Tales of a Designer

Startup Weekend Ann Arbor and Nudge

This past weekend, Startup Weekend came to town and I was very excited to see what the event would bring. I tried to make sure that I didn’t set too high of expectations, so the only thing that I expected was to have a great experience and do some networking. Well, the great experience happened and more.

The first evening started off with everyone giving their business pitches who had ideas for companies/products. Once that was over, people went around to scout what projects they would be interested in working on for the weekend. This was the beginning of Team Nudge.

Nudge is a simple text and email platform to help small businesses remind clients of appointments. The idea is very simple and the team is very confident that the business idea will be successful. One thing I feel that makes or breaks businesses is if the service is needed. Most of our team, as well as others at SW said that this kind of service would be useful for them to remember appointments. So imagine how many others could use this type of service?

So the whole weekend was spent fleshing out this idea, coming up with a marketing/business plan, building the application, and branding the whole thing. The logo was done my Victoria Pater, and the team really loved the logo she came up with. When we had our logo nailed down, I went ahead and designed the UI for the site that compliments the logo, as well as the simplicity of our service. I feel that it represents the company very well, from a service standpoint, and from an ease of use to our clients that will use the site.

Our programmers put in a ton of work cranking out the application, which works great, and we’re in the process of making our final tweaks to fully launch this service. One very cool application that we came up with, and quickly put together, was our No Show Calculator. It’s a way for a business to quickly assess how much money they lose a month from missed appointments. In other words, we give them a way to show how much money they lose to convince them that Nudge could prevent missed appointments. Great idea that took about 20 minutes to put together, and I think it will be an essential tool for our business.

Overall, the weekend was great, but the reason it was so great was the amazing team that I was on. A formal thanks goes out to those that were on Team Nudge, and I was highly impressed with the collaboration that happened this past weekend. We had a lot of fun, took lots of pics, and worked hard on something we think will be useful for businesses. We plan on officially launching this any day now, so signup to be notified and I hope you find it useful.

Update: I’ve uploaded a video of the final presentation on our product, so check it out of you’re interested. And check out Victoria’s recap as well, with more video.

Publishing 2.0

I’m always on the hunt for new blogs, especially on the topic of online media and how the world is embracing the online media space, especially newspapers and overall journalism. One of the best blogs to do this, that I’ve found, is Publishing 2.0. They consistently write great posts, and always leaves you with something to think about when you’re done reading, and I always send off links to colleagues who like to do more in depth thinking of how people are using the web.

I would highly recommend this site to be in your feeds if these types of topics are of interest to you. One of my personal favorites is Evolution From Linear Thought to Networked Thought. I’m sure I could link up a bunch more but go read for yourself. It’s worth it and is a very good thought exercise.

The Challenge of Quoting Projects

As I was going through reading some of my old blogs posts from this site, I came across 5 Things I Learned Starting a Business. As I was reading those, I felt that I’ve only gotten better at those 5 things, but also tried thinking of things that still need to be improved on, and the first thing that came to mind was quoting projects.

We have tried different approaches and we have far from mastered being consistently right on our quotes. At first we tried doing the hourly thing. This proved the be the worst solution for us because it was very challenging tracking hours to the minute. At one point or another, I always went over the hours specified for the project, which ends up in us losing money and having issues staying within the project budget.

Our next approach was, which we’re still using is just giving the project a total price, loosely based on an hourly rate. This has worked for two reasons. The first is because we’re in a different mind state in not having to stress over every hour spent. This allows us to be as creative as we need to in our research/design/development and not short ourselves because of the limitation on hours.

The second reason this has worked, is because when we meet and go over a quote before sending to a client, we all make sure we’re in agreement on the price tag. When we get to a point that we feel that we can crank out a project for a certain amount, then we are comfortable on whatever time we spend on the project. Again, this isn’t the best solution, but it’s worked for us lately, and we’re still working on refining this as well.

It’s not easy quoting projects, however, I imagine that the more we get used to working with each other, the better we will be at estimating the costs of certain tasks of a project. But it seems like only time will get us better at quoting.

How do you normally quote projects? Has your method been effective for you?