Disso Progress: Interviews

Hi everyone.
I know I said I would try to write about my dissertation progress every week but failed to do so. Since my last post back in May, I have been doing interviews with end-users (professional women) and paying customers (beauticians).

These interviews are a lot harder than I thought, the hardest part is not interviewing them or finding someone to interview (I thought finding someone would be the hardest) but its arranging a time and day. I email them back and forth a few times and sometimes it can even take a few days to get a day and time arranged. I haven't really been looking for beauticians to interview, I've been focusing on end-users more and fortunately one of the founders is looking beauticians for me as she wants to do the interview with me too. That's good, founders should listen to the feedback themselves. So far we've only interviewed 1 beautician and I've interviewed 8 end-users, all of which are either the founder's colleagues/ friends, my friends, and my supervisor's friends. Some of these interviews were done in person but some were over the phone/skype.

In the first couple of weeks many of the interviewees suggested doing it on the phone as it was more convenient for them. My supervisor said I should suggest travelling to their work place so then maybe they would be more willing to meet. So I did and yes I was able to meet with the rest in person.

So far from the interviews with the end-users, most of them have said they don't use mobile beauticians and wouldn't use them unless they know them or recommended by someone. This is because of trust, inviting someone to your house is quite personal so you have to trust that person. Most said they go to salon for the experience and want to feel pampered but if they come to your house you don't have the experience. Some said they would only book a mobile beautician for a special occasion like hen party.

As well as doing interviews, I've also sent out some surveys to some Facebook friends. I don't really like this but I guess this is another way to get feedback. I don't like it because you can't prompt them and they may not understand the question. Some people have skipped most of the important questions which is really annoying. I'm not sure if its because they don't understand it or they can't think of any answers. Last time I checked, 7 people did the survey and 5 people skipped majority of the questions! Not good.

Anyways, I got another 2 interviews this week one with an end-user and another with a beauticians. Thanks for reading.

TEDxUCL 2013

Hi my lovely people! The title says it all. This is a post about TEDxUCL, my day and experience as a volunteer for the event. In my previous post, I mentioned that I'm a blogger for TEDxUCL and have been blogging the week prior the event. On the day I had to sat through all the talks and took notes for blogging. That was a good role because I know other volunteers who were in charge of catering couldn't stay and listen to all the talks.

My TEDxUCL tshirt

Reception 

Other Volunteers

Prior to the event, I was quite excited to be part of a TEDx event but on the day  I didn't have that excitement but it was still a good experience. My top 2 favourite talks were by  Julie Hall who spoke about The Rise of Micro Entrepreneur and Mark Brill's Emerging and Future Mobile. They were good in different ways. Julie Hall's talk to me was very motivating. She encourages people to start their own venture and if you're unemployed don't sweat just create your dream job! 'Don't wait to be chosen, choose yourself. Make a difference.' Those were the exact words Julie used at the end.

Schedule

Mark Brill was talking about mobile in 2045. The technology he showed us were really intriguing. I was really looking forward to Talhal Timol's tallk about the Return of a Bow Tie. The programme indicates he will be talking about the fashion industry which is of course something of my interest. But I was quite disappointed. Majority of his talk was about his business. I was expecting something like how to be creativity, how to differentiate yourself, etc. Anyway more about this if you read on.

A few of the speakers I knew. Charlie Jackson is my class mate. It's weird seeing him talking lol. Daniel Hulme and Blaine Landis have both taught me. In fact Jeff Skinner taught one of our lectures, he was covering Keith's lecture for a week. Met Timothy Barnes during E-challenge. And the MC, Ahmad Bahkiet is also my class mate. I know I'm name dropping a bit here =p lol.



As a volunteer, I got a certificate to prove I was part of it! Other goodies we received include; amazon gift voucher, polo T-shirt I was wearing during the event, key ring with TEDxUCL engraved on it and a bag.

Apparently this year the food was a lot better. Last year, there were complaints that the food (catered by UCL) was bland and boring. So this year they served sushi from Wasabi and sandwiches from Pret a Manger. For tea break, croissants and pain au chocolat from Paul's. The croissant were so big! I've never had anything from Paul's, I was told their hot chocolate are amazing. Unfortunately, there was no hot chocolate. lol. I of course had a bit of everything considering I love food.

