Yost Slide.
In 2015 during my time at Stanford University I was part of the Silicon Valley Innovation Program, which was a 12 week workshop introducing us to the startup world in the Valley.
Briefly Yost is an innovative group messaging app that helps to break down the barriers associated with large group chats on other social networks. Gokul, Charlie and myself were the team behind this app. Neither of us had any experience with iOS development, but we were a very capable technical team.
We started off with some market research using a prototype we made by customising an existing group messaging app Line (which proved to be the only app that allowed us to do the customisations we required). It wasn't perfect, but gave us a good sense for what to expect when testing our app in the future. With the wind in our sails, we went on to designing the app using Sketch, and credit goes to Charlie for is design skills in all formats throughout our time together. Some of the designs can be seen below.
Yost Chats.
Yost Group Chat Details.
Example group chat.
Following these designs, Gokul and I began development of the MVP using Swift and Xcode. We spent almost all of our time in the week before dead-week (week before revision for finals), iteration after iteration, eventually finishing with a solid product that replicated our wireframes. This gave us a few days to collect more market research (and do some testing) by installing our app to user's phones.
In fact, all three of us spent so much time on the product that we left preparation of the pitch to get into the Stanford Sharks round until the last minute. Our pitch turned out to be bad, we didn't even get to a quarter of what we wanted to say in the 3 minute pitch - a clear misjudgement of time. However, the work that we had put into the product managed to carry us over into the final round.
I still remember that night together at TreeHouse, realising that we only had a couple of days to prepare for the final pitch in front of a huge crowd in the CEMEX Auditorium.