Digital Noticeboard

What i am looking for ?

1. I am looking for feedback on my thought.
2. I am looking for some contacts to reach out to.
3. I am also looking for some mentors who can support me

Story in Detail

I recently participated in the event “in50Hrs” conducted by “thestartup” center based in chennai. Idea of the event was to help ideators towards a prototype. I also pitched one as titled above.Neither it is “World Changing” nor i could achieve the prototype i set out to do. Only thing i got is a somefeedback and advice on how it can be monitized

Genesis

I tried running a now defunct startup call https://edufinity.net.  I did it for 8 months. One of the biggest challenges i always faced was entering into college. Placement officers acted as barrier to entry and curried favours to those who would bribe them. Even to get a message on the noticeboard, i had to struggle a lot. I was frustrated with this behavior and as a way out dreamt of controlling the Noticeboard itself.

Formation

I thought, i should digitize the noticeboard, Along with typical benefits of digitization. I can connect all educational institutions who use this noticeboard. Categorize the data at the granularity level of college, department, classroom, subject etc. Also, i can use the information to drive action and create a minisocial network centered around college. Once i do this, i though i can have a hold on information flow and hence i can push in services as part of the information stream to targeted audience. To put it “Agenda behind Agenda”. I called my idea EDULINK

Accident

Fornutaley or unfortunately, when i was about to pitch my idea, the projector didn’t work. So i agreed to go without the deck. In the process, i forgot EDULINK. To make it easy for the audience to understand, i said “Digital Noticeboard for Educational Institutions”. When i  said that participants started giving shape to my thought based on their own understandings of what i communicated

Mentoring

As part of the event, they assigned mentors to everyone. Suresh from Orangescape was my mentor. Even before i could speak to my mentor, i realized it’s important to understand the pulse of people. So, i went around asking people. It became clear to me that i am trying to hit too many things at one go. They all understood that i am talking about a hardware device that would replace the wooden noticeboard where we pin it up. When i discussed with Suresh it became clear that i had a confused thinking. He suggested that to bridge the usability barrier, it would be better to have a touchscreen interactive hardware combined with a software to get best of both worlds.

Conclusion

As an outcome of that discussion we thought that this is something that might have potential customers “world class” MBA institutes  mushrooming in INDIA for whom anything is fine to attract talent. It is part of my responsibility to

a) Find out if our target Segment would be interested in buying such a product

b) Collect data on Customer Expectation so that we can evaluate this idea.

Action

It has been 2 weeks since in50Hrs got over. I haven’t been able to talk to anyone in identified college. Nor, was i able to decide which colleges to reach out to. I did dial into fe colleges only to find a no answer or atleast in one collge, they asked me to drop an email.