Scratchpad Spotlight: Su Yang on Fast Prototyping
This winter, from Jan 2nd — Jan 23rd, we piloted our Scratchpad Fellowship, which gave 5 teams of students 4 weeks, free desk space, and $200 to pilot their early-stage ideas and test them for viability. We adapted this test from Four94 mentor Avni Patel Thompson’s Four Week Test. This blog post is from one of our Scratchpad Fellows.
Ever resolve to begin doing something, only to give up a week or two later? I’m Su, a sophomore at MIT studying computer science; one of the most effective ways for me to stay on track is talking to and setting goals with my friends. For the past month, I worked with Stella Yang, a fellow CS student at MIT, on a social goal-setting app aimed at helping people follow through with their ambitions. Users can collaboratively work together on things like going to the gym every other day and reading a research paper every week, holding each other accountable by being able to see who’s already completed the task and who hasn’t. Over time, groups will be able to watch their “goal streak” grow and see how far they’ve come!
We started off by focusing heavily on market research: we not only wanted to make sure that there were others who would use something similar, but also that we were getting our product exactly right. While we had a vision for what we wanted our app to be and look like, we understood that our users’ habits would ultimately dictate its success. We ended up sitting down and talking to over twenty undergraduate and graduate students over the course of one week, asking them about everything ranging from their 2018 resolutions to the apps they use on their phones.
After that, we set out to create mockups of the actual product. Inspired by Google’s 5-phase design sprint, we spent a significant amount of time making sure we were both on the same page, individually sketching out interfaces, and discussing which parts of our drawings we wanted to keep and which parts were ultimately not necessary for our MVP. We then created digital mockups using Sketch to get a better sense of how it would look on real screens.
The four-week challenge really forced us to cut down on the amount of time we would have otherwise spent on business research. Last fall, we both enrolled in an entrepreneurship class that took us on a twenty four-step, four month process to validate a startup idea; we analyzed everything from the total addressable market to how much it would cost to acquire a customer. Only given a month this time, we were a lot less thorough with our research, but were able to trash bad ideas and iterate through different versions of our product much more quickly. We’re still working on developing our business plan, but we’ve also started developing our app in parallel: as my mentor, Marissa, put it, you have to make mistakes before you’ll be able to see any real progress. If the idea is good enough, people will be receptive to it no matter how polished (or not) the first versions are; the hardest part is starting.
