From Imagine Cup to a startup
Hello! My name is Olya, and I am a psychologist.
Imagine Cup is a technological competition of Microsoft, in which teams consisting of students or graduate students present their ideas and prototypes of projects. I will tell you about our participation in the IC.
I was lucky, my boyfriend is a programmer, and three years ago I learned about IC from him and thought: “Why not participate?” - it was something new for me, and I decided.
The first time we participated in IC in 2012. I organized two teams in which there were more psychologists than programmers, but, no matter what, we presented prototypes of applications for Windows Phone:
')
“BeMom” - educational games for pregnant women, with the help of which the girl learns what happens to her during each week of pregnancy.
“KIWI” - an application that selects current aphorisms, analyzing pages on social networks, and provides psychological assistance
Our games for pregnant women received the audience award, and aphorisms - the first place in the regional finals in the city of Tomsk - a good start.
In the photo - our teams with guys from Tomsk.
At that time, we had little idea why we were doing these projects, we just wanted to participate in an interesting competition. With one project, we went to the Russian IC final in Moscow, it was fun, we got lost in the night city, quarreled with each other, made peace, spoke, met a bunch of interesting people, missed the plane and spent a day at the airport.
But, as is often the case, after the contest the project with aphorisms has safely died down.
But we did not abandon pregnant women, we wanted to improve the idea and make the most fun and informative games for them. At one event, oddly enough, in Irkutsk, our hometown, we met Gaidar Magdanurov and told him about our idea. He advised us to an elementary thing, which for some reason we did not think: ASK what pregnant women need!
So we found out that pregnant women are quite pragmatic people, and their main problem is the inability to communicate with the doctor at any time of the day.
In 2013, we participated in the Imagine Cup more consciously, with a draft application that helps solve this problem. We took 3rd place in the regional final in Vladivostok and have already thought about taking it seriously and making it a sluggish start-up project.
We even went to Seliger with this project and found out another elementary thing: in order for the project to become a startup, you need to find out if people will PAY for it.
We went to pregnant women, showed a prototype, arranged discussions, and it turned out that, in principle, it is possible to communicate with the doctor for free, and they are not ready to pay for it. The business model needed to be changed, but at that time we didn’t think of anything worthwhile and temporarily froze the work on the project.
The idea came itself - along with people who needed it.
I must say that, apart from the BeMom project, I have been administering our community Tyzhpsycholog !, for quite a long time! This is a humorous public in vk, which already has almost 40K subscribers. Often psychologists are asked to place their search advertisements for people to research, but I cannot place such ads, because this is not the content that subscribers expect from a humorous public. However, it became clear that there is a problem: psychologists are looking for people for their research and are completely unaware of where to get them.
I myself write a diploma, again, about pregnant women. Where am I looking for people to study? I come to an organization where there are a lot of them, for example, in the perinatal center, and I ask you, I just beg these women to take tests, because “well, I really have to.” I am embarrassed, I spend someone else's time. And women - well, so be it, agree, but not all and not very willingly.
On the other hand, there are people who are interested in psychology, they seek to know themselves, but are not familiar with psychologists who can help them with this. As a result, they search for tests on the Internet and find this:
Looks familiar?
A midlife crisis in 25 years? Brain level ?! The level of naivete ?! What is it all ?! From the point of view of psychology, this is complete nonsense.
Or worse.
Interestingly, and the percentage of fat and muscle percentage is also psychological?
In general, there are a lot of pseudo-psychological nonsense on the Internet.
So why not establish mutually beneficial cooperation?
So we came up with the idea that we are doing now.
FreudZone is an online platform that helps research psychologists and test lovers to meet and help each other.
For research psychologists, this is an opportunity to find people for research, create tests using a special constructor and automatically process the results, because it is not very fun to read a bunch of tests manually, and survey designers are often not entirely suitable for psychological tests.
The project helps lovers of tests to get to know themselves qualitatively, without a psychological percentage of muscles and other Internet horrors, to obtain sound results and psychological counseling online, to share test results in social networks.
It seems to be as it should be, and is relevant, but we have questions: what if people are satisfied with everything, maybe they don’t want to know themselves qualitatively and reliably? Maybe they have enough psychological age and weight?
To test whether our project is necessary for someone other than ourselves, we conducted an experiment - we created the FreudZone Public, which solves the problem of our service at an elementary level - it helps psychologists-researchers and people who are interested in psychological tests to meet.
Here psychologists post announcements about their research, while other members of the community respond and pass tests. It is interesting for people to communicate with each other in this format, they are ready to pass serious tests in order to get a reliable result and talk to a psychologist.
