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Many things has happen this week, and it’s been a very busy and tiring for us. The week started with the continuation of the pitching elimination where 5 teams are remain to pitch and we are one of those 5 that will be pitching. It was Monday and the pitching will start at 4 in the afternoon, so the team spend the free time in preparing the slides, speech, and the mobile application. The elimination is held at the LISER office in the LRC building therefore the participants are the only people there and the panel of judges. Even though there are only few people we are still nervous, why is that? It’s because the panel of judges this time are different from the first elimination round.

They are only two and both of them are more on technical details rather than on business, though they know things about business but it’s different from a real entrepreneur point of view. And so the pitching start and just as we expected, they tackle more on technical details and little on business side. When it is our time, our hustler do the presentation and the remaining are on standby for product demonstration and question and answer. After the presentation and demonstration, the Q&A portion starts, there are only few questions for us simply because there is only few to say in our mobile application. The mobile application only have the main function and purpose and its lacking of features, and so the Q&A turns into feedback and suggestion to us.

The suggestion that we heard from that day is the same on what we heard on our consultation before with our technopreneurship instructor, therefore it is not new for us to hear them. Admittedly we could have done better and implement those feature but it’s just that we’re lacking of time and busy on the other curricular subjects to focus alone with the mobile application. As we listened and observed with the other competing teams, we already realized that we will not be selected to the top 7 teams. It’s not because we’re not good and our idea is bad but, it’s because we are just not yet ready to compete with them with our current product as is. Nonetheless, we enjoy the experience in participating in such event and as we embrace the result, it will serve as stepping stone for us in our future projects and do better.

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This week is a busy week for us in preparation for the elimination round of pitching last Thursday. The team prepared the slides and mastering the content to deliver the message well to the panel. Aside from that, we also finalized the code for the demonstration of the mobile application. But sadly, after all those preparation, our team didn’t get the chance to pitch because the event has ran out of time. Nonetheless, it was worth the time and we learned something by listening attentively to the panel questions and suggestions.

As of now we are currently waiting for the continuation of the pitching which the date is unknown. It may come soon since the main pitching event is this coming Wednesday. But if the continuation of the elimination will not be held before the Wednesday, the main event may be moved to another day or week, or we’ll be automatically eliminated but will still pitch for the finals. But it’s all just an assumption, no matter what happens we still learned a lot from this subject and we’ll carry it until we graduate. While we are waiting for the continuation to come, we are preparing again ourselves for the presentation and tweaking a little on the mobile application.

And as we wait, we would also finish some of our pending projects in this semester since the finals is near and the submission dates are fast approaching.

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“Fall seven times. Stand up eight.” From an old Japanese proverb. We may have fall this past few weeks due to a problem that we have encountered but we rise up again carrying the wisdom that has bestowed upon us by our technopreneurship instructor.

Our week started with the reporting of customer relationship and revenue model of each group. The content of our report is the updated BMC, customer relationship model, revenue model, and etc. While creating the report, we were able to figure out what would be added to the BMC and our strategy and tactics in accomplishing our goal based on the BMC. During the report, our instructor noticed the premium in our metrics that is not supposed to be there and has been forgotten to erase. After discussing it with our team we have agreed that we will not implement it, simply because we realized that it’s not worth the upgrade for premium. And so we stick with the basic functions that we have in mind for our mobile application.

But everything change when the fire nation attacked. Nah it’s not, it’s from an anime named avatar. Kidding aside, everything did change after the consultation of ours last Wednesday with our technopreneurship instructor. During that time, first he let us discuss our BMC with him starting from the right part to the left part. The right part is already good since it has been tackled throughout the semester. The left part is also good, but we may add some new to it after the short discussion of our instructor about the left part such as the key resources and key activities. After the short discussion, we present our product in actual which is a mobile application and have it installed in an android smartphone for demonstration purpose. We walkthrough our instructor on how to use our mobile application and explain the basic functions in it.

When the demonstration is done, it is time for hearing the comments of our instructor. At that time, it’s not a comment that we heard, but a number of a very good suggestion on what would be the feature of our product and it fits perfectly right. We we’re stunned by hearing those beautiful suggestion that what we all did at that time is stay in silent as we agree on those suggestions and leave us speechless. We were amazed at that time because even we as a team didn’t see that one coming. And we were also constantly thinking on what would be the other feature of our product and he gave us the answer straight away. I can say that it is indeed a very good consultation.

Having someone see through your holes and letting them to criticize it can actually lead to improving on what you’re currently working on by accepting their suggestions as you see fits. Hopefully we can apply those suggestions that we received because it is really good and we are currently working on how we implement it.

