Week 9: The prototype is alive
The last week has been full of hype, ideas and decisions. We have managed to narrow down our broad concept into a simple, testable prototype.
The prototype presentation
Since last week we spent most of our efforts on simplifying our concept to get a viable prototype of our solution. We wanted to create something that we could show to our possible end-users to get feedback before we lock the final properties of the project. Make sure you check out the presentation about the prototype:
The presentation consisted of three parts: the introduction, the prototype demonstration and the next steps. The introduction was smooth, compact and clear. We managed to remind the audience of our last presentation while showing the progress we have made since then through user-feedback. Ville could have moved around less and spoken slower, but the structure of the introduction made up for that.
The prototype introduction was what really got our audience interested. We had planned a short monologue showcasing the different use cases and properties we had thought about in our prototype. Once again, the speaking was a little fast but we had a lot to say, so we couldn’t really help it. Next time we should think about leaving something out, so the presentation doesn’t feel as rushed. We had some technical issues when closing the prototype demonstration, but the audience laughed about it so it served as a nice transition to our next steps.
Our next steps were really clear for us, since we knew the many things we still have to do to get our concept towards our final vision. However, these steps had to be presented REALLY fast so they felt rather vague. We even had to encourage the audience to ask about them in the question part because of the time limit. We also wanted to show that our prototype was live at www.satisfactory.fi/proto, but that might have been a waste of time since it could have been left to the “thank you” -slide as text only. In the end we ended up going over the 3-minute time limit by 5 seconds. Well, that’s not too bad since the judges were nice enough and didn’t stop us during the last sentence.
Overall the presentation went really well, almost better than planned. We managed to tell the audience almost everything that we wanted. We managed to stick to the planned structure, so the presentation hopefully seemed well-planned and consistent to our audience. We believe that is the case, since the questions were mostly about details and reasoning for our decisions, rather than explanations about the things in our presentation. Next time we’ll have to focus on scoping the presentation down so we have enough space to speak in a calm way that shows that we know our concept thoroughly..
Meeting with Tapiolan Monitoimiareena Ltd
This week we also had a meeting with Katariina Järveläinen, CEO of Tapiolan Monitoimiareena Ltd. The company provides venue for multiple events from concerts to ice hockey matches. From this meeting we got invaluable information about how the whole event organizing industry works in practice. With this information, we are able to refine our business model even further. This also acted as additional validation to our concept as Katariina said she was interested in the concept as a service provider, as an end user and also from the HR perspective.
In the meeting it became apparent how crucial advertising is to a venue provider and how good our decision to focus on same day after work instead of longer term planning actually was. We were surprised, however, that the company didn’t have any existing architecture to import the calendar with. Also, while our the commission model got a very positive reaction as expected, the additional advertising costs might not be as appealing for such companies as we expected. The company would strongly prefer paying for the actual sales directly and not more vague advertisement potential due to larger risk. In conclusion, we gained from the meeting a large amount of positive feedback but also some criticism and ideas how to improve our concept and business model even further.
Our next steps:
- Writing user stories to explain our service in practice
- Collecting more feedback from the companies and end users
- Drafting the poster and final presentation
- Turning our prototype into a live, working product
