. Whatever was missing or needed to change surfaced as soon as the founders started working in it, and each time it went back into the requirements.
The prototype was built on real, reusable code, so the next phase can build on it. The engagement wrapped up with a roadmap from MVP to V1, V2 and V3: what still needs to happen on the way to production, in what order, and with which technical choices. Code, documentation and all artefacts were handed over to StoryMachine.
The result
After a few sprints, the founders had three things in hand: documented requirements for what the platform needs to be, a working prototype in their own domain, and a roadmap for the phases after that. The prototype in particular changes things at this stage. A conversation with an investor or a first customer goes differently when there’s something on the table that works.
A prototype also exposes what doesn’t add up yet. Every time it gets used, the requirements get sharper than a document could ever make them. Those insights help shape the scope of the next phase.