Week 1 Pitch Feedback

[brandonbrown]

General Pitch Feedback

• Clear and provocative explanation of problem
• Nicely states how and why HouseFax is the right solution
• Target Audience is too broad (Realtors, home buyers, and home sellers)
• Is there an age group, lifestyle, income level, or other factors that will help you to narrow this down further? A more detailed audience will give clarity to feature and design direction.
• Trulia and Zillow are good examples of heavily trafficked competition
• Good transition from competition to your early designs
• Overall design can use refinement and direction, please schedule time with Brandon Brown to discuss
• Technology stack looks appropriate for this type of application
• Documentation explaining your use of proposed APIs will be highly scrutinized
• Austin TX restriction may be a blessing allowing you to focus on a small region

Concept Feedback

• This is a smart idea serving a great community focused purpose. There is an entire section of the startup world dedicated to problems such as these, they’re called “Public Safety Startups.”
• Some relevant companies that you may be able to pull direction and features from:
  • https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/10/banned-crime-reporting-app-vigilante-returns-as-citizen-says-its-report-incident-feature-will-be-pulled/
  • https://news.crunchbase.com/news/neighborhood-surveillance-startup-flock-safety-raises-9-6m/
  • https://www.geekwire.com/2015/this-app-lets-students-anonymously-report-bullying-and-crime/
  • https://www.crimereports.com/
• If you can’t get approval for a crime reporting api, this may be an opportunity for you to construct a small API that would provide you with temporary “fake” data to prove your concept. If approval for a Crime API extends late into week 3, we highly recommend this approach to avoid stalling the entire concept.

[reactivepixel]

Concept Feedback

• UVP Problem: Pulling and displaying info from the API falls short of providing a transformative experience. You are merging 2 APIs data, which is a great step, but currently you are not identifying a unique value proposition.
• UVP Possible Solution: Zillow has a rating score for schools in the target house's area. Consider taking in the info from the CrimeAPI and create a risk score of your own. This could be centered around specific houses or neighborhoods. Rather than just displaying the info to the user you can create weighted categories of crimes and apply that to a formula that calculates a meaningful score to advise your users. If there is ANY crime near my house I might freak out, but if you are able to establish a threshold of normal and how this property compares to that you will provide your users with a unique and meaningful solution.
• If displaying specific crimes, proximity of the crime to the address in question would be idea. Don't burden your audience with having to look at several maps and have them mentally figure out where they are in comparison.
• If a user can create a profile and have multiple properties, should you allow them to setup notification settings, should a crime of a defined threshold be committed within a defined proximity?

[TraceLarson]

Created #7 in response to UVP issue.