CoursePal - Shipped product in 2 days

Summary

Untitled

We (Me and Srini) were brainstorming about an idea till around 2AM.
We realized we have no idea which courses to register for and the deadline is close.
We thought that most of our friends have the same problem and we decided to solve it.

IIT Madras had 400+ courses to choose from as electives.
Most students didn’t know which courses to choose or if a course is good/bad
The only way was to manually individually ask seniors. Seniors had to individually give reviews back too.
This was during Covid and it was hard to get a hold of seniors unlike when we were in college physically.

CoursePal - Write and view feedback about courses, access restricted to student email IDs

We were time constrained. Deadline was very close.
Split tasks among us 3 (Me, Srini and Anuj) efficiently.
We broke it down into 2 parts: Collecting feedback, viewing feedback.
Day 0 - Build collect feedback page. Worked through the night. Slept at 8 or 9 AM.
Day 1 - Release collect feedback page. Build view feedback page.
Day 2 - Release view feedback page.
Collecting feedback
- Others have tried it in the past with Google Form, etc. and failed. Because seniors have no other incentive to fill feedback.
- So it was crucial to make it as friction-less as possible for them.
- Flow:
  - Created copy focusing on senior-junior relations. “Help out a junior”, “Ever took a course you regretted”, etc. and shared via Whatsapp statuses, group messages, Insta pages.
  - Login with student email ID
  - Easily search for a course using course ID or parts of the name, whichever you remember.
  - Easy to fill questionnaire with checkboxes and sliders instead of many descriptive questions. Because that is easier to summarize and useful for the viewer.
Viewing feedback
- Identified core JTBD and created filters accordingly.
- Users didn’t want to search for individual course reviews, they wanted to find courses that fit some criteria.

building is so much fun fr.
it always takes more time than you think it will take. plan accordingly.
if you face a problem and know that few others also face it, take initiative and try to solve it. worst case you learn by building it. best case, you help a lot of people.
you learn a lot, even if you fail. you learn a lot, in a very short amount of time. you learn things that can’t be learnt by reading.
the happiness you get after this is unparalleled.

Untitled

still remember when Srini asked us to guess number of users on the first day. we both guessed 50 or 100 max. It was 400 already. We were sleep deprived, but felt so so good.
Feedbacks we collected was used for a T5E article too.

There were a lot of things that can be improved and had to be fixed.
But this was a seasonal problem - course registrations only twice a year.
So we deprioritised this and kept working on Resonect - startup.
We’re planning to open-source it and work with the current students to keep it running.
As of now, we had 6300+ users (80% of the target students in IITM).

Untitled

Hope you had fun reading this :)