Hotline
A Hackathon Sketch Turned Venture Product
This was originally posted in The Portfolio of Ameer Suhayb Carter, the Creative Director of fog. You might find some other work posted in both publications.
A group of gents (a few buddies of mine: enlore) went to a legal hackathon in Atlanta in hopes to create tech solutions for the underserved law industry. Albeit not surprisingly law professionals are abrasive to tech adoption for a number of reasons which I’m sure has dissuaded many of them. Regardless, we spoke to a half dozen pro bono legal service providers and distilled a solution from all of those conversations to serve problems that they all face.
To tether our discovery efforts, we utilized the use case of Domestic Abuse as an anchor for our product’s development. The example: a lawyer in question told us of an issue with low-income clients that can’t afford to discreetly build evidence against their abuser(s), not withstanding the cost of litigation. This stems from a few reasons:
- Abusers typically want full control of location and communication of the abused.
- Access to help via internet is prohibited and may lead to more sustained abuse.
- The abuse may not be physical, and it is harder to quantify/capture with traditional means.
With that in mind, we wanted to find a low-barrier way to use the abuser’s tactics against them and empower the abused. Within 6 hours, we built a MMS + Dropbox + Twilio solution we call Hotline. Here’s how it works:
- A Twilio number (or short number) is connected to a dropbox account with a small python script.
- The abused sends an MMS to the Twilio number of an image, text or location data which then activated the python script to print that data into a folder in dropbox.
- The lawyer can view the logs of these messages and build a case for their client discreetly.
Our demo led us to win the hackathon and we used the $2,500 to further fund this idea after receiving praise and continuing conversations surrounding tangible use cases in other law practices and industries at large.
What’s next?
We sent our idea to the Nashville Entrepreneur Center and we validated our concept with investors and industry professionals in the Automotive (insurance), Healthcare (help and response), and Federal Government (disaster relief) spaces.
As for the design, with iOS 10 opening iMessage to it’s own app ecosystem, I will be exploring design solutions that can aid in the help of domestic abuse victims.
We didn’t think this could garner such a response, but if you ask the right questions, who knows what you can come up with. :D
Fog is an early stage design firm focused on companies that require software, found through the interwebs.
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