If I were in your shoes.
Our startup journey.
‘Can we trully create something of our own? Can we develop a functional website or even an app? Having our own brand and label seems like a joke’. Theese were our first thoughts when we were assigned to develop a startup idea and to be honest at the time it seemed complicate enough to end up to a complete failure. But we had to try. So we decide to keep calm and…babysteps! Of course we were offered plenty of guidance during our journey by our proffesor Betty Tsakarestou. We used open ideo human centered design thinking methodology in order to get organize and slowly create our project. So first and foremost we had to create our team. Our team was small. It was consisted by three members: myself, Maria Gougi and Thwmai Galani. Together we had to come up with the startup idea, we had to collaborate, share the work that had to be done and create satisfying results. The startup idea came to us naturally. At the beginning we thought that it would be difficult to find a theme for our project but eventually all we needed was a little brainstorming and some creativity.
We ‘ve all spended endless hours asking google, yahoo or wikipedia about problems that we may face and the only thing that we actually managed was to get lost in a sea of useless and unwanted information and end up even more confused. We might have even find ourselves watching a cat talking on a youtube channel instead of finding out about available online courses that we were originally interested in. In other cases we might experience a newfound situation and we search online for guidance on how to deal with it but again we end up desperate and we face a deadend. So what could be done to avoid this mess? We decided to create a site in which on the one hand, our team would take the responsibility to specifically answer to questions made by users or visitors and on the other hand the users would have the ability to state the problems they might face or suggest solutions to the problems that other users may have. In order for this to work properly we would have to provide users articles, researches,opinions and generally valid information to help them deal with their troubling situaton. The name of the site is ‘If i were in your shoes’ and our goal is to create a worldwide social platform in which people from all over the word can comunicate with each other, express their problems -from the slightest to the most serious one- , find solutions and discuss about their troubles.
Obviously the site is not perfect yet and there is still much work to be done. But the whole experience has a much deeper meaning than the constraction of a site. We learned that we can actually create something on our own. We learned how to participate on a team and be little inventors on our own. We were shown that we can leave a stigma -even a small one- in the world. Now we know that we can do better, we can evolve, we can work harder and exceed the limits in order to manage whatever we want.
Panteion University of Athens, Social and Political Sciences, Department of Communication, Media and Culture