Inspired, we decided to implement this project, as well as to participate in the Imagine Cup 2014 in order to get useful feedback from experts and to promote the project at an early stage. This time we won no prizes.
But the question remained, because of which we suspended the work on the previous project: will people pay for it? Now we are exploring it, there are two ideas: a subscription model (for example, an advanced package with statistics for an additional fee) or an advertising model. I must say that on Tyzhpsiholog! the advertising model works: psychologists are willing to pay for the announcements of their seminars and trainings, the publishing houses for advertising their books, etc. But only experiments will show how it will be on FreudZone.
During the three years of participation in the Imagine Cup, our team changed its composition, but one thing remained unchanged - these are two psychologist students. We have little experience, but personally we lack such a service that we are going to create. We found two crazy programmers and a lawyer-designer, and we work with such a company of five people.
Our project is a web application. His first prototype, presented at the Imagine Cup, was written in Clojure, a modern Lisp dialect supporting the JVM platform. Our, at that time, the only programmer really wanted to try Clojure, since theoretically it provides all the possibilities for a simple and reliable implementation of the application (fairly stable libraries for Web Compojure and Enlive, as well as Clj-Redis and ClojureQL for working with databases) .
After the Imagine Cup, we more strictly approached the planning of the future of our project and came to the conclusion that, despite all the advantages, we should move towards the most common languages ​​and further develop the project in PHP and Javascript. In conjunction with the main engine of our own design, we plan to use the Twig php template engine. The server part is planned to be divided into two independent systems - a web server with PHP, Twig, etc. which provide the basic functionality of the site and a data processing server that performs resource-intensive mathematically calculations. Such calculations will be required not only for processing test results by standard mat means. statistics, but also methods of machine learning (clustering methods, reducing the dimension), which is planned to make available to users.
To organize a high-performance system, we want to use both the classic MySQL relational database and NoSQL Redis for caching user requests and storing other data to which we need to provide the fastest access.
We are planning to launch FreudZone in early September 2014. Feeling the interest and support of the professional community, we decided not to look for investments yet, and at the end of June 2014 to launch a crowdfunding campaign on boomstarter.
I thank the organizers of the Imagine Cup, for me this is not just a competition, it is an important stage in my life, which has changed a lot in it. Thanks to the Imagine Cup, I felt what it means to do my project and became interested in startups. Perhaps due to this I will be able to improve something in this world.
Imagine Cup is a technological competition of Microsoft, in which teams consisting of students or graduate students present their ideas and prototypes of projects. I will tell you about our participation in the IC.
How psychologists get on Imagine Cup
I was lucky, my boyfriend is a programmer, and three years ago I learned about IC from him and thought: “Why not participate?” - it was something new for me, and I decided.
The first time we participated in IC in 2012. I organized two teams in which there were more psychologists than programmers, but, no matter what, we presented prototypes of applications for Windows Phone:
')
“BeMom” - educational games for pregnant women, with the help of which the girl learns what happens to her during each week of pregnancy.
“KIWI” - an application that selects current aphorisms, analyzing pages on social networks, and provides psychological assistance
Our games for pregnant women received the audience award, and aphorisms - the first place in the regional finals in the city of Tomsk - a good start.
In the photo - our teams with guys from Tomsk.
At that time, we had little idea why we were doing these projects, we just wanted to participate in an interesting competition. With one project, we went to the Russian IC final in Moscow, it was fun, we got lost in the night city, quarreled with each other, made peace, spoke, met a bunch of interesting people, missed the plane and spent a day at the airport.
But, as is often the case, after the contest the project with aphorisms has safely died down.
But we did not abandon pregnant women, we wanted to improve the idea and make the most fun and informative games for them. At one event, oddly enough, in Irkutsk, our hometown, we met Gaidar Magdanurov and told him about our idea. He advised us to an elementary thing, which for some reason we did not think: ASK what pregnant women need!
So we found out that pregnant women are quite pragmatic people, and their main problem is the inability to communicate with the doctor at any time of the day.
In 2013, we participated in the Imagine Cup more consciously, with a draft application that helps solve this problem. We took 3rd place in the regional final in Vladivostok and have already thought about taking it seriously and making it a sluggish start-up project.
We even went to Seliger with this project and found out another elementary thing: in order for the project to become a startup, you need to find out if people will PAY for it.
We went to pregnant women, showed a prototype, arranged discussions, and it turned out that, in principle, it is possible to communicate with the doctor for free, and they are not ready to pay for it. The business model needed to be changed, but at that time we didn’t think of anything worthwhile and temporarily froze the work on the project.
New idea
The idea came itself - along with people who needed it.
