A Great Problem Requires a Great Solution
Business side of the story
After identifying the problem of the potential end users, the next step in the project was to define which customer segment should we target our product to. We identified individual customers, small company employees and mid- to large-sized company employees as our potential segments. We also need to consider the service providers as our customers since we sell marketing space to them. We made VPCs from the three end user segments as well as one for the service providers.
Larger companies would seem preferable to others since in smaller groups of people face to face or calling is an effective way of deciding where and when to go. In groups where people know each other very well they can often guess where others would prefer to go. In larger companies where people don’t know each other as well, our app brings together people who have the same firm as an employer and common hobbies or interests. This enhances the team spirit in the company and increases informal communication bringing benefits for the company as well.
The relevance of the perspective of the company depends on how we market our product. If we try to convince the company to “officially” endorse the software for the employees the company point-of-view is relevant. This is why the VPC for this segment includes both company’s and employees’ views, although they are separated essentially dividing the canvas into two. We also started our first iteration of the BMC!
Link to the service provider and the mid- to large-sized company VPCs:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B3uDp7TGVvi-WjdkWExsbzJPTE0
Tech side of the story
After finding our problem we decided that fail fast principle could be applied in the project. This was a perfect fit, since it also ensures that we have at least somewhat refined demo for the final presentations. We divided our product into two parts: users deciding on the right event and the most fitting time. First we tackle finding the right event since it is closer to the core of our value proposition. In order to get the user experience more realistic and also to test our idea of the technical execution of the product we developed several components: user interface for user input, dashboard for presenting results, a cloud to run this all in and the interfaces to connect the components to each other and a third party (Finnkino) API. Below is the picture of the architecture. We also acquired a domain for our prototype to work in. Thus, you can also check out our prototype’s user interface in satisfactory.fi and the voting results from satisfactory.fi/dashboard.
This initial prototype acts as a solid foundation to both start the iteration with and build on top of. Quite large initial prototype also allows us to use our staff more efficiently as there is enough pieces for everyone to work on.
Here are screen captures of the UI and the dashboard:
Next steps:
- Creating both short and long term strategy
- Contacting service providers and potential end users and their firms in order to validate the product
- Benchmark similar business models (Smartum Liikuntaseteli, event brokers)
- Creating potential solutions for the scheduling problem
- Continuing the software’s UI, UX and the dashboard