Ok moving on to something less positive. During the day, everyone (volunteers, guest and speakers) is encouraged to tweet with the #TEDxUCL. I of course tweeted, even if they didn't tell us to tweet I would have done so anyway. When the event ended  a couple of the organisers told me that they received complaints from a couple of speakers about a couple of my tweets. I'll tell you exactly what I tweeted.

"Is Mark Ronan giving a history lesson? Interesting....#tedxucl"

"Talhal Timol's talk isn't a TED talk its a pitch!'

"Good "pitch" @velscvoir @ttvelsvoir." (That's also for Talhal Timol)

Mark Ronan was speaking a lot about  history and I just couldn't grasp the essence. I felt like I was in a history lesson and so I tweeted my thoughts. Talhal Timol's talk as I mentioned earlier was basically about his business, more like a pitch. He just ended with a sentence about how important appearance is. I was actually really looking forward to Timol's talk because its about fashion But was disappointed. So I tweeted my thoughts again. (I did tweet some positive tweets about other speakers because I did like them)

The president of Enterprise Society told me to delete those tweets. Ok so I did out of respect. But thinking back he had no right to tell me to do that. Ok fine, those weren't entirely positive comments about them but:

1. I was tweeting from my PERSONAL twitter account. So I can tweet whatever I want.

2. Everyone is entitled to their opinion. People either like what the speakers said or they don't. Those were my own opinion.

3. I did not use any negative words, nor did I saying anything explicitly insulting. (I admit I was being sarcastic)

4. I was not the only one who tweeted criticism. Some were more harsh than me.

Yes, I was a volunteer so shouldn't have tweeted something like that which is what put me in the disadvantage. But as mentioned, I was tweeting from my personal account. What if I was a guest and I tweeted that? Are the organisers going to find me and demand me to delete them? I mean how did the speakers know I wasn't a guest, or did they?

Anyhow I tweeted with an apology (not tagging the speakers) after. Fair enough the President was probably really stressed as this is a big event and then receiving complaints probably freaked him out. But still he had no right to delete them and I did not appreciate the way he spoke to me. I'm not going to mention about that, its enough.  This is my PERSONAL blog.

Thanks for reading.

Volunteering for TEDxUCL

Hiya readers, my university (UCL) is organising a TED event, TEDxUCL. It will be taking place this Sunday, 2nd June at the university. Unfortunately if you are thinking of buying a ticket for this event, it is sold out now.

I have volunteered to write blog post for them. Please check them out! =)

TEDxUCL is back: http://tedxucl.org/ted-x-ucl-is-back/

What Will Our Speakers be Speaking about?: http://tedxucl.org/what-will-the-speakers-be-speaking-about/

Another Sneak Peak: http://tedxucl.org/another-sneak-peak/

Student Speakers: http://tedxucl.org/student-speakers/

Dissertation take off!

Hey bloggers, readers, colleagues, friends, and everyone else.
I am going to try and blog at least once a week on the progress of my dissertation. In fact Itxaso did recommend blogging to keep track of the progress. In my previous post I mentioned that I'm working with a beauty startup called Glow for my dissertation and because they haven't conducted the customer development I will help them do that for my dissertation.

I am actually quite excited because all the theory and tools I've learnt from this course I can apply them.  So I will try to apply every single step and tools; customer development process, lean startup (build-measure-learn, canvases, etc. However, I won't be posting the canvases every week because I don't think the girls would like me exposing their business strategy or structure on the internet like this lol. I will mention some results of the hypotheses, what I've been up to and what I've learnt.

To start off this dissertation I will be using Ash Maurya's Lean Canvas to distill the essence of Glow onto one page. I chose the Lean Canvas instead of the Business Model Canvas because Ash Maurya adjusted his canvas for startups before product/market fit which is the case of Glow. This step of mapping out the hypotheses onto a canvas is also the first step of customer  that Steve Blank's ruled out in his 'The Startup Owner's Manual', except he mentions using the Business Model Canvas.

After mapping it all out, I will be discussing it with my mentor. Then I guess the next step is to write out a script, using the Ash Maury's guidelines, for interviewing potential customers. And yes, I will get 'outside the building' as Steve Blank strongly emphasizes. Okie dokes, that's it for now. I'll be back! Thanks for reading.

My Dissertation topic

Hi guys! It's been a month since I blogged here at Startup at 24. I have been revising...or shall I say TRYING to revise for my exams coming up in May. I've written a timetable to make sure I fit everything in, I hope I will follow it lol. I have 4 exams so that's not too bad and the good thing is they are spread out.

