So, the course is almost over and we have to make a big blogpost about our work, progress and the course.
As you know, our first idea was about gamification, we were called letsgamifyit back then. Our idea was to improve workplace efficiency and morale by taking ideas and methods from video games and try to use them in a workplace environment. We were thrilled about the idea, because most of us were big gamers ourselves and the idea is something that is both gaining traction in the Western world, while being completely absent in Estonia.
In those early phases, we defined roles in our team that have been ever-present to this day.
Our team consisted of 5 members, three of them are IT students and the rest from other areas. Stenver did most of the programming and also helped keep the team focus, did presentations and gave out assignments. Lauri was our "pure" programmer. Tambet took the role of designer, leader and was also the main generator of ideas and strategies. Kristjan and Katre also did a lot of marketing, tested the product and set up meetings. Kristjan also helped us create and publish articles.
We started contacting different companies about our idea and when the first big problem came out. It turned out that most of the companies in Estonia were not interested in worker motivation and those that were, already had loads of motivational practices in place. Most likely we wouldn’t have gotten very far with a single company. That’s why after 6 weeks of hard work, we decided that gamification was a bad idea for our first start-up and after a quick and intense meeting, we pivoted our idea into a web-based clicker and renamed ourselves DemClicks. We pivoted to this idea because there was a lot of positive feedback from our professors. While doing research on our competitors, we found that there is barely any competition in Europe.
We had at least one, at the busiest times, two meeting per week. Aside from that, most of the matters were discussed in Skype continuously throughout the week. Meetings were scheduled quite promptly. Although we had a task division, our developers team had much higher workload at the beginning due to the reason that we changed our idea in the middle of the semester and we had to catch up with others quickly. Now we have moved to the marketing part and it has given more tasks to the rest of the team as well. We often had problems with people not doing their work and not taking initiative, due to being too busy or not being interested enough. Stenver and Tambet took the leader roles in our team and tried their best to make the whole team work. In general the team spirit was high and we felt comfortable working with each other, we did not have major arguments. We also used some external help - for example when publishing an article, we used the help of the proofreader. We also did not have any design person in our group and we got our first page design and logo from one of our contacts. But we found that the design was not very good and the current version and logo are designed by Tambet.
The reason why we failed our original idea has been explained. Considering the fact, that our product is directed to university lecturers, we often had a problem in finding time to meet and communicate with them. The problem being that we all had school and/or jobs, which also required our attention. When setting up meetings, we found that most lecturers want to meet on their work times, which often were the busiest times for ourselves. And a delay in our first release could be attributed to the fact that our programmers wanted to release the product as complete and bug-free as possible, but we found out that we could use lecturers to do some of our testing. We also completely and utterly failed with time estimations. Even though our scope was good and minimal, we absolutely failed to keep scopes on a weekly basis and tie them to the milestones. The problem was that none of us had sufficient knowledge of the underlying technology and also none of us had any previous analytical skills. And we all know that developers overestimate their abilities when it comes to time evaluations.
We could say , gathering our team was a big success. The people in our team have respect for each other and have enough similarities to make the progress not seem like a slog and our members socialized with each other outside of the project. Therefore there were not any fears about giving an opinion, if a person disagreed with somebody, there was a discussion about it. The benefits, as suggested, came from communicating with lecturers directly and more-or-less following Ivo’s and George’s notes and suggestions, not by just sitting behind a computer. We were also successful with going to the meetings with teachers - we were late to none of the meetings and we got loads of feedback from there. What also worked great for us were weekly team meetings and codecamps. Almost everyone attended to the weekly meetings and we got to talk through most of the issues there. The codecamps were very motivating work environments. Probably 80-90% of useful work was done in there.
Currently we have finished with our free version of the product, which consists of creating an unlimited amount of single choice questionnaires and displaying the results. Since the summer came, then we cannot really start selling our product right now, but we can develop it. By the end of the summer we want to have multi-choice and text-choice questions, support for IE 6 and up, improved design. We also want to have all the premium features done - powerpoint integration, excel export and set the time before your questionnaire automatically closes.
In the beginning of autumn, we want to start selling our product to the lecturers. Since the core of our product will be free, then only the premium features require a monthly fee. Our users will be the students of the lecture. Currently, we do not plan any adverts in our product.
