Tuesday after our VC presentation and we show up at the loft ready for our SGM with Jay and the teaching staff. Feelings are mixed as we know we have a product idea that according to the VCs can "bring a lot of value" (so we are excited) yet is "highly dependent on our modeling layer" (so we are scared and unsure). We are going in to the SGM looking for some guidance.
Thankfully, our CS210 staff gave us just that. One of the TAs led us through some procedural/infrastructure considerations, leading to creation of this blog and usage of our GitHub to track and assign issues. This was very helpful, but the more meaningful insight came from Jay who had further feedback from the VCs and plenty of personal opinions regarding our "Big Data to Small Data" exploration platform.
Basically, it sucked. The use cases were unclear, the data was unavailable, the models didn't exist, the team was unclear if we could pull it off... the list goes on. Basically Jay told us that all our creeping suspicions and fears were justified and that we needed to better define our users and the actionable ways in which they could benefit from our product. He also thought our product was maybe too ambitious and that we needed to remember "it is better to under-promise and over-deliver than over-promise and under-deliver." With this input, we realized we had a lot of work to do, and planned an emergency pivot meeting that night in the only place we felt appropriate- the d.school.
“under-promise and over-deliver”