Geschichte  |  Geographie  |  Wirtschaft  |  Gesellschaft

 

Ben Martin, 2006 | Uetendorf, BE

 

One of the biggest problems many people, especially students, face when working on their projects is procrastination. In this Matura project, I developed a mobile app, called powerhour, that aims to help people stop procrastination by turning their projects into fun games. After developing a minimum viable product, I launched powerhour as a startup and tested my product with real users. To turn powerhour into a product my users truly love, I iterated on their feedback and suggestions as fast as possible. This allowed my app to gain 5-star ratings on various platforms such as the iOS App Store, the Google Play Store, and the startup platform Product Hunt.

Introduction

Procrastination is one of the most widespread problems amongst students. It is often described as one of the biggest reasons hindering students from achieving their academic aspirations and has multiple bad consequences on the mental and physical health of students. In my project, I worked on developing a solution to this problem by gamifying the process of working on projects. My guiding question was: “How can I build a gamified mobile app to tackle student procrastination and test it on the market in the form of a startup?”

Methods

My methodology was guided by the Lean Startup Approach. This meant, that instead of building a perfect business plan and product before launching it to my possible customers, I started with a very rough basic first version and shared it with early users quickly. After that, I continued to gather feedback and iteratively improved my product. In every iteration I tried to solve the biggest problem my users encountered in helping them overcome procrastination. On the technical side I worked with a cross-platform app development framework which allowed me to write my app just once and run it on many different platforms like iOS, Android, and the web. This technical selection allowed for even faster iterations.

Results

After a phase of roughly 3 months of testing my first concepts as a web app with early users, in June 2023 I was finally able to launch the first mobile app version of my app in both the iOS App Store and Google Play Store. My app called powerhour achieved 5-star ratings on both these app stores, almost 200 users from all around the world and very positive early feedback. An analysis of my data showed that most of my users currently come from the USA, India, Canada and of course Switzerland. This shows the effect of my international focus in marketing. During the development, I had some great moments of success with my framework of iteratively improving my app. An example of this is the sign-up process. After the launch of my app, I soon noticed a very high abandonment rate during the sign-up process. When I investigated the cause of this, I realized that an overly complicated and slow sign-up process was discouraging many of my potential users from creating accounts on my app. So, I developed a completely new sign-up process, including an improved user interface and one-click sign-up on iOS devices. This significantly reduced the abandonment rate in the registration process. This really shows the success of the iterative framework. From a commercial point of view, my app hasn’t turned a profit yet, mainly because the focus at the moment is on achieving product-market fit rather than rushing to monetize it. However, I already have a monetization strategy in place that will allow me to move quickly towards profitability once product-market fit and scale are achieved.

Discussion

My paper was able to answer my guiding question and I was able to execute on the vision of a first viable product that helps students overcome procrastination by turning their projects into games rather than boring work. I am pleased with the results, but I also know that this is just a first product that has not yet achieved Product-Market-Fit. Because of this, I am continuing this project and hope that by continuing my user-centered methodology, I will achieve Product-Market-Fit as soon as possible.

Conclusions

In conclusion, I think my project was a great success. I was able to launch a first working product for my target market, validate the product and improve it through several iterations. However, I still see a lot of room for further work on this project. I continue to work on this project and am currently working on the biggest iteration of powerhour so far, based on what my users have told me I need to improve.

 

 

Würdigung durch den Experten

Prof. em. Daniel Huber

Ben Martin hat eine App zur Bekämpfung von „Aufschieberitis“ entwickelt und hat diese erfolgreich auf den Markt gebracht. Er ist dabei sehr professionell, nach der Methode „Lean Startup“ vorgegangen und hat dazu sogar ein Startup gegründet. Dieses Resultat ist umso beeindruckender, als keinerlei Vorkenntnisse vorlagen. Die Arbeit ist in jeder Hinsicht ausgezeichnet und wird als professionell beurteilt. Ben Martin wird die Arbeit weiterführen und ist derzeit in Diskussionen mit Investoren.

Prädikat:

hervorragend

Sonderpreis «Open-i Festival» gestiftet vom Eidgenössischen Institut für Geistiges Eigentum

 

 

 

Gymnasium Thun mit FMS
Lehrer: Michael Kiener