Amir Chaudhry

23 July 2014

Winning Seedhack 5.0

[This story was also a guest post on the Seedcamp blog.]

A couple of weeks ago, I took part in Seedhack 5.0, on the theme of life-logging. My team were overall winners with Clarity, our calendar assistant app. This post captures my experiences of what happened over the weekend, the process of how we built the app and the main things I learned. You’ll find out what Clarity is at the end – just like we did.

Meeting people and pitches on Friday

The weekend began with some information on the APIs available to us, which was followed by pizza and mingling with everyone. I spoke to a few people about what they were working on and the technologies they were used to. It was good to find a mixture of experience and I was specifically looking for folks with an interest in functional programming – that’s how I first met Vlad over Twitter.

After pizza, those people with ideas, even if not fully formed, were invited to share them with the room. I came in to Seedhack with specific thoughts on the kind of things I wanted to work on so I spoke about one of those.

Pitching Personal Clouds

I described the problem of silos, poor interoperability and how all the life-logging data should really be owned by the user. That would allow third parties to request access and provide way more value to users, while maintaining privacy and security. Building a centralised service makes a lot of sense in the first instance but what’s more disruptive than eschewing the current model of yet-another-silo and putting the user in control? If that sounds familiar, it’s because I’m trying to solve these problems already.

I’m working on a open source toolstack for building distributed systems that I call the MISO stack, which is analogous to the LAMP stack of old but is based on Mirage OS. With this stack, I’m putting together a system to help people create and run their own little piece of the cloud – Nymote. The introductory post and my post on ‘The Internet of my Things’ has more detail on why I’m working on this.

For systems like this to be viable, we must be willing to trust them with the core applications of Email, Contacts and Calendar. Without advanced and robust options for running these, it’s unlikely that anyone (including me) would want to switch away from the current providers. Of these three applications, I decided to talk about the contact management solution, since I happen to have wireframes and thought it might be simpler to implement something over the weekend.

There was quite a bit of interest in the overall concept but what really piqued my curiosity was that someone else presented some thoughts around Calendars and analytics. After a brief chat, we decided to join forces and tackle the problems of Calendar management. The team had a great mix of experience from product to design and several of them had worked together before.

The Clarity Team

Amir - Product - Worked in several startups, product & programme management experience, currently a Post Doc at Cambridge University Computer Science dept.

River - Product - Programme Manager at Dotforge Accelerator and lead organiser of StartupBus UK 2014.

Mani - Developer - Freelance web dev (CMS and APIs), winner of multiple hackathons, currently studying at Sheffield University.

Vlad - Developer - Started programming long ago and attended many competitions and hackathons. Currently studying Computer Science at the University of Southampton.

João - Developer - PhD in Theoretical Physics, Python enthusiast and moving into data science, currently doing data analysis at Potential.

Jeremy - Designer - Freelance UI/UX Designer, hackathon enthusiast, currently studying medicine at Sheffield University.

Thick fog and ambiguity on Friday evening

We had all decided to work together and we knew it would be on the problem of calendar management and analytics. We were fired up but it quickly became obvious that was all we knew.

The next four to five hours were spent discussing the rough shape of what we were going to build, what specific problem we thought we were solving and whether there were enough people with such a problem to care.

We had a look at each other’s calendars and talked about how we each use them and the things we like and dislike about them. For example, I have around nine calendars and I curate them carefully, adding contextual information and sometimes even correcting old events to reflect what happened. We even bounced around the idea of the contact management app several times as well as a few other ideas that came up during the discussions.

These conversations took a while and it seemed like we were going around in circles. Despite this, it didn’t feel particularly frustrating. I realised that the same sticking point was coming up repeatedly because we were forcing ourselves to imagine a prototypical customer and the problems they might have. This was never going to work since we wouldn’t have time to go and find such people and do basic customer development. Far better to constrain the problem to something we experience so that we can look to ourselves for initial customer feedback. Once we did this, things seemed to go a little faster and taking breaks for food helped us keep our energy up.

There were a few occasions where I looked around the room and saw other teams with their heads down, headphones in, and bashing away at keyboards – we hadn’t even figured out what we were doing yet. Despite this, it was a great exercise because it allowed all of us to get a feel for what aspects each of us cared about most and it helped us form some kind of shared language for the product.

