Reflection | Salute to the end. 50% painful, 50% fun.

HALF PAINFUL AND HALF FUN is what I think of this 3 month start-up experience.

How did this happen????

It all happens within a blink of an eye.

Of course NOT!!

Before I started typing, so many scenes just flush into my head…

Me standing under the cold wind in the early morning, holding posters and testing materials in front of the Berkeley gym. Worrying to be kicked out by security, I have to keep a calm, less suspicious look. Looking harmless and friendly(I know my personality well enough so I doubt ), I approach a male athlete that looks twice as my height and ask him to stop and participate tests with me.

(Trust me, there are moments that I just want to throw away the papers and walk away. )

This is one of the many scenes that I and my teammates went through during the entire semester to keep updating our MVP. It’s a battle of energy and patience. And we won!

Know a bit more about …. something…

There are questions that I asked myself along the way of building Glo-up.

What did I do? What have I learned?

The essence of this class, in my perspective, it’s to get rid of the self-righteousness.

The most dreadful thing for a designer is to assume the user would think the way you think. You believe your ideas save them. So many times you will just sink into a solution so deep, you never realize that your idea is so far away from your user.

There are also many sides of me exposed via this group working environment.

I like to give proposals or suggestions for the next iterations. After so many MVP attempts, I finally realize that the timing for bringing new perspectives and thinking is critical. It could release the team from struggling on a dark end. It could also lead the team to another dark end. This could make our MVP generating experience feels inconsistent or unsettling.

As a designer, I noticed that I have the tendency of loving fresh ideas and resent the old ones. Instead of loving one idea so much and grasping it to the end, I trash it too quickly when I have doubts about it.

However, by sitting down and opening up discussion with my teammates, I learned to keep taking action on one idea. And only to move on if we catch a sign that the users dislike.

My thanks

(I wrote it down at the beginning of this class…Thank you Kate for keeping this for us.)

One of the things that I have to do is to honor my teammates on broad. I just have to… Because they have done hella great work. And I am glad that all the goals I wrote down are achieved from this group-working experience.

Moreover, the experience of bringing a concept to real life and marketing is addictive. I wish everyone to become a founder of something they love. Good Luck and GLO-UP for life.

(This is beautiful… lol)