I must say that, apart from the BeMom project, I have been administering our community Tyzhpsycholog !, for quite a long time! This is a humorous public in vk, which already has almost 40K subscribers. Often psychologists are asked to place their search advertisements for people to research, but I cannot place such ads, because this is not the content that subscribers expect from a humorous public. However, it became clear that there is a problem: psychologists are looking for people for their research and are completely unaware of where to get them.
I myself write a diploma, again, about pregnant women. Where am I looking for people to study? I come to an organization where there are a lot of them, for example, in the perinatal center, and I ask you, I just beg these women to take tests, because “well, I really have to.” I am embarrassed, I spend someone else's time. And women - well, so be it, agree, but not all and not very willingly.
On the other hand, there are people who are interested in psychology, they seek to know themselves, but are not familiar with psychologists who can help them with this. As a result, they search for tests on the Internet and find this:
Looks familiar?
A midlife crisis in 25 years? Brain level ?! The level of naivete ?! What is it all ?! From the point of view of psychology, this is complete nonsense.
Or worse.
Interestingly, and the percentage of fat and muscle percentage is also psychological?
In general, there are a lot of pseudo-psychological nonsense on the Internet.
So why not establish mutually beneficial cooperation?
So we came up with the idea that we are doing now.
FreudZone is an online platform that helps research psychologists and test lovers to meet and help each other.
For research psychologists, this is an opportunity to find people for research, create tests using a special constructor and automatically process the results, because it is not very fun to read a bunch of tests manually, and survey designers are often not entirely suitable for psychological tests.
The project helps lovers of tests to get to know themselves qualitatively, without a psychological percentage of muscles and other Internet horrors, to obtain sound results and psychological counseling online, to share test results in social networks.
It seems to be as it should be, and is relevant, but we have questions: what if people are satisfied with everything, maybe they don’t want to know themselves qualitatively and reliably? Maybe they have enough psychological age and weight?
To test whether our project is necessary for someone other than ourselves, we conducted an experiment - we created the FreudZone Public, which solves the problem of our service at an elementary level - it helps psychologists-researchers and people who are interested in psychological tests to meet.
Here psychologists post announcements about their research, while other members of the community respond and pass tests. It is interesting for people to communicate with each other in this format, they are ready to pass serious tests in order to get a reliable result and talk to a psychologist.
Inspired, we decided to implement this project, as well as to participate in the Imagine Cup 2014 in order to get useful feedback from experts and to promote the project at an early stage. This time we won no prizes.
Business model
But the question remained, because of which we suspended the work on the previous project: will people pay for it? Now we are exploring it, there are two ideas: a subscription model (for example, an advanced package with statistics for an additional fee) or an advertising model. I must say that on Tyzhpsiholog! the advertising model works: psychologists are willing to pay for the announcements of their seminars and trainings, the publishing houses for advertising their books, etc. But only experiments will show how it will be on FreudZone.
Team
During the three years of participation in the Imagine Cup, our team changed its composition, but one thing remained unchanged - these are two psychologist students. We have little experience, but personally we lack such a service that we are going to create. We found two crazy programmers and a lawyer-designer, and we work with such a company of five people.
Technical implementation
Our project is a web application. His first prototype, presented at the Imagine Cup, was written in Clojure, a modern Lisp dialect supporting the JVM platform. Our, at that time, the only programmer really wanted to try Clojure, since theoretically it provides all the possibilities for a simple and reliable implementation of the application (fairly stable libraries for Web Compojure and Enlive, as well as Clj-Redis and ClojureQL for working with databases) .
After the Imagine Cup, we more strictly approached the planning of the future of our project and came to the conclusion that, despite all the advantages, we should move towards the most common languages ​​and further develop the project in PHP and Javascript. In conjunction with the main engine of our own design, we plan to use the Twig php template engine. The server part is planned to be divided into two independent systems - a web server with PHP, Twig, etc. which provide the basic functionality of the site and a data processing server that performs resource-intensive mathematically calculations. Such calculations will be required not only for processing test results by standard mat means. statistics, but also methods of machine learning (clustering methods, reducing the dimension), which is planned to make available to users.
To organize a high-performance system, we want to use both the classic MySQL relational database and NoSQL Redis for caching user requests and storing other data to which we need to provide the fastest access.
Near future
We are planning to launch FreudZone in early September 2014. Feeling the interest and support of the professional community, we decided not to look for investments yet, and at the end of June 2014 to launch a crowdfunding campaign on boomstarter.
Special thanks to
I thank the organizers of the Imagine Cup, for me this is not just a competition, it is an important stage in my life, which has changed a lot in it. Thanks to the Imagine Cup, I felt what it means to do my project and became interested in startups. Perhaps due to this I will be able to improve something in this world.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/222939/
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