Final Stretch

Going into the break we knew that there were going to be two revenue streams for the product. The foundation is the freemium model in which features like being able to talk directly to a nutritionist and having more detailed exercise instructions were going to occur with a subscription fee.

Our innovative second revenue stream would come in the form of promoted posts from grocery stores and restaurants when we recommended to our users meal suggestions and grocery lists. We discussed extensively on if promoting advertisers would dilute our results and taint the legitimacy of our product. Soon we recognized that similar to Google, we must be transparent with our promoted results and also set a level of standard of when we would allow promoted results.

On the engineering side we had to figure out how to execute the platform for ads. Would we use adwords or other platforms to run the auction process or is that something we need to build in house? We soon recognized that it would be something that we would outsource at first since it is not our core competency. Then once we have the resources and the need, it would be an in-housed platform for the application.

BUILT.IO

There were several times during the stages of developing the product in which I wished I had a better understanding of the engineering side. To have knowledge of the language in order to help make decisions for our application felt very important to me. This week it seemed more important than ever as we began to make more decisions that would affect the code later on down the line. The most important aspect was the platform in which we would utilize for the product. After talking to some of the judges during another feedback session, we recognized that Built.io was a great platform to utilize. The engineers then made he executive decision to move our product over to that platform.

For me this seemed like an easy move as we would have full-service support. Beyond that I didn't understand how else to make the decision as I didn't quite grasp the factors that were important to our platform decision. Overall, the engineers seemed very happy with the move.

It was really exciting this week to see our product come together and show it off to our friends. With a great idea and a great market, it also was difficult to put together the business model. Curan and I met up to come up with the monetary aspect of the pitch and decided that we would finalize our decisions at the next meeting after we see how far the engineers had achieved with our product.

Pretty matters; communication matters more

This week the bulk of the work was my responsibility with the front end design. As a person more focused on the study of business and competitive strategy, my goal in this class was to develop me understanding of UI/UX much more. I read books about color palettes and human intuitive behaviors when it came to interacting with a mobile application. Designing and applying what I learned was a bit more of a learning slope.

The big part about front end design is being able to communicate with my engineers to understand what components they need. In order to do that we decided that I would just crank out the mocks with the features that the team discussed and ensure that every layer of the mock up is correctly labeled and isolated in the design program. Therefore that would make it easier for the engineers to utilize certain icons and backgrounds that I created.

After hours of starting, revising, redoing, then finalizing the mock ups. The engineering team and I met to discuss how the mocks are going to be used for the actual front end design. The meeting was sometimes frustrating as parts of my mock were scrapped in order to simplify the product into a minimal viable product. It was difficult to see my vision and effort decrease but it made me understand the importance of communication with the engineers. Overall the meeting and our approach was effective and we came out of the meeting ready to finalize our MVP!

It's all about the input

There were two main goals coming into this week:

1. formulate a clearer pitch
2. differentiate the product from competitors

To address the first issue, the business team met up to discuss the flow of the presentation. Curan and I formulated how to capture the audience in a few seconds and really explain the application by demonstrating the flow of its utility. We began to research some facts about nutrition and found a way to explain that our application is about altering our decision making process. After the pitch feedback, we loved the advice that our app is used to stop a series of bad decisions that ultimately leads to poor health and obesity.

To address the second issue, we recognized that the product has to do two things. The first is be able to remove the pain points associated with inputting what you eat. This means selecting different food items in multiple steps. That's when we recognized that we should have technology that can parse through simple tech as well as a mechanical torque to have picture recognition. The second point is to have output recommendations that are more qualitative so that the user would understand it more. This means our recommendations are in the form of food suggestions and exercise plans rather than just calorie burn and intake suggestions.

With the combination of the two above features, we felt very proud of our product and knew that we had a lot of work ahead in order to make both successful.

Reality check

Finally! We pitched our Piquant application in front of the whole class. After doing the pitch, we finally received the harsh feedback that we needed to reignite our thinking. A lot of the criticism stemmed from our similarities with myfitnesspal. For majority of the issues that were brought up, we thought that it was because we didn't clearly communicate our value proposition enough.

Overall we learned that we needed a better way to present that our application is more than a diet or healthplan. We found that we needed to clearly communicate the differentiation that the application was able to proved real-time recommendation.

On the engineering side, the engineers learned about built.io and figured out the backend clearly. I was really proud to see their hardwork pay off and how the three team members were able to collaborate. Walking away from this week we felt that we had a much better understanding of how to provide a better pitch and it was so exciting to finally see the product come to life.

One small step, one huge progress

After narrowing down to the health industry and exploring both the nutrition market as well as a device to help detect and alert health problems. Our team became more passionate about developing a nutrition application as it seemed more in line with our interest.

As soon as the team gathered a better sense of direction, we were able to talk more as a group and brainstorm in a more passionate level. It was as if having a more clear path allowed us to feel revitalized for the project once again. The important thing was, although we picked the type of flavor, we didn't have a set recipe or ultimate goal so our creativity was still there and we were not narrow-minded.

We began to really hammer down the logistics of a nutrition app and how we would differentiate ourselves from our competitors. Curan assigned us to look into the competitors. We also began to discuss how we would personally use the app in our daily lives. We looked into why we haven't used an application for nutrition guidance before and how we would differentiate ourselves.

As we finally understood the structure of recommending users food choice and exercise based on different health plans. The engineers set out to understand how to retrieve the data base from nutrition, meanwhile Curan and I looked into what types of features are important on the application once the data has been compiled and how we would create a true business model from the application.

Brainstorm/Research Update - Health-Tech

Motion monitor-

Since the 5s, iPhone has a built in M7 Chip. Apps like Nike+ have capitalized on that, I don’t know if we can do better…Pivot to location tracker and meeting up with friends?

Target: People with large social circles.

Current apps:

FB Nearby Friends- shows the location of everyone on your fb (if they allow it). Takeaway: FB has become such a large network that many are not people you want to share your whereabouts, you have to manually select people you don’t want to know your location (opt out). Our app should start ground up, using phone numbers and adding people into your locator inbox (opt in).

Footprints- Shares location between spouse and children. Shows history of places the person has been. Takeaway: Creepy, for the demographic that we’re going for. We can alter this to almost like a timeline profile. People can choose to show certain locations in their history and share photos that they took in those locations. Additionally, rate/review restaurants, hike trips, etc?

Thoughts: Our app can add features like selecting to show if you’re free to hangout or not. Also you can insert scheduled meeting times with people, then you can see where they are 15 minutes within event start time to know where they are and estimated arrival time. Can def explore more here!

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Health Tracker-

Target: Young adults, probably urban areas. People who are health conscious and want to keep track of their intake. Large market here.

Current apps:

Health Cubby- People with the same weight goals motivate each other. Takeaway: Our app can also integrate a way to plan workout times/classes together

Restaurant Nutrition- Has nutrition info on items for over 50 restaurants. Takeaway: Our app can create this database and also do “most similar item” approach to restaurants that aren’t listed in order to get nutrition count

Resource: Livestrong.com has a large nutirtion info database of restaurants and packaged items

Thoughts: Like Curan said, out selling point may be to find a way to translate calorie count/other metrics to something that people understand more. If we are a lifestyle app, we would need to know their goal body tone type/weight, then it monitors intake, based on restaurant dishes and grocery list. Then it could be something as simple as the app suggesting, “You should go for do yoga at least twice this week,” “reduce your dessert in take this week,” or “instead of pizza night on Friday try to eat ______ (and suggest a healthy dish)”