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WEEK 15: Pitch Deck

We came short on the parts we made. Some of my team were less cooperative than most, and those who could contribute lacked the equipment to help me. This was one of my depressing moments during this whole project. I gave my all into developing this and I was so ready to showcase what we made, but because of unforeseen circumstances. We fell short and ended up not completing the presentation on the deadline. It bothered me for a long time how I failed as a leader, as a student and as a person for not being able to control the situation. It made me realize I was not cut out to be a leader; I can't lead and rally people when push comes to shove. I will end up failing others if I took on the role again. I was deeply saddened and humbled at this trial by fire and made me realize my limitations as a person and how far I could go. 

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WEEK 14

This was a little complicated since we made minor adjustments to our revenue model from what we presented last time. We decided on two revenue model types which were the ad revenue and the subscription-based revenue in order to maximize our income and make it more practical and cost efficient. We never really wanted to monetize this, but income has to come from somewhere and this could be it. We still are not sure how to go about this. Hopefully, the numbers in our calculations are not to far off and we lead us to success in the near future.

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WEEK 13: TRACTION

This was the most crucial part for me since we tested the application again to different people so that they could give feedbacks and opinions. We had a lot of positive feedback as well as a lot of encouragement from the people testing them. We bled a lot of effort into making all of this. A once humble idea now turns into some tangible that people can actually use and touch. We are proud to have done what we did and the sacrifices we have made to get this far into our project.

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WEEK 12

This was a little easier to identify, but it gave me something to ponder over about who are key partners and what we wanted to achieve in our application, like the key activities that we are going to properly implement and what its functions will be through the daily lives of our users. I guess challenges is what drives my team forward. Struggles and difficulties will always be a part of life. You will confront challenges no matter who you are, where you come from, or what job you have. Every day is a new challenge. A task that must always be overcome, and if you are unable to face the pressures of life, it will undoubtedly stress you out, leading to constant concern and preventing you from living a happy life. Some individuals overlook the idea that happiness is a choice and that facing challenges and difficulties is common, and that all they have to do is accept and face them. It is true that we have some control over our life since we make decisions, but we cannot control what happens in our surroundings that may influence us; however, we can always control how we react and handle them. When it comes to overcoming personal obstacles, here are a few tips.

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WEEK 11: Revenue Model

What I Expected:

Numbers were never really one of my strong suits, so I expected that this would be the greatest challenge. Making assumptions about prices and projections for the next couple of months or weeks is the thing I am not confident about. Making calculations about income can go wrong if I do all the calculations with no one checking them. I am sure that many things could go wrong and I would meet many trial and error in the specific activity. 

What Happened:

So i messed up a lot in the calculations. When my grouped check the validity of my solution, there was a lot of missed calculations and wrong numbers in those instances. We did a lot of back and forth and did the math again as well as brain storm suggestions for proper pricing. The corresponds with our cost of our project so that we the project would be self sustaining. 

What I am going to do:

I will try not to get confused with all the math next time as well as practice my math solving problem because it really bit me in the butt during this particular activity and it made things harder than they needed to be.

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WEEK 10: Creating Competitive Advantage

What I Expected: 

The interview would be the hard part. Finding people that are not busy enough to give you a thoughtful feedback that could improve the application would be taxing. Finding students with the feedback that could be applied would also be taxing. Many of them just take it as is and occasionally give useful content. Our pricing was a thing that I was not so sure how I would go about it, too. The advantages we have were quite prevalent since we had such a small scope for our project.

What happened:

We got some useful feedback after all turns out. All you gotta do is send them to the right people who can give you useful feedback. They pointed out a lot of things that we overlooked in our prototype which we discussed as a team on how to resolved and improve the features to make its quality of life easier and appealing.

What I am going to do:

Keep trusting in our guts and listen and clarify anything we did not understand during the discussions and webinars. The speakers insight were pretty useful in the learning materials given and we will continue to develop as we push forward for our endeavors.

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WEEK: 9 MARKET IDENTIFICATION AND SIZING

What I expected:

i really thought that it would be as easy as searching for it on google and that all the statistics would not be as hard to find. I purposely made the project to be small so that gathering information and statistics would not be as hard as it actually was. It was not the case.

what I actually happened:

So when i searched for our target average market it was easier since we already know what we wanted or who we were targeting but, for narrowing it down to a more manageable group. We had a hard time deciding which criteria to separate them by. After deciding what are SAM was, the next challenge was finding the statistics that matched our statement. The same happened to our SOM, but we powered through it. 

what I am going to do:

We will continue our project with dedication in mind as well as the will to move forward and truly develop our application because for me, this application can really help students and teachers alike in many situations.

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WEEK 8: Midterm Pitch

This was a fun experience that we had finally made some tangible to present. Our efforts were not bare for all to see and that made me really proud of what we accomplished throughout this trial of fire that we had to go through to get this far. Many things were done, polished, re-organized, rewritten and re-do but now it was mostly clear to all the people involved that we were heading the right path with our goals in mind. The report went smoothly and none of us wasted the 5 minutes that were given and all did their part in thier efforts of making the report. Quick, clean and concise was the theme of making the script for the report, and I really fired us up to do it.

