Week 7: Starting the Final Project

Idea Generation

My team kept generating ideas since the weekend, but we couldn't really decide on one.

Some ideas we had were:
- Drag & drop travel planner
   > We usually need to open lots of tabs, apps, to plan one trip -> we want a one-stop solution.

- Anonymous chat where you can reveal your identity
   > Main purpose: make friends once you get familiar
   > Try to get people to reveal their identities

- Location-based social map
   > Something like Habbo Hotel but you get to see users around your location
   > Create your own sprite

Idea Validation: Travel Planner

On Monday, we asked Colin about the first 2 ideas, and he like the travel planner idea. He had felt the same pain we did when planning your own trips.

On Tuesday, we gathered feedback from some of our tutors and realised the tutors felt that the travel planner app would not be a good idea for the final project.

Some reasons they gave were:
1. Scope too big
2. Too many travel apps

I really liked the travel planner idea as I like to plan my own vacations, and I don't usually travel with packaged tours. I would love to have an app like this to solve the pain of having to open Google Maps, Google Docs, Google Sheets and TripAdvisor to plan one trip.

However, I saw their point in that the scope was really too big. During group discussions and user validation, we realised that both us and the users would want a wide range of features in order to make this app a one-stop solution. Within the 5-6 weeks we have to build this final project, it was probably not feasible. Or we would only build a half-baked app in the end. Even if we die trying.

Another Idea: Anonymous Chat

We did a quick poll amongst the team and found that we weren't too convinced about the travel app idea now. After another brainstorming idea, we expanded on the anonymous chat idea and combined it with one of the social causes we had interest in.

We wanted to have a platform where users can find someone to talk to about problems or emotions. We also wanted to make it easy for people to join in, without accounts, and anonymously.

Introducing Bubble

We proposed to have an anonymous chat platform where users could create private one-to-one or public group chats. In the group chats, anyone can join and they can set the topic beforehand. In private chats, they can indicate interests and find a random match to chat with.

However, there are some problems we might face...

- Anonymity => bullying?

As with other anonymous apps, Bubble can be used to bully people, and considering that we're targeting those who have emotional problems, bullies might end up kicking someone who is already down.

We intend to moderate chats and allow people to flag users that act inappropriately.

- Not enough users 

As a chat platform, Bubble needs users to actually chat with.

Following the growth hack talk, we intend to fake it until we make it, going the way of Reddit.

After some googling, I also found a Reddit thread that shows how Dropbox, Quora and Foursquare growth hacked at their start. It shows pretty interesting strategies, and hopefully we'll be able to try them out for our final project.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/2clqa3/how_startups_such_as_dropbox_airbnb_groupon_and/

Some Thoughts

As usual, I'll be acting as the designer and frontend dev. After playing around with React in Assignment 3, I'll most likely be returning to Angular and Angular Material for the final project, to play to my strengths and something more familiar to me. After going through the talk on security, I also picked up some tips and will be (hopefully) making it so that the frontend doesn't suffer from XSS. :P

I'm pretty tired after going through midterms this week, but hopefully I can start kicking things off over the weekend!

Anxiety, Jadeye, Rehashing Ideas

Kudos to all those who presented just now!! It takes courage to go up in front of a crowd and present your idea, then open yourself up for constructive criticism.

So it was a really long and tiring night... but there were some interesting ideas presented. There weren't really any that I believed in enough to work on for the final assignment, but I did see merit in some of the ideas.

My Anxiety and Jadeye

For example, Jadeye.

I've had bouts of anxiety due to stress before, and it was a problem that I felt was too trivial to specially go to a psychiatrist or counsellor for, and yet was affecting me physically and mentally: insomnia, panic attacks at night. I tried an app called Pacifica to calm myself down, and it offered similar features to what Jadeye proposed, with journaling and calm breathing exercises in the app.

The unique feature that Jadeye provides would be the ability to contact a certified therapist. Contacting a therapist over an app does feel much more convenient than going to the hospital or a private practice. I might have used it, but I am quite price-sensitive as a student with limited budget.

However, it remains to be seen how much it can actually help the people it is trying to reach. For me and Pacifica, the journaling feature was too much of a hassle eventually, and just typing to myself wasn't helping much. In the end, it was talking to a friend and taking a breather to come to terms with my own state of mind that solved my anxiety.

