A fugly prototype is born
Well, the one thing I didn’t do this week was the one thing I said I was going to do last week. There’s still no detailed timing plan with milestones to drive action.
Why? Because I was too busy getting stuff done. Kind of.
Best news of the week: we now have a working prototype app. Race.Radio 0.1 is out. I’ve downloaded it on to my old iPhone using Test Flight and spent a good part of today playing around with it (any excuse to get out on the bike for some “field testing”).
This version of Race.Radio allows you to:
- Pair the button through the app using Bluetooth
- Create ‘public’ groups (public just means open)
- Add users to those groups (we have some dummy accounts to test with)
- Put the phone in the pocket and use the push-to-talk app with the button
I glued one of the buttons to a Garmin quarter-turn mount and attached it to my handlebars, then had a ride around the park a few times, narrating the experience. All good. As hoped/expected the Bluetooth connection didn’t drop once, which is critical — and the major failing when trying to use the Pryme button I bought with a generic PTT app like Zello.
Next week I’ll get a friend or my bro set up with a button and the app and we can start stress-testing it. I can also now start formally recruiting some groups for research so I can see (or rather, hear) how they actually use the product — vs. how I’m imagining they might use the product. Best start this before the weather gets too grim.
No progress to report on the button housing design, but we review again on Monday. I’ve started building out the next iteration of the very long one page website, but it definitely needs some better imagery and designerly love.
On the investment side, I got my Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme (SEIS) Advance Assurance application reviewed by SeedLegals and then sent off to HMRC. If you’re interested, you can read about the benefits of SEIS for investors here. It can take 4–8 weeks for them to review it so I should have heard back by the end of November latest.
A cycling friend came round on Wednesday to talk about our respective ventures. He‘s friendly with a couple of cycling-keen high net worth individuals and I ended up sending the one page teaser to one of them. No response yet, but if that’s the route I end up going then I suppose I’d best start getting used to rejections.
And this very evening I went for beers with one of the speakers from my Hyper Island course. We had a far-ranging and extremely interesting chat about the direction the research could take. Obviously my primary goal remains to understand the market appetite for the product, but it seems a shame not to go a little broader and deeper. For example, how could the product positively affect mental health? and what does a social network look like if it’s voice- rather than screen-based?
I’ll leave you with that one.
Over and out.