The only outcome from this first evening was an outline but it was an important one. It distilled what we what we were going to work on and the components of it. We did this so we’d have a clear starting point the next morning and could get going quickly. Here’s a paraphrased version of what we sent ourselves.

Smart Calendar App.

We are collecting data from mobile and from desktop. 
- Mobile includes:
  - Call logs
  - Location (if we can)
  - Messages
  - What application is being used and when
- Desktop includes:
  - What application is active and timestamps of it
  - Location?
  - Git Logs ... ?
  - Taking logs of their existing calendars.

Working out what people are doing.
- Extrapolating info from active application (e.g browser page)

Present info back via calendar UI
- Need to turn all this information into webcal events

Useful info we want
- Time spent travelling (how much?)
- Time in meetings 
- Time on phone
- Who the meetings/calls were with
- Relevant docs/emails these are linked with
- Use labels

Then it was time for some late night snacks.

With one challenge out of the way, the next one was finding somewhere to sleep for a few hours (Campus was closing from 01:30). I had nothing planned but luckily for me, a couple of team members had booked a hotel room for the night. The minor complication was that we had to first find the hotel and then somehow get six people into a room meant for two – without the night manager kicking us out. That’s a whole other story, but it suffices to say that James Bond has nothing to worry about.

Rays of light and clearing haze on Saturday

After some card games and a few hours of sleep, we headed back to Campus and during this walk, we came up with ‘Clarity’ as the name of the application.

Once we arrived, development began. River volunteered his digital assets to the cause (i.e. his whole Google life). Mani worked on the Android app, Vlad on a Chrome extension with Joao pulling in the Google Apps data as well as combining it with data from the various platform apps. Jeremy worked on the front-end of the site, while River and I began wireframing the UI and user flow through the site.

Once the development was well underway, I realised how superfluous ‘the business guys’ can be. It would have been easy to simply sit there and let everyone get on with it but there were other things River and I did while developers were writing code.

Wireframing - We spent time thinking about what a user would actually see and engage with once they visited the Clarity site. We made a lot of sketches on paper and this was helpful because communication with the team was smoother with something to guide the discussion. It also helped to inform the design work and gave River and I something to show to potential users.

Talk to people - aka early customer development. We already knew that we were our own customers but it was useful to talk to other people for two reasons. Firstly, to get an idea of how they use their calendars and whether they have similar problems to us and secondly, to see what thoughts we prompt when we describe our solution (or show our wireframes). This led to useful information on how we should refine the product and and position ourselves against perceived competition.

Refine the product - Going through the wireframing and talking to people helped us come up with several new ideas for how to display the data back to users. Some of these seemed great at the time, but after showing some paper sketches to other people, we realised customers didn’t care about certain things, so we discarded them. Even though Jeremy had already done the work of putting together the UI for them (sorry, Jeremy!).

Examine the competition - After we described what we were working on. A few people mentioned potential competitors and asked how we were different. Initially, we didn’t know much about these companies but it was something we could explore while development was underway and consider our positioning.

Remind people to regroup - Every few hours, we would make sure everyone caught up with each other. We would check that things were going well, share what we’d learned from talking to people and discuss any technical problems and possible workarounds – including changing the scope of the product. The discussions we’d had on Friday meant that we spent less time debating when these questions came up during the weekend.

Work on the pitch - River and I began working on the pitch from just after Saturday lunchtime and kept building on it until Sunday afternoon. This, combined with showing our sketches to people, made it much easier to think about the story we wanted to tell the audience. In turn, that made it easier to think about the product development that had to be completed by Sunday. Especially in terms of a kick-ass demo.

Bright sunshine and achieving Clarity on Sunday afternoon

Development carried on through the night and we took a break to watch some sports via River’s laptop – at this point Clarity was actually logging this and other events. The next morning, we reiterated what we needed to get done for the demo and I was pretty ruthless about practising the pitch. River and I practised endlessly while everyone else made sure the the technical pieces were working smoothly. We had a lot of moving parts and making sure they were glued together seamlessly was important. At this point, we knew what Clarity was and how to tell its story.

Introducing Clarity

We all have calendars and we put a lot of time and effort into managing them but get very little back. A simple glance at your calendar for the past month will show you a sea of information with no idea where your time was actually spent. We believe your calendar should be working harder for you. Your calendar should give you clarity.

Over the course of the weekend, we built tools that can go through your calendar and understand the events you’re involved in and tie them back to the relevant emails, documents and people. With a suite of software that spans across your GDrive, Chrome and Android, we’re able to combine your calendars with rich, contextual information so you can really understand what your time is being spent on.

We built this system and plugged it into River’s digital life. If we take a look at River’s summary for the last month, we see that he’s spent around 32 hours in meetings in London last month, despite living in Sheffield. We can also see that he’s spent an hour on the phone with someone called Lee, but that all of them were short calls. The next person also totalled an hour on the phone but only across 3 calls. Already, River has learned something about the the people he interacts with most and how. We can also drill down further and see all this activity presented in a calendar view, except this now represents where his time did go, rather than where he thought it went. For example, he’s most active via text message between 4pm and 5pm during the week, and we can see that he spent a few hours watching sports last night.

Clarity can do much more than provide an accurate retrospective view of your time. Since it interacts with all the important components of your life, like your phone and laptop, it can even perform helpful actions for you. For example, say I have a meeting set up with River but I want to reschedule it. I simply send a text to him as I normally would, suggesting that we move it to another day. Clarity can pick up that message and is smart enough to understand its intent, find the relevant calendar event and reschedule it automatically. River doesn’t have to lift a finger and his diary is always up to date. It’s easy to imagine a future where we might never have to add or edit events ourselves.

Clarity is a smart calendar assistant that understands the context around you, provides you with insight into your life and helps you seamlessly organise your future. You can find out more at http://clarityapp.me

Judging and announcements

After the pitches, we met a lot of people who had the same problems as we did with calendar management. Several offered to be beta testers. After waiting for the judges, prizes were announced and Clarity was declared the overall winner of Seedhack 5.0!

Things I learned

Looking back, there were a lot of things we did which I think helped us get to the winning slot, so I thought I’d summarise them here.

Think first - We spent time up front to define what we were going to work on. I thought this step was crucial as it meant we all understood the shape of the problem but also the areas that each of us were interested in. That helped later in the weekend as we could refer back to things we discussed on Friday.

Move fast - Once we did figure out what we were doing, then it was a matter of building the software to gather and crunch the data. A lot of this was done in parallel as Jeremy worked on the front-end UI while Mani, Joao and Vlad took care of the data aggregation, analytics and platform products. Don’t be afraid to throw away ideas if you find that they don’t work for people and remember it’s a hackathon (i.e gruesome hacks are the norm).

Remember the demo - At some point you’re going to be forced to stand up and talk about what you’ve done. We started thinking about this from Saturday lunchtime and sketched out the slides and the elements of the app we wanted to show. This helped inform the UI and technology that we were building and the pitch never felt like it was rushed.

Practice, practice, practice - we were told we’d have 3 minutes to pitch/demo and maybe a few additional questions. I made sure River and I practised repeatedly to get our time down to 3mins and ensure we getting across everything we wanted to. The important thing with such a short amount of time, is that we were forced to cut things out as well as ensure we emphasised the main points. It was a ruthless exercise in saying ‘no’. During the actual pitches, we realised everyone was taking longer (without repercussions), so I added an extra 30 seconds to cover the potential market sizes and business models.

Leave artefacts - After the pitches, we knew that we had to take the site down. It was built at high speed and in a way that ended up exposing someone’s data to the internet at large (thanks, River!). It might have been somewhat easier to build something using faked data that we could happily share the URL to and leave online. On the other hand, our demo would not have been half as compelling if we weren’t running it real-time on live data.

Looking to the future

This is a product we all want to use and the team is interested in taking this forward. There are a lot of things to think about and many things we would build differently so we’re discussing the next steps. For example, there are likely ways to empower the end-users to control their data and give them more flexibility, even though the work at the hackathon was already quite impressive. Given how well Seedhack went, you might even see us at Seedcamp Week later in the year. If you think this is something you’d like to work on with us, do get in touch!

To wrap things up, here’s a victory selfie!