Hello there! Hope you’re safe and healthy.
You might recall us from semester course registrations.
Yeeeah. Those guys.
Team Resonect :)
(slight heads-up: CoursePal is just “A” venture of Resonect. The best is yet to come)
A humble thanks to all of you who shared the website, CoursePal; shared your valuable course feedbacks, and helped insti become a better place.
Yes, we expected a decent response because it was a problem many of us faced,
but not on a scale where it went on to be used by 1500+ institute students within less than 24 hrs of its final release.
Here’s the story behind the curtains,
The What -
What is CoursePal?
Simply put, it’s a digital space for making course registrations easier. A space to share and view course feedbacks. The people who have taken the course share their feedback, and people who are interested in that course view them.
The Why -
If you’re an insti student (IIT Madras student) we need not explain the why.
400+ courses, many (and often contrarian) feedbacks for the same course, and no systematic and structured solution to take a call whether or not to take a course.
The problem was insti-wide, and the solution was to be fairly frank, simple.
Simple? Yes.
But easy? Ah, not so much.
Especially not, when you need to bring the site live within 24 hrs :)
The How -
2:30 AM, July 19:
Sanjeed (Sanjeed I) and Seenu (two of the three co-founders of Resonect) have just finished a 3hr+ brainstorming session, and are thinking about what course to enroll as registrations have begun on 17th July.
Both are completely exhausted and have no clue, like all of us on which courses to take. Both agree that there should be a much better and easier way for this!
EUREKA!
What if Resonect builds something that solves this exact problem?
Hence, we had the following strategy for this initiative,
The Impact -
7:30 PM, July 20:
CoursePal is open (just) for giving course feedback.
We expected about 80–100 at max users at that point.
11:30 PM, July 20:
The team gets on a call again, as we have to work on viewing the feedbacks now. We are brainstorming the features, feedback received from friends, and discuss that CoursePal is something that we did just to fill in the gap, and hence another nightout is not worth it.
And then Srini asks us to guess the number of users.
In 4 hrs, 600+ users have signed up.
Whoah!
A sweet, rare, beautiful moment. One of those, which don’t necessarily startle or astonish you, but award a quiet confidence.
Needless to say, we put another nightout for best experience :)
8:00 PM, July 21:
Final Site releases. By this time, we have crossed 1000 unique users.
Few of the responses.
Learning?
1. Timing is CRITICAL
Yes, each of us knew course registrations were pain, but none of us solved it before.
To be frank,
nobody would have even cared about CoursePal if it were not Course Registrations week.
Even Bill Gross said in his TED Talk, the most critical part of any startup is the TIMING.
2. Team Bonding
We knew each other past 3 years.
But working on it for almost 13+hrs for 3 days taught us more about each other than the 3 years.
It was humbling, unique and we suppose one of the best tests to know your team.
3. Execution time may swell
When we started off, we thought this was a 3 hr job.
Ended up being for 20+ hrs.
You may plan out with the best of your analytical skills, but somewhere, somehow, in some way, some things might go haywire; it’s we guess inevitable.
Yet if you’re willing to pay the price of actually finishing it, it’ll return you with memories you’d cherish for a lifetime.
And yes, we in no way say that the product we created is flawless.
Yes, there are things that can be improved.
But we aimed to cater to the students as quickly, as early, as lean as possible.
And 1500+ users is the validation that we did it in a fair way.
We were also able to support T5E with their article on courses with the feedbacks we collected.
Lastly,
We need you to understand CoursePal != Resonect.
Resonect is something larger ;)
Something good is coming!
Email us at resonectcore@gmail.com if you’d like to work with us on the “actual” Resonect.
Follow us on Instagram for updates!
Team Resonect,
Sanjeed I, Anuj Khandalikar, Srinivas