THE FULL STORY
IDEATION
Our journey as a team began from the Ideation process, which was our hardest and most important task as an upcoming business. The ideation process involved the whole team brainstorming different ways to come up with ideas for our product and company. Our goal was to find the wants of the customers, and make products or services that satisfy them. This was done through extensive market research, both primary and secondary, by our marketing team. We concluded from the results of this research process that an issue the public faces is a problem with the quality of air, and how to tackle them. Hence, we landed upon InfoAir! However, we had countless ideas before InfoAir, all needing to be scrapped for various reasons. It was only after countless trials and tribulations that we had reached where we are right now.
Furthermore, the Ideation process was a really important step in our business as it adapted each other to our workstyles, and made our company's workflow more cohesive.
PLANNING
After finalizing our business and initial product idea, we had to plan for our next steps of what to do as a company. Each department had to focus on what it had to do for the company’s future. The finance department worked on ordering all the components and making the balance sheets. The tech and production departments focused on the frameworks and the design of our products whereas marketing focused on making sales plans and potential collaborations with other organizations.
PROTOTYPING
As all our components had arrived, it was finally time for us to make the product. This part of the process was predominantly done by the Tech and Productions team. The production team focused on the casing of our product through the usage of biodegradable plastic with the usage of 3D printers. The tech team worked on the interiors; the microprocessor was programmed to connect a sensor which can accurately detect PM levels, after which it was connected to an OLED Display which further communicated these values to the users. Having a working prototype was vital for our company, as we could showcase it to our potential customers, but our prototype still had multiple problems. After making multiple prototypes due to changing its design and dimensions to make it considerably smaller, we had a working prototype!
SALES AND PRODUCTION
Our Marketing team was incharge of the sales whilst we started batch production of our product. Since the product had various options for colors, our team decided to go for pre orders and then delivery so that customers are able to choose the color of their InfoAir device. A sales booth was set up and sample pieces were kept on display for demonstration purposes. A payment of 50% was taken from customers as an advance inorder to reserve the product which was then delivered to them within 10 days with the balance amount being collected on deliver.
