Things I learn about Imagine Cup (Video Submission Part)
Last week, another Semi-Final Imagine Cup held in Jakarta, Indonesia. Actually talking about it this year is a heartbreaking for me because my project didn’t make it this year. This is the post about mistakes we made during my four times of participating in Imagine Cup in Video Submission and how we learnt from them.
Choose your team member wisely.
There are 3 aspects in composing a great team.
The first one, choose the best people you could. A self-taught person would be suitable for this kind of competition. 3 out of 4 of my team I participated with in Imagine Cup is the expertise in their role. You should avoid an interception between works of your team member, always make sure each of team member working on themselves and what they expertise with. Doing a task with two or three person at the same time is not a good thing, you will waste a lot of time coordinating, arguing, and a lot of things that is unnecessary. In 3 out 4 of my attempts we divide and assign task and we eventually work faster.
The second one, choose the people who have the same vision with you. Those people don’t have to be someone you know before, or someone you are the most comfortable with. The important thing is that people in your team should passionate with what you are going to build. Without passion, how we can make the most of their ability? My first attempt, I fail to find team members that are equally passionate with what we are going to build.
The third one, choose people with different skill set. The most common mistake in building a team in Imagine Cup is they fill their team member with developers. You won’t need a bunch of developers in your team. The most ideal for me in my experience is to start with three people. One was excellent at presentation, business, and marketing. One was excellent at Web Development, and myself as a Mobile Developer. If you want to make it better, one out of those three should also understand UI/UX design. If your project use knowledge outside your team member capabilities, you should hire the fourth member that understand it. But, be hesitate to hire the fourth member, do you really need them? Because if you actually don’t need them, you are only wasting your team quota and in the future you can’t add more people that you will actually need. The composition of Developers (Mobile and Web) can be replaced by anything depends on the need (for example: IoT Developer).
Innovate and check any predecessor product with same idea.
Most of the time the team is too busy to build their product and forgot to check for their competitor. Once I was building a news summarized reader and the jury asking a comparison between our product and the competitors. It was okay because we have prepare about it. Some other time I create a pomodoro style combined with Get Things Done (GTD) style and gamification productivity application.
This is the one big mistake that we create in this product. What we’ve got in mind is that our product is actually a GTD style productivity application with a gamification, with only a little pomodoro as a helper to finish the task. We already check a GTD style competitor such as Wunderlist and Todoist.
But the jury see it differently, they interpret it as a pomodoro style application with a gamification. As a result, when we asked the comparison between our product and the competitors we have no idea what our competitors features and how our product got advantage compared to them and this is a huge fail. One of my advice to avoid this scenario is doing user testing, and you ask them to describe how they feel about the product, and what they think is the main features of your app. Because assumption from development team and assumption from users is different.
If you’re not sure where to check for competitors or you haven’t got any idea to begin with, you can always check Product Hunt or BetaList. It’s filled with a collection of trending products around the world or an early developed product.
It’s not a big deal if your product is not the first one, but it has to stand out from the crowd.
Your idea shouldn’t always be the first product of the idea, but you can always improve weaknesses of previous product with similar idea and stand out from the crowd. But it’s better if your idea is the only product that will be available in market right now. On my third project for Imagine Cup, I saw one of a project in Product Hunt and I can see how it can be improved. On my fourth project for Imagine Cup while building I found an app in Product Hunt that actually works the same way with our product. So those two websites are worth to check.
Creating a Good Video Product is not easy.
Once I have been told by person who used to judge products with video in competition. And he said…
It’s mandatory for us to watch all the videos, but they never said we have to watch it completely right?
That was a thing that not all people concern with. To make sure people watch your video entirely, you should follow these principles:
Two minutes is the best, three minutes is good, four minutes is okay, five minutes is meh.
I know you are building an extraordinary project with a bunch of features that you want to your future users to see. But you should see this statistic for sure.
You should read that the precious minute is on your first minute. And it getting drastically reduced on the second to third minute. That means you have to make the best of it on the first one minute. For Imagine Cup, basically I split it into three part of videos:
First part, background problem. Don’t worry, is not a thesis or final year project for your college. But for the first 30 to 45 seconds you should describe the problem people are facing without your product. First, it looks pretty hard, but with a good scenario you can make the best of your first 30 to 45 seconds. I assure you that this kind of duration is enough to make sure the viewers understand the problem you are talking with clearly.
Second part, fact and data. This is a tricky part of making product video. You should be able to describe the data about the problem. For example: if your app is trying to help people to reduce the risk of employee being late you can always search for data something like “6 out of 10 employee are terribly late”. By doing this it will help your viewers to see the problems that you are going to solve. You can also use facts that even though there is no clear information about it, but already known by people such as: “Multi-tasking people tend to work slower”. Even if you didn’t get information from a trusted source, people will not deny the information. For this part, 5 to 15 seconds is good enough. You can always use chart or text only and it still looks good.
Third part, demo. Yeay! Finally we can show our app features. Now it’s time to show off the product you have been working on for so long. Put all of the main features in front. Make sure your features show a way how to solve problem that you already stated before. You can always put a minor feature in this section, but please do be careful about your video duration. One of the trick to put a lot of features as possible is to put an explanation of minor features alongside with major features. If the feature is not really important you don’t have to put it on this section. 60 to 90 seconds is the suitable duration for this section.
Extra part, well after the first three part you are free to add some extra information that not as important as the first three part. I would suggest to put the team member introduction here, if your product already released you can always put information about it here, or if your product will be released after the video produced you can always put a release date here. One thing to remember…
There is no guarantee that people will watch up to this point.
So make sure every important things already covered in previous sections and make sure they didn’t miss anything important. But if your product stand out the crowd, I believe they will watch up to this point.
One last thing for this part, if you make a narration for the video make sure that your video have subtitle. Because it will help people to understand your video faster.
To understand it better, this is one of the video we used for Imagine Cup that use those principles.
That’s all lesson learned according to my views. I’d love to get your response or any input, so if you have any comments or suggestions, feel free to leave a comment.
And don’t forget the heart if you liked the article :)
I will write the next part later this week.
If you are interested in participating in Imagine Cup next year I’d love to talk about my tips and experiences about it. Feel free to contact through my Facebook :)
