What I hope to learn in CS3216
How to make products that people actually want
CS3216 Software Product Engineering for Digital Markets is an undergraduate Computer Science course at the National University of Singapore (NUS).
I have always dreamed of having my own tech startup to make a meaningful impact. But if I want this so much, why don’t I have a startup yet? Well, here are the 3 ̶e̶x̶c̶u̶s̶e̶s̶ challenges that have held me back and my strategies to overcome them through CS3216.
1. No Great Ideas — The Eureka Hunt.
In a world saturated with apps, it is hard to find problems that can be solved with my app development skills. Hence, through CS3216, I hope to uncover problems that are overlooked or underserved by existing solutions. I want to leverage the diverse expertise and perspectives of my wonderful CS3216 classmates to find our “secret sauce” as a team to solve these overlooked problems.
For example, the rise of ChatGPT brought many gimmicky AI-powered apps. I have tried many of these slide-making and video-editing apps that are extremely generic and don’t address real customer needs. In CS3216, I hope to tackle such issues with my ideas!
2. Talking to people? Not for me.
Even if my ideas are great, I need to validate them by engaging with customers. After all, the biggest reason startups fail is no market need. Instead of relying solely on friends for feedback, I’ll be stepping out of my comfort zone — since I’m introverted — to interact with actual users.
Although I have attempted customer interviews before for CS3240, I often felt that regardless of how hard I tried to ask unbiased questions, the interviewees seem to respond based on what they believed I wanted to hear. Therefore, for customer interactions this time, I want to apply a practical guide I recently read about, “The Mom Test”, which talks about how to craft interview questions that even our moms can’t lie to us about. This way I can build apps addressing customers’ genuine needs and challenges.
3. Making sales is challenging.
Converting customers is not easy. How do I craft a compelling storyline to persuade people to use my products? To accomplish this, I want to delve into design principles, psychology, and web analytics tools. One specific thing I’m interested in learning here is designing and building attractive landing pages with high conversion rates. For instance, I downloaded the Arc browser solely because their landing page was so cool even though I didn’t really get what it was about. I want to create the same kind of impact with my own products someday :’)
Moreover, you might have heard of the saying “A designer’s dream is a developer’s nightmare.” As both a designer and developer, I always wondered where the ideal balance of dream and nightmare lies for me, and I hope to discover that while building these products and landing pages.
In a nutshell, CS3216 is not just any course, but my journey to learn how to transform ideas into reality — to try and become a holistic entrepreneur that can recognise great ideas, validate them with real customers and persuade people to use my products.