Anyways, the main thing I wanted to talk about is my dissertation topic. I have sorted it out! Itxaso is a well connected person, she has tonnes of contacts from different industries. I said I want to do my dissertation on health or beauty and she helped me find a beauty startup called Glow. (Its a mobile app that connects beauticians and customers - won't tell you the full details yet) She made an introduction for me via email to the founders. They are two girls, Thais and Kaska, who previously studied at Imperial college for their MBA (I don't remember the exact name of the degree, I think its Innovation entrepreneurship), and Itxaso was one of the guest lecturers there which is how she met them.

I've met with Thais last week to discuss about the stage of their startup and what I could do my dissertation on at the same time that could help them. They have developed a mobile app MVP however they have not gone through the customer development; testing hypotheses, interviewing customers, etc. She said Imperial does not teach the same methodology as UCL- Imperial doesn't teach about the lean startup- so she doesn't really know about the customer development process. Therefore we both decided that I could be working on the customer development side of their startup. I will be meeting Kaska this week, didn't get to meet her last week as she was away.

I am actually looking forward in working with them because I am working on something that I am passionate about lol. Everything I'm doing at UCL is just 10 times better than at Westminster! I'm not talking in terms of reputation, its obvious the reputation is a lot better lol. I'm talking in terms of the things I'm doing. I didn't really enjoy studying Criminology and Economics, I only studied it because I went through clearing and didn't know what else to study. I only enjoyed half of the modules we studied back then. My dissertation topic back then was although my choice but wasn't my biggest passion, I did something about the music industry. But fingers crossed hopefully I will do well in this dissertation and will earn me some big opportunities after I graduate.

Thanks for reading, I'll be back very soon!

Semester 2 is finished- Dissertation workshop

Hi guys, second semester has finished! We are on Easter holidays now, then its exams and then dissertation. The year has gone way too quick! I don't want it to end =( I'm going to miss the time at university and the time spent with the friends that I made at university...well not that I won't be seeing them after University. (I used that sad baby picture because it describes how I feel. lol)

Last week we had a dissertation workshop and most of it was a waste of time. We have three choices for the dissertation, we either have to write about our own business idea, do our dissertation on a startup's idea or with a big company's project.

On Monday we went to Google campus to do our BFP presentation. We had to present the problem our business idea aims to solve, our solution,  3 important issues for our business and the 3 minimum features that will cover those issues. As well as the presentation we had to present our MVP made from Wordpress.

I must give myself some credit for doing the presentation slides lol because they look really good. Simple and sweet lol. Basically my style is no words just pictures to represent what is going to be said. I just don't like seeing too many texts on slides, it's very distracting. In fact I learnt this technique from last year finance classes. Itxaso said investors don't like seeing slides with too much texts. The slides have to be kept simple, clear and concise. Benjamin was the one who presented so credits to him for presenting so well and being able to understand my slides lol.

My colleague Bryan did an awesome job on the MVP. The demo page looked amazing, so much better than I expected. To be honest, I didn't think he was able to produce something like that, lol =p. You must be curious, go check it out here.

At the end of our presentation, Itxaso and Magdalena (our mentor) didn't have any questions for us. Not sure if that's a good or a bad thing. However, Itxaso did have a big smile on her face and said that our video is really good. Awesome! (The video is an explanatory video of iEducase which I blogged about in my previous post but I've included it at the end of this blog).

On Tuesday, Dave our lecturer invited two people in to talk about dissertation. Sorry not invite... he paid them to come in. We did some silly activities like writing down our feelings about the dissertation on post-it notes.. I only stayed for an hour because I wasn't feeling well but it was boring and waste of time anyways. Seriously, Dave wasted his money.

On Wednesday, Chris' workshop was to help us find and define our research question and areas. It was sort of helpful but I wasn't able to think of my research question.

On Thursday, we had to form study groups of 5 and discuss our research area. A few sponsor companies came in to give a short presentation of their company. I wasn't interested in any of them. This day however was useful because my path is clearer, I am thinking of doing my dissertation based on the beauty industry. Lol. Might as well do something you're passionate about, right?

