Week 7: Simplicity Battles Functionality
One week ago was a significant milestone for us. As a recap: we had decided on the market segment to focus on, that is large companies and their employees. We had started counting service provider companies, such as movie theaters and event venues, as our customers as well since we’ll have to market and sell our product to them too. We had also created a simple prototype of our product, which we presented interactively in class. The demo had a Tinder-like swiping mechanism for browsing events in a group, as well as a dashboard to see the results.
Strategy
The most recent week saw again great progress. We decided to make life easier for ourselves and began really make more documentations. This week we started documenting our business plan and strategy to make sure that everyone on the team stays on the same page. We started off by defining the first version of our strategy, along with its mission, vision and objectives:
Mission: We want to offer a solution for large companies and their staff to be able to arrange group activities effortlessly and increase networking opportunities after work hours.
Vision: satisFactory will increse the well-being at work by improving the socialization and team spirit through easier participating in group activities with workmates.
Short-term objectives: Ensure the customer base with smart marketing, create contracts with free time activity providers, get the application to the markets.
Long-term objectives (assuming short term goals are achieved): maintaining and developing the app even further, increasing the customer base, also possibly by extending our segment from large companies to just groups of friends.
Writing these statements down really helps us to visualize the direction we’re going in, so that each team member’s work contributes coherently towards a common goal.
Competition
We also analyzed our environment. There have been “event discovery” apps, but they haven’t been very successful. No one has yet really solved event discovery yet. However, that’s not really the main problem we’re solving here. Rather, we’re trying to simplify group decision making about going to events. Virtually all of event discovery apps have concentrated on individuals; we’re going to market our apps as a solution for groups, namely teams in large companies. That way we’re targeting a small niche that we believe we have a solution for. We don’t really have any direct competitors, but we have to make sure that our solution works better and is more fun than making free time -related decisions in groups by traditional means, like through WhatsApp and Slack.
App design
We also had a couple of involved discussions regarding our app & website design. We had to set a common vision for what we want our solution to be like. Two extremities were battling here: on one side we had a feature-creep driven approach that tried to solve way too many problems with the cost of being hard to use. On the other side we had a way over-simplified app design that sought to turn the whole decision-making process upside down, and placed limits to functionality and choice even intentionally. To accomodate our fail-fast way of doing things, we had to choose something and get going. We ended up with a design that we branded “Äfterwörk” (yes, with dots over vowels, with the sake of being different). It’s an efförtless, spöntaneous, and söcial solution that helps you filter and suggest events, see where your workmates would want to go, and vote for the evening’s plan. It has a design that lets you do this casually during your work day on your mobile phone or computer, and by the end of the work day, you and your team should have a decision in place about how to get refreshed together.
What’s next?
satisFactory’s wheels have to keep turning. We’re pushing this new design forward by making a high-fidelity prototype, and updating our business plan real-time. Will this solution work and be fun? We certainly believe so, but only testing it out will truly tell.
Have a nice wörk day ❤
Max Samarin, satisFactory
