HurryBuy - explaining the idea

HURRYBUY

PROBLEM: Nowadays, people are really busy and time seems running faster and faster. No time for "physical" shopping is a reality. SOLUTION: Hurrybuy is a mobile-app to use in the traffic queue, the cafeteria, the train or even the subway. Users can make quick a list of products to buy and when they arrive at the supermarket they just need to pick-up the shopping-bags. A GPS service will help users to find the nearest supermarket.

Riskiest assumption

This is a challenge and a new concept of market for supermarkets which means necessarily a change in their services.

WHAT - Quick quick shopping! An app who helps you to save time and actually make it more useful: shopping in the supermarket while you are doing other things.

WHO - Busy People with busy lives!!! Every person that has little time to spend (or even no time at all) on the daily basic shopping or doesn't like spending time in queues or finding the products among the infinit shelves at the supermarket.

WHY - Because nowadays people tend to be less patient and want to spend more time doing things that really matter and spending their free time with their interests and not in queues. This app will save time or just turn waste time in useful!

Prelude to HurryBuy

After all the ideas we had before (the ones we posted in the Commerce Accelerator platform and the ones that got lost in the middle) we became kind of "pros" in finding a problem and a solution. We started to find issues everywhere!

A bit after this mentally disturbed stage, we started to think "what's our situation now? what kind of problems do we have to face during the day-to-day?" and we answered to those questions by saying "we are Erasmus students". And most (or some of them, at least) of the Erasmus students have a big issue: they don't know how to cook or what to do for dinner.
And with this we got to the idea of having a platform that calculates recipes by writing down the ingredients that we have in the storage. Unfortunately, it already exists. So we had to drop the ball again.

Either way, this brought up new ideas.
What if we made something like "A Complete Guide To The Exchange Student / Youngster That Got Out Of His Parents House - A How To Survive Kit" application?
We'd have some levels on how to cook food, how to clean the  house, how to do laundry, etc. But then we realized some strong risks, such as: the guide would lose its interest by the time when the student/ youngster learns how to to the chores; he could just call his parents or friends for help without the need for an application.

After this we got back to the storage idea again (the one where you wright down the ingredients you have and it riffles a recipe for you). We really liked this idea, so we started to think about another app that could calculate when you need to go to the supermarket to buy more things that are getting out of stock in your storage.
Even so, we got to some issues on how to calculate this, so we drop this idea out too.

This brought up even another idea.
We figured out another problem: when you are in a hurry and you need to go to the supermarket.
If you had an application where you could select rapidly the items you need to buy (while in the transportation, the traffic jam, some reunion, place, etc.) and then go to the supermarket to lift up the shopping bags, this could save a lot of your time that you would waste while looking up for things in the endless shelves.

This was how HurryBuy came to light!

(TIME: 4 days)

28th September - Second Assignment / Second meeting with the Smart Team

This was the end of an intense week. None of us were happy with our ideas and so we decided to think about new ideas individually, apart from the first group brainstorming.

These are some ideas that we had:

MARIANA:

1. Can I rent your personal transport?

Sometimes, it's hard to find cheap transports in a city for just one day or even a few hours. And actually, we had this idea because we were trying to find a boat to rent in Tampere and there is no information about that. So the idea is simple: an app where you can find personal transports for local/native people in a foreign city.

Riskiest assumption

Riskiest assumption

It could be a risk because we are competing with some rental companies with same services (mainly companies with cars for rent).

WHAT - An app to rent personal transports (can be a bike, a car, a boat, etc).

WHO - For everyone who need to find a cheapest way to rent a transport in a foreign city.

WHY - Cheap, fast and easy way to find transports that sometimes you can't find in a website.

SARA:

1. Pointandsee

While you are a tourist there are a lot of things that you can't recognize while walking around the streets. With this app you could point with the camera to the object you see (a sculpture, a building, a painting) and there would appear a resume of all you need to know about it. Then you could save that information and make your own and personal tourist guide!

Riskiest assumption

Cities without a big tourism investment wouldn't invest much in this

WHAT - an application that tells you the history about places and things. City ​​councils that want to attract more tourists would invest in this!

WHO - those who are interested in knowing more about the place that they are visiting... or even living in!

WHY - because the history would be preserved in some way and people would gain more interest in getting more knowledge about what they are seeing if knowing what's behind it.

2. Spoil-block

Aren't you tired of people spoiling your show on your feed? This application removes - from your facebook and twitter's feed - every chance of you to know, in advance, what you are missing from the show you are following. It blocks this information so you won't receive any unwanted hint from your friends.

Riskiest assumption

It can be difficult to hide every trace of spoiling, because the app can stop recognizing some kind of tags that will pass to the user.

WHAT - an app that hides the spoiling hints that your friends publish on your facebook and twitter's feed.

WHO - it's for people that get really annoyed with this and want to watch their shows without seeing their friends talking about it all the time.

WHY - from the user side, it can ruin the way they will see the show from that point on; from the marketing point, the producers of the show can have a decrease in the number of people watching that show.

(TIME: 5h-15h)

26th September - Second Demola meeting

We talked about the webinar and tried to guess the "Who?", "What?" and "Why?" of our ideas.

During the webinar one of our ideas was exposed.

 It was actually very badly explained (by Sara in her profile) and with mixed ideas. Either way, the main idea of it (inserted in the "ecosystem enhancement" topic) was appreciated.

(TIME: 2h30min)

25th September - Second Webinar/ Second Assignment

2nd assignment 

Inspired by the first webinar?