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We Fall and We Stand Back

Last week we have encountered a problem that affects our milestone greatly. The said milestone for that week is the completion of the product and the continuation of the interview with the product on hand. The problem that we have encountered is that the PC of one of our hacker has broken and the main reason of it is the motherboard died. The content inside of that pc is the most updated code of our project and we haven’t be able to back up that recent code in a USB or in an external drive. Luckily, one of us has the old copy of the code but it’s too far from what it should have been last week. Having that situation, we did have to double time in the coding in order for us to catch up from what has lost last week. In order for us to double time, every free time that we had in the week days like the interval before classes, we have been coding patiently and calmly trying not to get affected on what happened. Because it’s no one’s fault and we know that we can overcome this problem just trust each other and don’t give up easily. From this experience, we learned that it is better to be always prepared because we can’t predict on what would happen next. And trusting your team capabilities, would lead you back to the right track. To sum up are week, we mainly code back our product to catch up to our lost product and as of now we have already achieved it, we just only need to debug our product and add some feature depending on our next plan.

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Do Not Give Up Until You Succeed

Customer satisfaction is a marketing term that measures how products or services supplied by a company meet or surpass a customer’s expectation. Customer satisfaction is important because it provides marketers and business owners with a metric that they can use to manage and improve their businesses. Just like on our previous pitching presentation with the panels. It helps us to build or create customers’ satisfaction by applying the panels suggestions and recommendations. They gave us some situations that might be encountered to our customers in the future. That’s why we plan with our group to have some changes on our project. It was a big help in improving our startup idea which can lead us to success someday.

This week has been a busy week for us in preparation for the proposal hearing last Friday and Saturday. All of us focused on revisions of papers for our thesis proposal with our respective advisers. Despite of our busy schedule, we still have time on this subject which is Technopreneurship and we are still on track. However, we encountered a problem and it might affect us and our schedule greatly. If this problem will remain unsolved, our team may need to double time for a week in order for us to be on track again. We all know that there are some unpredictable and unwanted circumstances that might going to happen all through out in doing projects. But, we don’t give up quickly I now that we can make this with the help of my team. I believe on my teams’ strength and knowledge. And hopefully we will find a way to solve this problem that we are facing on right now.

Today’s experience made me realize that it’s important to back up your files especially the one that you’ve been working on because you don’t know what might be going to happen and just for safety reason.

Additionally, the conducting of interview was delayed this week due to some reasons and may be extended depending on the outcome of the problem. We are facing crisis right now and I hope it won’t last long. The team plan to set a meeting this week to discuss further on what to do to regain the time and effort that has been lost by doubling the work this incoming weeks.

Before I end this blog, let me leave you with this quote that has a great impact on our team right now:

“Instead of worrying about what you cannot control, shift your energy to what you can create.”  ― Roy T. Bennett, The Light in the Heart

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This week, we have completed our delete and edit function in our mobile application. We now have add, update and delete functionality. The next thing we will be doing is to debug our application by testing it ourselves. This is to prepare our mobile application for the demonstration to our early adapters. We didn’t conduct interview this week for the same reason that we will only receive the same feedback and need to be tested first before deciding. We will resume our interview as soon as our mobile application is ready for deployment.

Last Thursday in our pitching day, we have received a plenty of good advices from the panels. Some of it are recommendations on how to improve our product and how to compete with our competitors. After hearing them, we are taking it into consideration and we may update our BMC base on the agreement of our group. We will conduct our group meeting next week so that we can carefully think through of the suggestion and analyse each one of them and come up with new hypothesis. As for now, we will take our break for to relax our mind until our group meeting comes.

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Mafin at work

This week we continued our usual routine in presenting update in our current project. In our research, we discover that before we can distribute our product in our channel market, the developer must be a member first of such channel and must pay a fee for the membership. Also, the said channel has a percentage based on the sold product of the developer. The percentage differs in different channel market. Our next target research is to determine and analyse the behaviour of the customer in different channel market.  

For our project progression, we continued coding our mobile app. The functionality of our mobile app is in 75% already. This includes saving the data of the user input, buttons for adding the budget such as, amount allocated for the budget and the expenses of the user. The User interface (UI) of the mobile app is almost done, the buttons and the positioning of our desired design is already placed. Though the button for back and delete is not yet placed and that’s what we are working on right now. We have encountered a bug in display when resizing in low resolution, but we have fixed it already.