Our value proposition:
“Collect lecture feedback from lecture- its fast and free. No specialized hardware needed - use phones, laptops and tablets. Easy to use, fast to set up, instant results.”
We are not sure if the lecturers want to use it for engaging the students or simply for feedback, then we might also change the value proposition to -
“Engage your students - its fast and free.”
We must still research this area and find out our final value proposition.
Since we still have the motivation and belief , that there is a market for this product, then at this time our idea is to continue developing and marketing the project, with the goal of registering an OÜ and start improving education and making money. We also want to find out how the lecturers can really get value from this product. Currently we have 2 theories - they can make lectures more engaging or collect feedback from it. Maybe there is a third option, but we haven’t found out about it yet. If we can make university lectures more interesting, then we sure as hell want to do so. We don’t want this to be a fancy gadget.
Personal learnings
Lauri - The course was a really enriching experience. I gained some good knowledge and ideas how to build up a startup company as well as a product. I also managed to pick up few new bits from the technical perspective of developing a product as well, especially choosing the technologies for a product more carefully in the future.
Katre - I came from totally different field of studies and although I have done some projects beforehand, the experience to build a software entrepreneurship project was new for me. First of all, I learned about how IT-world works in general, how the programs and websites are being built, how web traffic works how we should think about every single detail before going to do a demo in front of a teacher. I came to understand how much work it requires to make certain changes or additions to the website and how a single mistake can cost a lot. As I was dealing with the marketing and doing demos for the teachers, after each time I was surprised how differently people actually think and how much useful feedback can each meeting give to you. I learned to see and think about different sides of doing a startup project. It is so true that one thing is to learn the theory but implementing it is something totally different. Building a value proposition was a real challenge as it made me to really think about the real core of our product and what we want to achieve. It is much harder than I have thought before and it is very easy to slip to the wrong road and start over-complicating the things. I can definately recommend this course to everyone - it was tough but easy things can never teach so much as real challenges.
Sirge - For a person who went to study financial and actuarial math with the hope. that all courses would be as useful as this. Sorry, no such luck, and thats why I have about finance more in this course than in all of the other courses combined. Since my subject was more about marketing and research, this has given me lots of skills in setting up meetings,presenting and selling a product, which has improved my confidence and writing articles about the product. Also I can’t forget the fact of learning to crash our product. And for a person who had no idea when joining this course, the goal of making me interested in being part of startups, mission accomplished
Stenver - I personally learned a great deal about a lot of things in this subject - technical skills, presentation skills, meeting skills, selling skills, creating a startup principals and team management skills. From the technical side i learned java, spring, hibernate, restless web design, jquery, amazon aws, liquidbase and lots of other minor stuff. I was present at half of the meetings with customers, including the big one - EMT. I did the presentation almost every seminar and missed only 1 meeting with teachers, where we needed to defend our product and argue with teachers. I started to understand why metrics are important(something Raimundas failed to teach), why everything must be measurable and why you shouldn’t start developing before market research. I started to understand value proposition principle and learned a great deal about pitch. Finally - i learned a great deal about team management and have identified the biggest mistakes i made in this field during the beginning of semester.
Tambet - What I have learned? Short answer to that question is A LOT. More to the details. Also like Stenver I can divide these skills into sets: technical skills, presentation skills, meeting skills, creating a startup principles and team management skills. From technical skills I have re-learned JavaScript, CSS, Java, Joomla and oh well HTML. From presentations and meetings perspective I presented a lot more than I have used to, competed with our original Gamification idea in MIT GSW event pitching competition to an audience of 300+ people from all around the world, made a big presentation to EMT with my teammate Stenver, met with many potential customers and of course I made our product final pitch with Stenver who handled the demo side. Most valuable knowledge I got was about the principles of how to create startup, there is so much to say about learnings in this field but I think that our final presentation and our learning description says enough about it. And last but not least since I was the author of the original idea I also learned about team management and how to interact with different personalities. For a conclusion I would say that this experience was very enriching and I intend to use the knowledge I got from this course in the future to continue with DemClicks and later maybe with some other Startups.
