Elisa Pyykkönen

A digital service for pet owners to make a custom evacuation plan for household pets.

My role

I was in sole charge of the project.

About this Project

This service was initially done for a course where we studied Lean Startup, MVP and rapid prototyping. The project was done very hastily in a couple of days due to the nature of the course and hence why it did have some major functionality – let's say – hiccups. It has been improved since then and will be further improved and polished over time. So stay tuned!

In the beginning of the course we created 100 ideas for a possible service. We limited those ideas to 10 most interesting by using different methods like pitching the ideas to others. After that we started making minimum viable products (MVP) of those ideas and validating them by pitching and selling them and getting peer reviews.

The main idea of this service is to give the customer a way of creating a custom evacuation plan for the pets in the household, to make the job of the fire fighters / other emergency service personnel easier. A customer can enter how many and what kind of pets there are in the apartment, where to look for them, the contact info of the resident and the emergency contact. The customer is then able to print the evacuation plan and place it on the internal door. For now it only has three most popular pets in Finland to keep the concept and product small and manageable, but for the customer point of view it should include other animals too.

The most challenging part of this project was the time given to finish it and that the product itself needed to be functional for me to be able to sell it, so the functionality became more important than the design of the service itself. On the other hand, the design of the printable product had to be clear and quick to understand, otherwise it would not serve its purpose, which is to make the saving of the pets easier. In this case the actual customer is a friend or a relative of mine and because of that I chose to make the illustrations in my style to make that a selling point. If this was a product for larger audience, the simplicity and understandability of the design would be more crucial.

The service was sold to over 20 people for 1€/link in its raw form in a short period of time, because selling our products was a part of the course. Even though the product was flawed, there was a demand and interest for this kind of a service, and I got very encouraging and good feedback from the customers and other students.

What I learned

I have lots of negative say about how the course was organized and that the teachers clearly didn’t know their audience’s orientation for most of us had little to none coding experience which this course clearly required. I was one of the lucky few who had the basic knowledge and even I had hard time keeping up with the schedule and demands of the course.

Even though the course was bad, it taught a lot. I learned the difference between MVP and POC, though not from the teachers but studying further on my own. The things we created should have been handled as a proof of concept than minimum viable products and should have not been sold, or we should have been given a bit more time than couple of days per project. From the coding point of view new things I learned making this were how to make a button to open a print window for a specific section, and to link images with form sections. And for the last but most of importantly: source criticism.