We didn’t interview for this week for the reason that we prioritize in working and finishing our product so that for our next interview we will be able to demo our mobile app. Even if we interview this week, we will only get the same feedback which is they want to see our mobile app first before deciding. That would be all for this week, hopefully we will finish our product as soon as possible to be able to show it already in our early adapter.

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This week we continued coding in our mobile application. The design in our wireframe is the same in our mobile application with a little tweak in appearances like color adjustment. The design and positioning of the button is there but some of the functionality is not yet done. Though we have completed saving the data of the user to the phone storage. The next thing we will be coding is the functionality of some buttons like adding of the expenses.

For our interview, we have covered 8 young professionals this week. They wanted to see and try the product first before deciding if they will continue subscribing or not. Nonetheless, our product is good and the purpose is good according to their feedback based on what we explain on them. For statistic, six out of eight would like to see our product and the other two said they don’t need our product since they are not having problems with budgeting.

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This week, we had a pitch deck activity presenting our product, markets, competitors, and etc... When doing a pitch I learned that, the presenter must tell a story of the existing problem that will piqued the audience interest and will get into it on how you propose to solve the problem. Also, since it is time pressured, you must talk continuously to share important information as much as you can, but you must be able to control yourself on when to stop without exceeding the given time limit. Time limit is not just a time allocated for being able to present the slides, but a challenge on how much relevant and important information can you give with such time.

In our group, some things are done correctly, and some are not during the time of our pitch like the asking price. The asking price is the amount of money that you ask to the investor in order for Start-ups Company to get funded and be able to start their product. But it is not just about to be able to create the product, but also would that be enough for you and to your company to make a living while in the process of doing your product. And that is our mistake, we miscalculated the cost and ask the wrong price. We only think of just making the product but we didn’t consider the other factors.

People learn from mistakes, and we learn from it. We hope that in the next pitch deck we will be able to improve our presentation.

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This week we have continued our usual routine, we interviewed a total of 8 people and the results we’re the same as last week. They want to use our product first then decide after their experience of it. The feedback of them is the same, most of them will use our product for budgeting in food either for daily or for groceries and some of them will may be using it on their payday only. Those who may use it only for payday may change their mind after using our product and finding it useful, that it can be also used in everyday budgeting like their daily allowance expenses. As for the creation of our mobile app, we have changed our software that we will be using in creating it.

Instead of android studio software, we will be using phonegap software. The advantages of it are, it is easier to use, because it is using html5 as a platform and jquery mobile as framework and we have a little background of it me and my co-hacker in our group. Compare to android studio that is only available for android platform, phonegap is available to android, ios, and windows platform. And with that, we can cater more customer, not only android user but also those who own iphone and windows smartphone. It is a great software that would help us to achieve more customer and the flexibility of application because of its platform availability.

Since we have replaced our software for coding, we are also back from the start in our coding and we will double time on it to catch up on the time that has been lost in changing our software. Meanwhile, we are preparing for upcoming pitch deck, and helping our presenter in her struggles by giving her ideas, information and tips. Aside from that, we were preparing also for our midterm exam this upcoming week.

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After the interview we have conducted last week, we have validated our customer persona which are the young professionals and their pains. The one and the most common pain of them is the over expenses.  Most of them loves to do shopping, eating, and travelling. But, the amount of their income is not enough to fulfil those desires. As a result, they are having a hard time on how do they budget their money.

Currently, we have 16 persona that are willing to use and pay for our product. Some are wanted to see it first before deciding. What they wanted to see from our product is that if it is much easier to use compare to the traditional ones of budgeting which is listing on paper. And if it would help them to manage their money by using our product. Since we already have an early adaptor, we may now proceed in making our product, and start coding.

Our software of choice in which where we are going to code is the Android studio. This software is for android programming therefore our product will be available only to those android user. We have already downloaded the software. The only thing that is left to do is to start with our coding.

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Last week, after realizing what’s need to be done, we’ve gather and discuss our next move for this week. Out of 3 targets customer down to only one, and that one we’ve decided is the young professionals. Why young professionals? Because, they are the ones who tends to spend carelessly and enjoys the life of being youth. Enjoying your life is not bad, but budgeting your money and at the same time enjoying yourself is a well thought. For our ideal young professionals, they must be single with an age of 22 – 30, because they are the ones who spend their money for themselves and some with their family, and the age bracket makes sure that they have a job.