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WEEK 7

This was a little easier than the previous activity of the week since most of us were already in use to the settings of the prototype making tool. The tool in question is Figma which is the easiest thing and we were already familiar with the features because of our HCI subject that we previously encountered last semester however, the demands of the application’s features were still very much complicated to implement. We got it up in running mostly so that people could get the jist of our application’s functions and its importance. Their feed back was very useful and guiding as but they were very tedious and tricky to incorporate with the talent we have for imagination and maneuverability of Figma. We watched many YouTube videos to guide us with this part of our project as well.

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WEEK 6: MVP & PROTOTYPE

This by far has been the most difficult to do, the prototype took 2 all nighters to finish and to figure out what does what and where stuff goes. Numerous failed functions set as back and the features we wanted and the transitions we wanted were so difficult to replicate that we ended up talking on video calls for long hours and had everyone searched for solutions to the issues that we were facing with the prototype. YouTube helped us out a lot and the features we implemented somewhat were on the application. Some were not added yet, and we only focused on the main parts of the application for it to function according to our purpose in mind.

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WEEK 5: Customer segmentation

This part of the activity was really informative as well as difficult to summarize each customer need. The interviews were difficult to manage since some of the interviewees had jobs and sometimes schedules did not meet but we still pulled through somehow. Making the diagram was fun for me since i like the color scheme I made and mapping out the customers day-to-day life made me think of other possibilities that our idea could venture and hit a different point in their day to day.

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Week 4

We did another interview or should I say re-interview some of our data before just to clarify a few things. Reviewing the data, we found that we needed more things to ask and polished so that things made sense for us moving forward. The questions themselves had a few things lacking said by our instructor and were a constant back and forth for our team discussions. On my end, I did not want too many questions since we needed to be practical, checking lots of questions would mean a greater chance of getting unnecessary work and time, something we do not have. We also have other things to account for and so far, time management has become the biggest issue that our group faces.

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Week 3: Insight on Value Map & Business Thesis

Interviewing people was really tough and finding our target market to interview was the main issue. The students were easy enough to find, like rocks just laying around but the teachers were the hard part. We did not try our university professors since they are quite busy but we did manage to interview some of them but the majority were from other schools that we had ties with in the past. The value map at first glance was tricky to understand but when i read through them and dicssussed it with my team, everything was pretty straight forward. Makes me thankful for the team mechanics for this semester’s activities. 

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Week 2: Documentations and Insights

The team has a well-oiled mind and judging by our discussions earlier. They are opened minded and that makes things easier. They think outside of the box and are flexible to opinions or changes as each of us pointed out issues of our ideas.

We disscussed applications that are quite similar to our own ideas and mashed other application together to create something new.

My idea was to create an application that is more like Facebook except it would be exclusively for USTP students with some unique quirks. It would more or less function like the very own USTP page on Facebook except it would be more than just a page. My vision is that it would be akin to a social app that centers around the campus and would provide a means of connection to my follow students to find study buddies, classmates, rooms, buildings, and etc.  It would provide up-to-date information regarding school events and memos. I would also like to include channel in different colleges such as CEA, CITC, and many more. To go even further, different section would be provided a channel as well. So this would turn out to be Facebook and Discord had a baby. Information regarding school books would also be present in the application to provide them information if the books they wanted to purchase are in stock as well as uniforms and P.E attire. All post would be regulated as well with different moderators filtering out inappropriate post. Netiquette is also part of our policies as a student in a university.

They were open with the idea but they also pointed out some issues as well like how would this application be profitable if used in a different organization? And I could not honestly give a straight answer. My Idea was that this app would be free and exclusive to a set organization so that scope would be limited but that provides less room for error the shorter your range is.

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Week 1: Self-Assessment

The Berkeley Innovation Index Test and the MBTI test were two personality tests I took recently. I had never considered myself being that sort of person before, and the results were surprising to me.

I'm talking about a commanding personality, which I've never really seen myself as. I prefer to be a foot soldier who is given duties to complete rather than being in charge of all battle-field judgments. Although I prefer to delegate all of the thinking to others, I do have a lot of deep thoughts about how things should be handled when it comes to providing. So it's possible that I was not at all surprised by the outcome. Because being lazy might lead to additional difficulties down the road, and procrastination is something I aim to avoid with every fiber of my being, I set severe guidelines for myself during this online class.

Because, to put it simply, I am a very greedy creature and I will never deny that fact, I have goals that I want to turn into something tangible so I can enjoy in all of its splendor and occasionally I have the mentality to let go of all the things that are preventing me from achieving that goal.

I have found that as I became older, I have become more ruthless and cold in my decisions about my future. I grew more pragmatic, and things that were logical to me made more sense to me than things that were sympathetic, but only to a certain extent. I still give individuals who are close to me an unfair edge.