Our next project will be coming up with an idea that we can present in an investors pitch. We will try to come up with an idea and be able to try and sell this product to investors. This will be useful to be able to present our ideas to other team members, or to potential clients and investors.
First of all, we had to come up with a problem to solve. This is important as we need our product to fill in a gap in the market, and something that provides users with something they can’t get from other products. My problem is that it is difficult to find out what activities/clubs are on in my local area. There should be one place where I can find out where activities are instead of having to go through Facebook pages.
Since I got given the brief for this project I have been thinking about what I could do for it, and I came up with a good idea that I think will work and is something that investors could potentially think about investing into. My idea was an app that allows people to see all of the different events/clubs that are on in their local area. The user will select or type in what activity they want to do, and it will show all of the events/clubs that are on in the area relating to that activity. For example, the user could type in rugby, and all rugby related events will show up, meaning that they don’t have to search through Facebook pages to find out whats on. The name I came up with was ‘AroundU’, as the app will show what is on around your area.
I then got onto designing the slides themselves. The reason why I done this now was because I wanted to first pick a design that I thought worked well with the brand, then I would finish writing all the content in that style. I wanted the slides to first of all be clear and simple, and this is because the audience need to be able to read what is on the screen, so this was my first priority. From there I chose the typeface ‘Poppins’, which is one that I used in a project last year. The reason why I picked this one was because I knew that it is a very balanced sans-serif typeface, and that it communicated clearly what I wanted to show. When it came to the colours that I used in the slides, I wanted it to be consistent throughout. In our lecture on presentation skills we were encouraged to keep it simple when it came to colour. I opted for a black background, with the typeface being white. I used blue as a secondary colour and used it on the slide to highlight certain words that I want the user to be drawn to. I also decided to add a grey fill to the text, and not only do I think it looks good, I also think that it makes it seem more important.
Doing a competitor analysis, I was trying to find apps or platforms that have the same or similar function. There isn’t any apps at the minute that do what AroundU does, but there are similar ones that I can learn from. One of these is Ticket Master, who are a ticket selling platform for concerts and sports events.
Although Ticket Master get a lot of stick for how they operate and how they often can crash when there is a high demand for tickets, I do like how easy it is to search for an event, and find out all the details about location, date, and time. It then gives the user the option to purchase a ticket and that is all you need to do. Ticket Master have changed how people buy tickets, with physical tickets no longer needed for concerts and events. It is now all on your device.
As I was doing this research, I found out that they have recently replaced their current app and brought out a new one. Because of this I wanted to note down what I thought of it on first experience. When onboarding, I was given the option to select 5 artists/teams that I am interested in. Doing this allows them to tailor what they advertise to me according to the interests that I have. This is very smart but knowing that some people don’t like this, or maybe some people can’t be bothered filling it out, they give the option to skip this step and go straight to the home screen. When on the home screen, the main feature that will be used is the search bar. Other than that there are some promoted events on that are nearby. When it comes to searching for an artist or event, all the user needs to do is type in what they are looking for, then they will be able to select what event they want to buy tickets for. In this case I searched up the band Oasis and I was able to see all of their upcoming concerts, although I wasn’t able to purchase any tickets as they are all sold out.
Talking to Ronan about my idea, he suggested that I look into web scraping. This is because there is a problem with my idea and that clubs have no initial reason to go through the effort of getting all their information onto this new app, especially if there isn’t even an existing user base. To combat this he came up with the idea that we should do that for them, and they don’t need to write all their information out themselves. This would be done by web scraping, which is a process of extracting data from websites, by getting into the code and using scripts to extract the desired data. In this case we would be getting the data that relates to clubs and activities. This would include: