Note: This post was originally published in FORBES under FORBES Entrepreneurs
This is the second article in a series about how a group of students at Penn created a non-profit commercializing a product that helps the visually impaired recognize what they are looking at. Check out the first article here.
After building the first prototype of ThirdEye (see a demo at ThirdEyeGlass.com) over a weekend at a hackathon, we had tested it with several visually impaired people at the National Federation of the Blind. The next step was to commercialize it.
Learning How to Run a Business
Of course, as students with very little “real world” business experience, we had no idea how to go forward and actually bring our product to market. Having very few contacts with successful entrepreneurs, for the next few weeks we lived on our school’s alumni directory. Whenever we found anyone–entrepreneurs, founders, medical personnel, CEOs, friends, and investors–we would pitch them and ask for advice on how to go forward. Almost all agreed to have a quick call. After all, who doesn’t like to talk about himself and his experiences?
Other times, I would directly ask alumni from my school for investment.
So what do you do?
“My team is building ThirdEye, a product that empowers the blind by helping them recognize what they are looking at.”
How does it work?
“Well let me show you!”
I would put on Glass, say, “Okay Glass, recognize this,” and within a few seconds a computerized voice would say “white iPhone 5s.”
“My team is building ThirdEye, a product that empowers the blind by helping them recognize what they are looking at.”
How does it work?
“Well let me show you!”
I would put on Glass, say, “Okay Glass, recognize this,” and within a few seconds a computerized voice would say “white iPhone 5s.”
That’s exactly what we wanted. My job became to decipher the feedback, combine ideas, throw out most of the suggestions, and then work with my team to implement the best ideas.
Simply asking successful founders who graduated from my university for guidance allowed us to save both time and money that we would have had to spend learning via traditional methods. Plus, I was indirectly able to meet and establish relationships with some of the most successful entrepreneurs around the world.
Applying Theory to Practice
We had one big advantage because we were in college: we didn’t have any particular need to fundraise. After all, we were building the product ourselves, the product itself cost basically nothing to use, we didn’t need to pay ourselves, and we were already living and paying for food because of school. Our opportunity costs were basically zero and we knew that college was one of the best times to work on a startup.
Life became a cycle. Get up at 8. Go to classes in the morning. Hold phone meetings between classes. Apply to competitions and grants afterwards. Talk to advisers. Work on homework (a little). Have dinner with a more experienced entrepreneur. Attend school or startup events. Go to the gym. Read business books. Sleep at 3 AM.
But it didn’t feel like work. We were learning so much about everything–how to talk to people, how to work with people, how to influence people, accounting and finance, how to become a better software developer, the legal aspects of entrepreneurship, how to work with the media, how to write a business plan, how to talk to customers, how to research competition, how to pitch to investors, how markets work, how to analyze companies, and how to publicly speak–that it felt like an opportunity.
“Failing” In the Public’s Eyes Only to Revitalize Our Operations
Early in 2015, we were right on development schedule when news came out that Google was apparently shutting down Glass. Almost instantly, everyone assumed that ThirdEye was done.
In fact, the Google Glass delay became one of our biggest assets. We knew that Google would be developing a new consumer version of Glass later next year. But now, since everyone thought we had “failed,” we didn’t have any pressures from the outside to launch soon. For the next half year, we decided to reduce our dependence on Glass altogether and focus on porting our app onto iOS and Android.
Not only would this allow users to download the app right on their phones to use the product for free, but we could launch sooner and distribution/scaling would be significantly easier.
Building A Product We Didn’t Know How to Build
The question became how do you build the app on iOS and Android? We had all done software development before starting the company, but none of us had ever built an app before–let alone publish it for thousands of people to use it on an everyday basis.
Still, rather than paying someone else to do it, we decided to stay lean and just learn ourselves. After all, the skills would come in handy later regardless of whether ThirdEye was successful.
Indeed, while I and a couple newer team members were hustling on the business front, the other original co-founders–Ben Sandler and Joe Cappadona–were hustling through Stack Overflow and learning software development on the go while building the mobile apps.
Despite the fairly simple nature of the application though, “things that were easy to program into the Glass app, like taking a picture and storing it on the device, were not as straightforward on iOS. I had to scrap several different versions of the app simply because my code wouldn’t work and I had no idea why; it wasn’t until several months after the initial deadline I had set that I finally managed to finish a working prototype” says Joe.
For a stretch, nothing seemed to work. We missed deadlines because we were too ambitious about getting newer iterations of our product to market as soon as possible (not to mention having to deal with school as well).
The hardest part however was creating an intuitive experience on mobile. Since we were targeting visually impaired people–as opposed to completely blind people–we knew that members of our target audience would be able to see and touch “blobs” in front of them, and thus would be able to point their phone camera at the blob. But how do you design the best interface for that?
Rather than hiring and paying videographers, product designers, and web designers, we just decided to teach ourselves the basics of design. We learned Photoshop ourselves to create a logo and the UI/UX, learned frontend and backend web development to build our website, and learned Final Cut Pro to create a video. Why pay people when you can learn useful skills yourself?
After testing both platforms with visually impaired people, we finally had a product that we knew the market wanted.
Hustling Through The Other Aspects of Launch
Our goal became to leverage every penny of the absurd tuition we were paying to even go to college. For example, rather than paying thousands of dollars to do additional structured medical testing (not to mention time and stress), we would go to our school’s eye hospital, sit in the lobby, and every time we saw a visually impaired person, we would politely approach, show them our product, and ask them a few questions. Through this, normally inaccessible customer interviews became free and interesting.
Rather than pay lawyers to take care of our legal work, we convinced a law professor to accept us into our law school’s Legal Entrepreneurship Clinic. At the clinic, third year law students completed all of our legal documents for free, and in return gained practical experience working with a startup. After our basic documents were done, anytime we had a legal question, we would just ask one of our professors (or reach out to a local Philadelphia law firm and ask for pro bono work). Why pay lawyers $500 an hour?
Marketing and advertising? We didn’t spend a dime. Instead, we would cold email every alumni in major media, tell them that we were students working on a product to help the visually impaired, and just ask them for advice. Instead of asking them for an article, they would ask us if they could write about us. We were able to access thousands of friends and families of the visually impaired.
Thoughout this entire process, we spent a total of zero dollars. The only thing we did spend was time…. Time that taught us practical skills that we’re going to use for the rest of our lives.
Remember, you never really need money to start a company. If you just hustle hard enough, there’s always a way to make things work for free.
Come back next week to read more about how to manage classes while working on a startup in school.
Rajat Bhageria is the author of What High School Didn’t Teach Me, the founder and CEO of ThirdEye and, currently a student at UPenn. Follow him at RajatBhageria.com
