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)”

The Great Pivot

In class, we constantly learned about how all start-ups go through major pivots. One story that really resonated with me was the one about Ekko Device. In the class, they started as a team of five guys who wanted to create an app that stored the clothes in a person's closet and selected outfit ideas.

This week, our group began to face the same dilemma. After the teams began to present their ideas in front of the class and the questions provoked careful consideration of approaches, our group reconvened and reorganized our explorations. From last week, we have moved away from agriculture and are now beginning to look more closely at the healthcare/ wearable technology industry. Eugene, voiced his idea of a motion sensor capability that would have a notification system for when an elderly person falls. This conversation allowed us to think about the health devices and wearable tech space in general. Knowing that Apple was swiftly moving into this arena, we felt comfortable investing time in this topic. We ran across two major problems with Eugene's idea. The first was the need for hardware that detects a person's fall. The alternative would be to develop a creative way for an iPhone's motion sensor capability to understand what a falling motion would be, whether it is in a person's pocket or someone holding it. The second issue is that the prevalence of smartphone/iPhone use by elderly people is low. This made the topic a lot less attractive as the amount of people who would utilize the tool is small.

Yet, the conversation led to us to start exploring what we can do with an app to allow people's relatives or emergency systems to be notified if they are physically hurt.

On the other hand, we also discussed a nutrition monitor mobile application. We knew that there were solutions like these out there but we wanted to see if there was a way to do it better. This was the topic that excited me the most. I have learned through other classes the rise of health consciousness across the country. The important part that we wanted to note though is that calorie counting requires a very specific type of person, we wanted to be able to translate it into something a lot more meaningful to an average individual.

The Importance of Being Passionate

With a game plan and a topic selected, our group seemed to be off to a great start. We organized a Dropbox in which each of us would drop in articles or blogs about farming in developing world. Each of us would then read them in order to be on the same page as everyone else. Furthermore, our meetings with professors have allowed us to gather an even deeper understanding of the industry.

Unfortunately, it was not meant to be. During our meetings it became apparent that the topic is something most of us were not passionate about. We read the materials to read the materials and interviewed the professors with a low degree of engagement. This problem was an issue that we needed to address as the meeting conversations became dull even though our research was progressing.

In our most recent meeting we decided to not be completely sold on the agriculture space. We wanted to explore more ideas that we may be more interested in. I personally was very happy that this was the new decision as I felt as if I couldn't get myself to be passionate about the agriculture space. I bet this is why not many have attempted to address problems in this market! Therefor we wanted to continue to drive the idea forward but still explore a couple of other issues.

Our group began to brainstorm once again, asking each individual to return to the meeting with a topic that they would really like to explore. I'm excited to hear what our group comes up with next! Hopefully we can find a middle ground of an attractive market that we could all be very very interested in.

Developing country's agriculture

Aparna and Curan hit it off in our mingling session due to the fact that they both had done research for agriculture and farming for developing countries. Through studying that space, the two of them have found a demand for a tracking product that farmers could use for, either to better predict the weather, record their seasonal orders, keep track of their seeding and watering procedures, etc. The motivation behind the space is that it is a very large market in which few people have paid attention to, therefore have not addressed. These solutions are also easier to produce because they can be modeled off of existing solutions that developed nations have.

Barriers to this solution were the fact that any mobile application that we develop would need a system that produces the inputs that we need. Whether its a database that understands the schedule of planting that farmers have or the collection of weather predictors.

To drive the idea forward, our assignment was to reach out to at least five professors in the agriculture industry (specifically of developing countries). We wanted to achieve three things by the end of our conversation:
1) Select a country or region of focus for the app
2) Understand the day-to-day tasks of a farmer in the developing world
3) Recognize the pain points that we can address
4) Develop a way to size the market

So far, the professors that we have reached out to have slowly been replying but it is very difficult to schedule a time in which the team and the professor are not busy.

LEGO Challenge

This week we embarked on the Lego Challenge. Curan and I were the architect while Tsion, Aparna, and Eugene were the engineers.

Before going into the challenge, hearing the roles, we predicted it was something very similar to what actually took place. As Curan was the communicator of the model piece while I was in charge of writing down the details. It was important that we were both on the same page. Having worked with Curan several times before, I understood the way he communicated very well. At first we were very detailed about our approach, making sure that we described each layer precisely by the number of units each color is and where it should be placed.

At a certain point we realized how difficult it still was for someone completely fresh to understand what we were trying to say and then recreate it. That was when we began to get discouraged and felt that we should just try to recreate the plane by describing how it should look like rather than doing specific instructions for the rest. This approach of the bigger picture rather than the small detail, we thought, would create room for the engineers to get creative but the outcome would be very similar to the actual model.

When we found out that the engineers didn't receive the correct parts, our friends in the other groups asked us if we could switch parts so that both of us could create something. This was frustrating and our team decided to just build anything that would resemble a helicopter with our resources.

Reflecting upon what this means for the outlook of our team, it appears that we are able to adjust and are the going with the flow type. I think we are also very easy going with the means to the end as long as the bigger picture is achieved.

Initial Push

It's funny how one's idea of humble beginnings is much more graceful than the actuality of it. That's where we began.

I was out of the country for a week and came back with a formed team. Curan, the beautiful mind and the beautiful person who I came into the class with, found three engineers to join our pair. They all had very different backgrounds and personality.

Aparna is an EECS major with a driven and motivated attitude that most people lack. Her energy drove the team for most of the conversation. Although she is younger than everyone. It was amazing to watch her contribute heavily to the team.

Tsion is also an EECS major but she has a design flare that enables her thoughts to be very different from the rest of the group. Her sense of humor and creative mind, added a new layer to the conversation each time. She is always supportive of everyone's idea but doesn't mind pushing it forward by adding new suggestions to them.

Eugene is another EECS major but it is very apparent that he has a passion for certain industries, like healthcare and the collaboration space. Although he is often the most quiet of the group, every time he speaks it always adds a lot of value to the group. We always appreciate the way he questions ideas in order to push our group forward.

The personalities were all different but what was interesting is that no one in our group truly had an idea that they had their heart set on. This is was has kept us to continually have conversations about our product. So far, we continue to dance in circles. Each of us are assigned a certain type of product that we have been exploring in the meeting and try to research further into the market in order to convince the others to also like the product.

At this stage, our ideas are still around health trackers, nutrition monitors, or developing agriculture tools. The goal is to narrow it down to just two in two weeks and finally pick one through our due diligence.