This week brings you a new assignment to continue with your ideation process.

Based upon your previous assignment you now have 3 ideas divided over three categories: E-Commerce, Advertising and Ecosystem Enhancement.

For each idea, we want you to answer the WWW, which consists of the following questions:

What is it?

Who is going to use it?

Why will it be used? 

Deadline

Monday, September 30, 12.00PM

(TIME: 1h30min)

24th September - Our first meeting with Bernard

Since we already had the team - formed by a coder (Bree), a marketer (Trá) and both of us as designers -, and we already had done the first assignment as such, we had to convince Bernard to let us stay like this. He accepted and we were officially integrated in the Smart Team.

This meeting was meant for those who could not assist the other one where people had to sell themselves, so there was a lot of people that didn't have a group formed yet.

We were introduced to the project and to the other teams, heard other ideas and talked about ours.

(TIME: 3h)

21st September - First assignment/ First meeting with our Team

During this meeting we had a massive brainstorming of ideas between the members of our team. The assignment meant that we wrote down 3 ideas and we were getting behind. All of us 4 thought that we had to chose 3 ideas among us and upload them, but, actually, every member was supposed to have 3 ideas, individual. (Either way, we talked about this in the first meeting we had with BG and he said there was no problem because in the future the tendency was having just one member of the group uploading the assignments in the name of the whole team).

Bree told us that she and Trá had been talking between them and wanted to make a database where you can search by pictures, smell, sound and tact. Me and Mariana weren't very receptive to this idea because we knew that there was already something like this promoted by Google and Bree herself showed us some similar things.

Anyway, we tried to pick this idea and enhance it by applying it to other options.

We ended up by selecting our 3 ideas:

1. Costumer-friendly platform
#ECOSYSTEM ENHANCEMENT

PROBLEM: people just don’t know what they are buying because the market is so full and competitive. Ex: Camera brands tend sell their products based in how many mega pixels they have so people are just buying the wrong products.
SOLUTION: A costumer-friendly platform that teach people what they have to buy concerning with their needs.
RISKS: creators of this platform can be threatened by big brands.

2. Make your own advertisement!
#ADVERTISING

PROBLEM: all of the advertising are invading the private space of each person. So we want people to have fun with publicity!

SOLUTION: a platform where people can create their own profile and then upload their own advertising campaigns. Benefits: people who want to work or just show creative skills to brands have an opportunity to do it and brands can have free advertising. There will be prizes like internships or money. 

RISKS: copyright issue but you need to star from the lowest step!

3. Similar Things

#E-COMMERCE

PROBLEM: There are actually two types of public: people who just want fancy clothes and don't care about the real brand (more instead of quality) and people who has a feeling with brands. 

SOLUTION: If you find a product that you like in a digital magazine you can click on the product and see the real shop and a similar product that is cheaper. You have two options: buy the expensive and real one or bye a similar and cheaper.

RISKS: big brands may have a decrease in their selling.

(TIME: 5h)

16th-20th September - Berlin week

This week we had planned a trip to Berlin, so we had to skip the meeting that occurred where people had to "sell" their capacities to the Demola team and start forming groups.

Our two friends with whom we had been brainstorming went and then joined with two other girls and formed a team.

While we were in Germany we talked to a girl, Bree Tsui, and she asked us if we wanted to join her and Trá My in their team, which they called "Smart". We said yes and arranged a meeting for when we got back to Tampere.

Brainstorming by the lake

Since the teams weren't yet formed, we thought that we could make teams on our own, so both of us and two other friends (also from Portugal) started to brainstorm on ideas for applications while resting at the park.

We came up with this game where brands could create their own level and offer discounts, promotions, etc. to the costumers. This was our idea to change the way of thinking the advertisement in the Internet and make it more appealing.

(TIME: 5h)

9th September - First Webinar/ First Assignment

First assignment 

This week’s assignment is all about starting the ideation. Come up with three ideas, one in each category: E-Commerce, Advertising and Ecosystem Enhancement. They can still be very rough diamonds in this stage. Even the name does not have to be definitive at all. In this stage, and with this assignment, we are interested in the problem hypothesis and the riskiest assumption behind the ideas. We discussed these two elements during the kickoff.

Define the problem hypothesis & riskiest assumption for your ideas in a maximum of 80 words.  

How to hand in your assignments Go to your profile page. Here you can find your Idea-page where you can enter your ideas in each category and describe your problem hypothesis. After creating your idea, you can open it to define your riskiest assumption. 

Deadline Monday, September 23th, 12:00PM

(TIME: 1h30min) 

Why Sanoma Accelerator?

The Brief:
The Commerce Accelerator is the third innovation Accelerator at Sanoma, a European Media & Learning company. We challenge 200 participants – half from within Sanoma, half Students – to come up with new ideas in the field of digital commerce. The participants will learn the latest in lean development and business model innovation by following sessions from top speakers. They will get to develop their ideas with the guidance of experts, and for the best, build it in an intensive, all-expenses-paid bootcamp in Amsterdam. All at the same time, the participants get to show their talent to the leaders of Sanoma, with the chance of getting recruited to turn their idea into a real business. And of course, have a lot of fun throughout the Accelerator.

This was the project that caught our most careful attention. 

We thought that the fact of creating a new application for the market, something that we've never done before in our studies area, could be a very good experience that would help us to know better what we like and what we don't like to do - and what we want for our future.

We thought carefully and applied for the Sanoma's project, which deadline was in the 9th September.