Source from kweekweek.com

On Friday, we had an unconference. This took place at KweekWeek's office that's near Angel station. (KweekWeek is a startup, it suggests events to people according to their tastes and location. Something like that lol)

I don't know why we went there, the initial venue was one of the lecture theater at Uni. It would have been better at Uni as it was so cold there and we could have used the toilets freely and unlimited times without getting dirty looks. Basically, when my friend and I asked the founder of Kweek Week if we could use the toilet, she was reluctant to let us use it. She said 'no not really, but yeh go on.' She knew we were there from 1pm- 6pm. Either she was expecting all of us to be holding it in for 5 hours or she was expecting us to walk down  to the McDonald's that was 2 minutes away or to the pub that was also 2 minutes away.  At the end of the day, Dave introduced her to us as the host of the "event", she was a total different person. Nicer one that is. Lol. She had a lovely smile on the face when she spoke. You thinking what I'm thinking?

Later on we met our dissertation mentor and they were all interesting and really experienced business people. After the mentors introduced themselves, there was a mini networking session with the mentors as we get to choose the mentors. Everyone was fighting to get the best one lol.

Anyways, that is it for now. Thanks for reading and catch ya later!

Our Startup Idea, iEducase has pivoted... Again.

Hiya. I said I will update you guys on iEducase every week but I failed to do so. A lot has changed since the last post. We have pivoted again. In fact we pivoted twice in the last 3 weeks.

We first scrapped the video case study idea because 2 of our lecturer do not see it as a good idea and don't see it will create value or solve the pain point. They also said universities will hate it because its encouraging the students to be lazy. Lol!

However, we disagree as we are students ourselves and sometimes would like a shortcut to reading. We do believe it is novel, lol! Anyways so we then came up with 3 ideas and since we were in week 7 (we have 10 teaching weeks) we decided to test them at the same time.

1. Audio book for case studies
2. Make iEducase into a recruiting platform where companies will post real or made up problems for students and graduates to solve.
3. Make sketch note videos for finance lectures

The audio book idea was suggested by a classmate. To test it, I simply recorded one of the Managing High-Technology class' case study that we had to read for week 8. I read out the whole case study, took me almost an hour. Reading out loud for an hour isn't easy at all, your mouth gets dry and tired. Haha!

I then posted on TE's Facebook group ( our course's Facebook group) and asked my class mates to try it out. But not many did. I tried it out myself, and it didn't work for me at all. I kept fidgeting and kept thinking about other stuff lol. I got the same feedback from 2 classmates.

To test the 2nd idea, Benjamin phoned consultancy companies to find out what problems they have with recruiting, and their thoughts on our idea. None of them were interested. They are what you would call 'Early Majorities' because they wouldn't try it unless some other companies have tried it and have benefited from it.

The third one was suggested by Dave our lecturer, he said Alan our previous finance lecturer has been trying to animate his lectures and is working on creating e-learning materials. However, apparently he isn't doing very well with it. So suggested us speaking to him and use his materials as a starting point and possibly corporate with him.

Week 8.
We had a 3 hour meeting and scrapped all three ideas. We came down with a new idea...again... a much better idea. Well we feel more confident about anyways. It's a one stop shop platform for learning resources. It's not entirely new it's still to do with education.

What is it about?
All universities have moodle/ blackboard/ intranet to communicate with students regarding the learning resources. However, although that is the platform for student to find learning resources but most of the time the resources recommended by lecturers are on another website. So students click on the links, they  get directed to another website. So opens up a new window/ tab. Then maybe they will have to either create a new account or log in. Basically, the problem we are trying to solve is having to navigate to numerous websites to obtain learning resources can be long and time wasting and having to log in to different academic websites is annoying. The solution is linking all the learning resources to one platform which is iEducase. We've created a video for it to explain it, see below.

Week 9
We were more proactive this week. The meetings were more productive. We create a survey and distributed it to students over Facebook. We create a video using scribble book, an App that Ben used for the previous video. And of course I did the voice over, so you will hear my voice again...




For BFP class, we are required to create MVPs for the business idea; a website, mock up of a mobile prototype and a Facebook app.

We've created the website but since we have pivoted we need to modify it to make it look like a one stop platform, that's Bryan's job. I've created a mock up of the mobile prototype using Balsamiq- a software that they suggested us to use as it was created by a UCL alumni- and Ben has created the Facebook app. Scroll down for all these.


Week.10.
The results of the survey has validated some of our hypotheses. And it's great! However, up to this stage we still haven't 'got out of the building' to interview customers lol. Regarding the survey results, many have said that the process of obtaining learning resources is long and time wasting. They would also find it helpful if everything was in one place and only needs one single log in.

Mobile Prototype- just a couple of screen shots of it

Facebook App