Rehashing Existing Ideas

As with most pitch events I have attended, there are always one or two ideas that are rehashes of something someone has built before. The thing with these ideas is that the pitcher might not know of the product that had come prior, but someone eventually brings it up and explains the downfall/success of the existing product and asks how the pitcher can do better than before.

You can't just dismiss or ignore the similar products that have walked this road before. On one hand, you can learn from them, see what they did wrong, and then improve over that. On the other hand, you might see what happened to them and realise that this road might lead to a dead end due to factors out of our control.

For the proposed anonymous Facebook messenger, one of its prominent predecessors was Secret. It had the same basis of being an anonymised platform comprised of only people you know. After a quick Google search, you can find that it eventually closed down due to malicious comments, racism, etc. Basically anonymity brings out the asshole in people. Who knew?

I felt quite sympathetic to the pitcher because of all the negative feedback he received. I've also had an idea that had already been implemented by others. In a nutshell, making it easy to order food in a group. My idea was similar to Orderlyst, which had been created by one of our tutors, Sam Yong, previously. I happened to ask him for feedback without knowing that he had created Orderlyst, and he candidly shared with me what happened when they made Orderlyst. Basically it didn't go well.

I've personally tried implementing my idea and testing it in my internship company. I did two different versions: a Slack bot and a Meteor web app. I iterated on them based on feedback from the users in the company, who used it to order lunch. While they were open to trying it out, they needed lots of prodding to actually use it. Eventually they just reverted back to doing a copy-paste of the list of orders.

My enthusiasm was quite dampened by the experience, I kept wondering, hmm I thought I already made it as easy to use as possible, why are they still doing copy-paste? In the end, the answer is probably: copy-pasting is faster and easier.

Sam faced the same issue, if I remember correctly.

I have still been turning this idea around in my head, considering it from different angles, but I haven't actually tried to implement it again. In the end, it doesn't feel like anything could be easier than copy-pasting. If anyone does manage to think of something, do try it out and let me know if I can join you. :P

So my point is: some pains may not be able to be solved, because the existing painful solution... is actually already the least painful. Hum.

Your thoughts on this, guys?

Week 5: External Pitching & Assignment 3 Idea

I thought the ideas pitched to us were interesting. For the INTELLLEX idea, I've actually heard of how painful legal search engines were to use when I was taking Information Retrieval. As for the idea for reaching out to depressed people within NUS, while it had good intentions, it was still a little underdeveloped and felt a bit shaky to implement.

The idea that made me take notice was the treatsure idea of giving away food that is going to be thrown away. You can tell that food waste is slowly gaining publicity as a problem society needs to solve.

 I remember watching a video where fresh produce that doesn't have the normal shapes that we expect, get thrown out and go to waste. However, a startup called Imperfect Produce is taking the produce that grocery stores don't want to sell and packaging it to consumers (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gi4iSrdlOXk).  There was also a woman in India who placed leftovers in a fridge outside her restaurant for anyone to take: http://www.upworthy.com/a-woman-saw-hungry-people-digging-in-her-restaurants-trash-so-she-put-a-fridge-outside .

Just by googling 'food waste startup', I managed to find an article on TEN food waste startups (https://foodtechconnect.com/2015/10/09/10-startups-reducing-food-waste-one-byte-at-a-time/). I didn't even realise there were that many food waste startups out there, or how many people were trying to solve this problem.

I had one thought: 'What if they combine forces instead of spreading out their resources like this?' but I don't think it's feasible considering how logistics-heavy the solutions need to be, and how localised it has to be. So the treatsure idea sounds like it could make a foothold in Singapore.

Although the external ideas were enticing, my group already decided on building a solution for a problem close to our hearts: finding a common time for meetings with group mates. We already feel the need for our app as we tried to set up a meeting time between the 4 of us -- our timetables just clash. XD

We're going to build a mobile interface for NUSMods and allow people to build their timetables as well as easily match free times with their group mates. For this assignment, I'll be working on the frontend together with Nicholette. We're going to learn React and try it out for the first time. I do like learning new things, and React has been something on the list to learn for some time, after Angular.

Learning from assignment 1, I drew out the user interactions and prioritised mobile first. I then drew out all the wireframes, so that it would be easier for me and Nicholette to work together on the UI. Looking forward to learning building something that people will use in the future!