HCS BIP Recap: Yo?yo. to clade

Quick announcements

David and I have decided to change the name of our project from Yo?yo. to clade, and we are excited to bring Keely O’Keefe onto the team!

Keely is a rising sophomore studying international business at Georgetown University. She is fascinated by the power of technology to empower communities to live productive and meaningful lives. Despite her experience and interest in tech, she spends most of her free time off the grid: cooking, knitting and making candles.

The “Jefe’s Problem”

For most Harvard undergrads, there comes a point in the evening where a deep and intense craving for a Jefe’s burrito begins. You can see this most prominently on weekends, when herds of students begin their nightly migration to Jefe’s.

But for some, by some defect in their circadian rhythm or disruption meal timings, this craving comes too early or too late. These poor souls find themselves ostracized by peers, who are themselves not hungry yet, or even worse, have already made their nightly Jefe’s run.

Some accept defeat, a few strike out alone, but most try and fight it. David and I have witnessed many attempts by this last group, the brave souls. Strategies here vary — some beg, some cajole, some threaten — but it usually looks like this: the hungry individual standing up in the middle of the room, surrounded by blank-faced, not hungry and comfortably sitting peers, spreading their arms wide and doing their best to lobby the group. And in truth, all they really need is one swing vote, one person to stand up with them and the rest will likely grudgingly follow.

But what we’ve seen, tragically, to be more common than this, is that instead of being joined by one of their sitting peers, a friend will walk in the door, bearing Jefe’s in hand and all the rich attendant aromas rushing in with them. Most times the hungry individual will not even need to turn around to realize what has happened, and will begin to slink back to their seat before the newcomer can ask what’s going on. Because with their arrival, the friend arriving from Jefe’s has dashed all hopes of rallying a movement out the door.

The tragic irony so plainly obvious here, is that the newcomer, instead of being the death knell of the hungry individual’s hopes and dreams, could have easily been the deliverance. Had they been contacted, they could have easily brought along with them another burrito, and done an invaluable service to their friend in need. But how was the hungry individual to know that this particular friend was in the perfect position to help them? How were they to reach out to them?

As mentioned earlier, Jefe’s is bustling on weekend nights. Those guests then spread across Harvard’s campus, and could bring delicious burrito and nacho goodness as they do so. All they need is some infrastructure to bring this joy to hundreds of hungry individuals — and clade seeks to provide this. Not just for the “Jefe’s Problem”, but all college problems.

Talking to users and building

A large part of work during the incubation program centered around gathering customer feedback, both with and without an MVP in hand. David and I first conducted a series of structured interviews with students from a variety of colleges. Additionally, we have been getting and continue to get casual feedback from peers, VC investors, and founders.

During the summer, we built two separate no-code MVPs: one using Glide, and another using Thunkable. We rolled out the Thunkable MVP to three test groups, totaling 20 users. We had difficulty generating much actionable feedback from this particular MVP, as due to Covid-19, most people are staying socially distanced. It was useful as it confirmed the importance of push notifications, and gave a glimpse into how users might copy each other in their request styles.

Additionally, David has been hard at work coding an MVP in Swift, and Keely and I are beginning to prototype the UI side with Figma.

Packaging

We maintain that the best way to deliver our solution is in the form of a phone application. This summer has allowed us to begin to solidify our ideas about the structure of the exchange system we are envisioning, and hone in on what we believe are the key aspects of our proposed solution. If you would like to learn more about what exactly the app will look like, please email adampark(at)college.harvard.edu for a copy of our early pitch deck.

Also, we have a website! Check out clade.network to join the network early, especially if you’ll be in the Cambridge area in the fall!