Plates Final Reflection

Within this project, our team had created Plates, a proof-of-concept of an app that connects university students over good food. Initially, before we had implemented or finalized our idea, I had thought that creating a startup was straightforward– you simply have an idea, assemble a team, and build your idea out before launching it. After going through the entire process with my group though, I had learned that it is much more complicated than that. I learned, for example, the importance of assumption testing before building anything out. Over the duration of this quarter, I had garnered many tools for this, including many that I was quite unfamiliar with. Experience prototyping, for one, was extremely useful to learn as it had enabled us to test our key assumption that people plan their meals ahead. Further, I learned a lot about teamwork and the importance of clear communication between members. Everyone should be on the same page when thinking about the project’s direction– the exercise that we had done in class wherein all team members wrote down what they thought the product was about proved invaluable in that respect. Given more time, I think our team would have loved to create a more complete and natural product. We had created look-and-feel and proof of concept prototypes, but did not get the chance to develop it using the tech stack we had initially determined. As an extension to this project, we would ideally create a functional prototype that uses TestFlight (an application demo platform on iOS) to test on a beta cohort of users. After that, we would be able to see what features users liked the most and the least, further validating or disproving our value hypotheses about Plates. Overall, I really liked getting this opportunity to develop an idea in a sandbox environment. I had learned a lot throughout this entire course and will be applying many lessons to my future endeavors with entrepreneurship.