With that setup, it makes it easy for us to narrow down and identify our possible target customer. We have also revamped the flow of our interview, it will not be just introducing our product to them and see if they are interested with it. But also, knowing their pains with their everyday life as a young professional and what could we possibly do about it. Also they must be a techie at least so that they can relate to our product and be able to use it conveniently. After we conduct our interview, we were able to validate this setup and gathered important information like user persona. We were able to know the hobbies, likes, and how they spend their money on one of our interviews.

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Stick to One

Last Friday after the consultation of our group we realized something. That after all of our interviews this past few weeks, we don’t need to have many target customers. What we need is that we focus in one persona, interview them, get a feedback about our product, then decide on what to do next. And that’s what we are lacking, we’ve done interviews with many people but we haven’t decided yet on which one to focus. Because, having only one target makes it easier to identify and validate our product if it is applicable and needed to them.

 With that situation, we didn’t manage to talk about deeper topics with our mentor like revenue streams. We must identify first our main target customer and validate our product to them. From this, I can say that consultation is a good and important thing. Why? Because, hearing opinions and ideas from a person with a lot of experience in this kind of field, it helps you get back on the right track when you got lost along the way. It gives you a hint on what must be done and what to be done next after doing the first one. Hopefully next week well get the right answer and the right people in our interview.

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MA-FIN

This week, we present our project and its updated BMC. In our presentation, everything went well but we lack one answer in one question. “Are they willing to pay in your product? If yes, how much are they willing to pay?”. At that time, we haven’t yet agreed on the cost of our product. And so it made us realize that we must settle it before we proceed to our next interview and gather good information.

Aside from deciding the cost of our product, we have also added SME in our target customer. This will increase the size of area and people that we need to interview to get information and produce hypothesis based on their feedback. It is a good thing because the more people we can interview; the more information we can validate. Hopefully this week we’ll get some good feedback and new information base on our conclusion from our previous discussion. And produce another hypothesis if we’re doing fine or if we need to change our approach.

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One Step at  a time

This week, after we finalized our ideas and presented to the class, the next step is to create a Business Model Canvass (BMC). With this, we identify our target market, possible customer, strategy, and etc. Creating BMC is important, this is the part in which we identify the path that our team are going to take and follow. So we plan, we talk, we write down our ideas, and then we paste the answer to the manila paper to fill up the BMC. After the BMC is completed, we now have the initial guide on where our team are going to start.

To test our BMC, we conduct an interview to the mall and locate a possible customer according to it. Our target of interview is a housewife/husband who are budgeting their everyday consumption and a young businessman. We have to interview at least 8 possible customer for this week and listen to their feedback if our product is exactly what they need or not and if yes, are they willing to pay? If not, why? The results are, out of 8 respondents all of them likes the project, half of them are willing to pay, the other half are would like to see the product first before deciding and some are wants it free. So, I think it’s a good start for us that they like our proposed project.

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One Stone per Bird

After gathering members to form a team. Now, it is time to brainstorm ideas for our technopreneurship. Brainstorming ideas is not easy, especially if you are the kind of person who is not brimming with ideas just like me. Therefore, it is very helpful if you have teamed up with people who has a vast imagination and creative thinker. It helps you to formulate your own idea by hearing their suggestion and criticizing their proposed idea.

In our situation, we have agreed that we will only do software like mobile application. Because were trying to avoid any expenses since we are fifth year students having an individual thesis. It is also okay to include hardware so that we can use it as project in our microprocessor too. But, we did not have enough time to finalize our idea that has a software and a hardware in it. And so we stick with mobile application.

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Choose Wisely

Creating a team consist of three people is easy when you have a circle of friends or best friends with you. And working together with your friends or with people you knew is much easier rather than with random people who you just have met due to random selection of group. Why? simply because you're familiar with them and you know their attitude. It is much simpler and better if you handpicked the people you wished to be in your group. Either it puts you in an advantage or disadvantage depending on the people you have selected.

But how do you choose your people? For me, knowing my weaknesses and strength gave me the answer to that question. Since i'm an introvert, i'm a quiet person and not good in socializing with people especially with stranger, and that is my major weakness. Knowing that, i'm in need of a person who is good in socializing with people and not as awkward as i am to fill my flaws or else i'm just creating another socially awkward group of people. As for my strength, i can do either software or hardware skills. I like to work with people whom i can share my ideas, exchange knowledge information, and especially i’m comfortable with. With that in mind, i would pick a person who shares common interest and similar with me to lighten the load of work or else i will be doing all the job.

Having a good team doesn't always results to a good output. If you're not comfortable working with them, it might not work. Therefore, it is also important that you consider your feelings if you're comfortable with the person, not just because of their skill advantages.