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.