Unforgettable story of my side project journey and learnings

Side Project Journey

During college I used to buy groceries at a store nearby and I ended up wasting food at times because I was not aware whether I had milk or bread left in my room or when it would expire. I thought there could be an easy way to track expiry dates for products bought at grocery store. By analysing the receipt/bill from grocery stores I figured out it is not possible to track expiry dates as it contains only the product name, price and quantity purchased.

Fast forward a few years, I encountered the same problem where I stay with friends. On talking with a quite a number of grocery store owners in Singapore, I figured out they don’t track expiry dates of food products. Well I did talk to a small circle of friends and family who seemed to face a similar problem of not being aware of whether their grocery products at home are about to expire or not.

By buying groceries from small grocery stores on a regular basis, I was able to observe what a typical customer does when buying products at store and how the staff at store sells the products to customers (i.e how they enter data in their Point of Sale System).

My understanding of the problem:

1. Expiry date tracking is crucial to avoid food wastage
2. No easy way exists to understand customers and their buying behaviour
3. Long queue is an important concern for customers buying products at grocery stores

Solution to the above problem:

A mobile app where businesses can manage inventory and offers customers a way to:

1. Skip Queues with self-checkout at store
2. Personalised product recommendation and discounts
3. Timely reminder of products about to expire

I thought maybe the small and medium sized store owners (mom and pop stores) are not aware that it is possible to track grocery store products with expiry date. So I built a basic version of inventory management system (android mobile app) with expiry date tracking.

There are three fundamental workflows for a particular store. First, when the inventory is added product details along with expiry dates are entered into the app. Second, when the inventory is restocked or updated it is updated with expiry date information. Third, when products are sold at Point of Sale system, the product with particular expiry date and customer information is used.

The shop can implement self-checkout with this app. For example, the customer would scan the product and choose the expiry date and they can even make payment through the app.

I created a Customer Survey — To understand whether you(customer) have a problem of wasting groceries, as they are past their expiry dates

These were people who had just finished shopping at a big grocery store and I asked them three questions.

1. How often do you end up wasting groceries (went beyond expiry date) which you buy from retail stores?
2. Will you be willing to scan the products you buy using an app on your mobile phone instead of waiting in long queues at the counter for checkout?
3. If there is an analysis provided based on your buying patterns, will you be interested?

I thought around 30 responses would be enough to understand the target customer segment. A couple of people in the survey found the idea interesting and were looking forward for a solution when I asked them whether they had any comments or suggestions about this idea.

The store owners who were the decision makers did not see much value in the solution. So I thought maybe it was because they were not getting enough customers to their stores. If I could get more customers to these stores in some way then they might be interested in trying out the solution. On talking with more grocery store owners I figured out there wasn’t a way for consumers to find these stores or get deals from these stores (mini marts) and store owners were not able to engage with their customers. So I built grocerydeals.sg website which offers location based deals from these mini marts.

• Location-based grocery deals discovery platform for small businesses
• Notification of product deals near user’s location
• Enables two-way communication (through Facebook Page)

By reaching out to various grocery stores in Singapore I ended up with 24 stores and 128 product deals on the website. There is an option to login with Facebook, when you are near the store you would be able to redeem a particular deal after logging in.

I created posters which were placed at stores and also handed them out to people in that locality in order to get more people to use the website (which would translate to additional revenue for the store when they redeem the deals).

Only a small group of friends logged in Facebook and redeemed deals using the grocerydeals.sg website. As there was not enough number of users redeeming deals it was not possible to convince the store owners.

On further discussions with store owners, they enlightened me about some of the drawbacks of the inventory mobile app. It was time consuming to enter all the details when products arrive at store (in most cases short of staff) and it was also slow when compared to a physical hardware barcode scanner which was present in all these stores.

I thought maybe if there was a way to scan products as fast if not faster than the hardware barcode scanner then it might be possible to convince the store owners. After a few months of effort, built an app (android mobile app) that detects grocery store product through camera.

With the above mobile app it is possible to store the data in the cloud and thereby providing an opportunity to generate insights for the store owners based on the products sold at the store.

Learnings

I learnt a lot during the whole process from start till today. I spent a lot of time discussing possible ideas at various stages with my friends. They helped me a lot. In fact, we went and talked to grocery stores as a team for pitching the inventory app with expiry tracking, also convinced a few stores to come on board for the grocerydeals website and a lot more.

Attending various courses and workshops related to entrepreneurship and startups online and offline was really valuable in terms of knowledge. I also got a lot of quality feedback from mentors at these workshops.

Technical (Software)

Completing the Udacity’s Android Developer Nanodegree helped me build the mobile apps. I also learnt how to prototype using Sketch, how to use Google Cloud Platform for infrastructure (to save data in cloud) and finally how to host and authenticate with Firebase for the grocery deals website. For the app that detects products through camera I used Tensorflow.

Non-Technical

I learnt how to talk to people. In the process understood the importance of having complete knowledge about your customer which will help you in solving their problems. I also got a basic understanding of how to run ads on Facebook for different target audience. Finally, I learnt how to use structured data to help Google understand the content of grocerydeals.sg site and also enable special search result features.