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Hi, a suburban mother of school aged kids asked me to help her solve the problem she has coordinating with other parents to arrange rides to shuttle their kids to school & sporting events. She wanted a simple scheduling service, with a panic button — a way for her to let others know if she was running late. Ironically, she works at Redpoint VC, but had trouble attracting developers to her idea. I built the MVP, conducting UserTesting.com focus groups to gather feedback from a busy, educated “soccer mom” demographic and iterated on a “wizard based” signup flow. Users reported it being better than the current email / spreadsheet / shared calendar approach they use now, some interest in paying for the service on a subscription basis. Key request was a native mobile app version, and, confusingly, a Craig's List like rideshare social matching service. MVP is built on Parse.com / Backbone / Bootstrap, waiting for the right time to build out an iOS app; likely the start of a new school year. Obviously the growth opportunities are in service-based, market-making transportation providers like Uber, BlaBlaCar/Carpooling.com, whereas this is more of a scheduling app with a long history of similar but failed approaches (as a quick search of ‘carpool’ on HN will show!) Still, I like the feeling that I'm helping make other people's lives easier. Feedback & ideas for good mobile app design most welcome! |
My team's tech is designed to streamline the data and network portion of your mobile app: http://developer.couchbase.com/mobile/