A good product needs a good story
For the Imagine Cup competition, some friends and I built an app for rapid emergency response. In another competition our entry was rejected - the judges simply didn’t believe it could work. What that taught me about value propositions, educating the market and telling your product’s story.
A few years ago, together with some friends, we decided to build an app for rapid emergency response for the Imagine Cup competition 👨🚒
The idea behind the app
The idea was fairly simple: anyone could install a mobile app and enter some basic information about their health, place of residence, emergency contacts and other details that could help in an emergency.
A kind of “user profile” 👌
How the app worked
The app also installed a widget on the phone’s home screen with three buttons. One called the police, another the fire brigade and the third an ambulance.
In a life-threatening situation, the user could press a button. If they didn’t cancel the call within 10 seconds, an emergency alert was automatically sent to the dispatch centre, together with all the data from the user’s profile and their shared location, so that the caller could be found on a map.
There was also a second version of the app for the emergency services, which shared the location of each rescue unit. In an emergency, the system identified the rescue unit closest to the incident and sent it a notification together with the caller’s profile.
At the dispatch centre, the operator could see the units moving on a map and coordinate the response.
Sounds cool, right? 🙂
A rejected entry
We didn’t win the competition, but the most interesting part was the feedback we got when we entered the same project in another competition…
It turned out that our entry had been rejected 🙁
The judges concluded that it was impossible to call for help within a dozen or so seconds while providing enough information for an effective rescue operation 🤯
What this story taught me
In the end the project went into a drawer, but the story showed me that when bringing a product to market, everything around it matters too:
- 👉 a well-presented value proposition - our presentation was clearly weak, because it sounded downright unbelievable
- 👉 educating the customer - sometimes you need to prepare the market for your solution so that it is clear and understandable
- 👉 a good product is not enough to succeed - a well-told story about it matters too
Looking back, I think we failed to reach the people who actually needed this product - perhaps then everything would have turned out completely differently 🙂
