The Dorm Discord
Having worked in a few startups and recently at OTTOGEE Inc., a Dallas based IoT enabled startup, I can be sure to say that I have a nick for ideas.
The construction industry faced scrutiny over the years regarding the health and safety of its workers. Currently, contractors have no way of measuring their workforces’ productivity, which means that it serves as a bottleneck to reduce their costs and plan efficiently.
OTTOGEE developed a microprocessor that measures these parameters at every set interval: Time, Location, Temperature, and Impact.
Yep… that’s it and so what?
It‘s now possible to:
- Know if a worker has been injured and alert safety engineers of the incident via text, email, and the web dashboard.
- Accurately measure equipment usage statistics for cost planning.
- Show a broad overview of statistics of all projects throughout the organization.
- etc…
During the pandemic, I moved into my dorms and I was quite isolated. I couldn’t meet class colleagues because the opportunity never presented itself and I didn’t have enough information to be proactive. For example, had I known my friend lived down the corridor, I would’ve knocked on his door and gave him a warm hello. This is where my experience with IoT and data comes in. A mobile app can help students creating a space to present themselves and display daily routine schedules for others to join. The idea is a mashup of Tinder and Discord but for dorm mates.
I’ll be introducing a fairly useful tool that helped me make great decisions for the app and its called PEST Analysis. It stands for Political Economical Social Technalogical framework that examines opportunities and threats.
So why use PEST Analysis?
- Supports more decisive and knowledgeable decision making
- Helps to evaluate how your strategy fits into the broader environment and encourages strategic thinking
- Well established reputation
To start, the political aspect that will be a concern is how recorded data will be used. Valuable data is usually the most difficult to attain because it includes sensitive data (your whereabouts, daily activities, etc.) that’s why when thinking through this idea, data privacy and control must be in the hands of the user (especially after the Cambridge Analytica incident). Economically, the cost to test and run this product would not be much. This idea can make revenue by talking to institutions that provide accommodation. It could be a per-student basis cost system and the students pay nothing. Also, the climate is very anti-social per se, it’s very difficult for students to roam around outside their dorms for the foreseeable future so the retention rate may hold well. The idea may be perfectly timed during the pandemic because students can get hooked to the idea and traction can set in even after we find the vaccine. The technology would ideally be using state of the art IoT bluetooth detection via phone as well as beacon placement in certain areas where cellular/wifi can be difficult to get.
Another aspect to look at is competition. It’s vital to know and breathe within the ecosystem relevant to the idea because 80% startups dissolve just after two years due to competition they had not anticipated. There could be bigger and better fish in the field that can push efforts in a month which would otherwise take a year for a startup to perform. Avoid the sharks!
The idea is original and there does not seem to be any direct competitors (companies that sell similar services with the same niche audience). Hence, it would seem comforting to know the ecosystem is left untouched and that might be because the idea is niche. However, indirect competitors (companies that sell similar services with a different/much broader audience) are plenty and I’ve closed them down to a few:
- Discord
Each one of them provides can be alternative to my solution, however in a different way. They tend to be the existing incumbent solutions. I believe an idea is worth pursuing if it can surpass the closest competitor by 10 fold in user experience. The criteria to be a competitor for this idea is the social aspect that is sharing your daily activities. Instagram stories can relay that information easily, Facebook events and stories can help with scheduling and social aspects, and last but not least the most identical of the bunch, Discord. It has a very similar solution however it’s for game streamers. So I can take the things that worked for these companies so that I do not need to rethink the wheel to how I would want to execute this.
User Interviews
Interviews are essential to validate your assumptions and in this case, I’m trying to assess whether students at dorms have the “need” for the app. To conduct an interview successfully, you’ll need to use sampling statistics and, unbiased and open-ended questions.
The statistics required is the basic random sampling, where you gather the relevant population and pick out random users. The questions you then ask should be planned but also not planned. What I mean is, sometimes the things we’re looking for might be completely out of our scope of sight, and it gives the flexibility to explore more viable options. So start the interview with warm introductions and ice breakers, then ask indirect, open-ended, and unbiased questions. To achieve all three, ask questions that can’t be answered with just one word and it can’t have any traces of your influence on your product. Make sure to proofread your questions with a few close friends and allow criticism.
I searched for all my colleagues in the dorms and picked out two people at random. I asked them:
“When did you move into dorms? and how was the experience? did you meet anyone?
“What was the last thing you did with your friends?”
“So you seem not to know many people here, can you tell me more about them including how you met?” (or the opposite way if user knows many people at residence
“How does your schedule look like during a typical week?”
These questions do not explicitly address the problem the idea is trying to solve and at the same time both open-ended with a most likely 10 min back and forth conversation (that’s where no planning comes in). That’s exactly what happened, each conversation took about 15 min.
Apparently, in my ordeal, I’m not alone. The first interviewee seemed to agree with me since he had also felt isolated. He had come from Minneapolis and the west coast, where our school is at, is quite far, so the social standing was not so great for him. The second interviewee had a friend here from high school, and he had no difficulties mingling with other students since first degree connections already exist within the city. Also, both colleagues mentioned Discord as a method of communication since everyone in dorms plays video games and streams to an audience for donations and just for fun.
User Journey
“I help students become more social at dorms, through a simple mobile app.”
A user journey is a testimony that truly captures the philosophy of a product in a story; it’s essentially the company’s values translated through a user. It is helpful to develop one because it acts as a reference guide for future features. It takes a lot of user interviews to be conducted, but for the sake of how pre-mature the idea is, a few people should be ok. Based on the interviews I conducted, the ideal user would be a person that moved in from a foreign country or state, is a student, and has moved into dorms.
Currently, this is a user journey of myself — “I just moved into dorms and I was just so shocked about the situation here.. It like a ghost town! I didn’t get to meet anyone for two weeks and we live in the same building. I luckily met a few great colleagues here using this app that shows you all information about your colleagues to make mingling much easier, especially as a freshman. Whenever I’m feeling off, I try to find out the schedules of my colleagues and plan something or join them through the mobile app!”
Wire Frames
A wireframe is essentially the skeleton of your product offering. The way you create this is by first creating the user journey since this is a direct derivative of it. Every feature added to the product MUST coincide with the idea’s philosophy.
Since the idea is social you’d probably want listings and notifications of events (aside from the usual sign-up, sign-in, and settings features) to be the prevalent feature of the mobile app. The app will need:
- A listing feature of events (like a friend hanging out at another dorm)
- A request for company CTA (For when you want to create events like hanging out at a friend’s dorm room)
- A listing of all students and their bios in the dorm complex (for users to discover one another)
- A walky-talky feature (a feature just like in Discord, create a server and your phone acts as a walky-talky)
This would give a lot of leverage over competitors and creates the minimum stark contrast required before working on the MVP (Minimum Viable Product). Everything starts as a skeleton and the best way to create a product is by constantly reiterating through the process of this article. I recommend reading The Lean Startup by Eric Ries. It especially describes this blog post but in a lot more detail, and the ethos of the book is that the user drives the product and not the company.
User is king, always.
Happy coding!
