My Story in Tech Challenge
As part of safewAI team tackling Huawei’s challenge
Usually, I am the one interviewing other students about their experience in different courses offered by UnternehmerTUM Academy for Innovators, but since I have taken almost all the courses after 1 year and a half, I would like to share my stories with you.
The first course I ever took from UnternehmerTUM Academy for Innovators was Tech Challenge. Since I have participated in different hackathons since the age of 18, I thought Tech Challenge would be the perfect course for me since I like hands-on and practical courses. I was in my first semester at TUM studying MSc. in Management & Technology at that time and I was still pretty new to everything. I decided to join TC together with my friend Nico, who at that time I had known for one week or two in the TUM Buddy Group we were both in. Another guy from our Buddy Group joined us, Christian, and since we felt kind of familiar with one another, especially taking into consideration that all of us were new in TUM and Munich, we decided to form a team together. However, we were still looking for one or two more team members.
We attended the Tech Challenge Kick-Off where we listened to companies presenting their challenges to us. I have to admit, all the challenges were very attempting. However, Huawei’s challenge was somehow the most difficult one. We had to implement some machine learning and use a text-to-speech solution. It was Nico who was insisting on going for Huawei’s challenge. The way he saw it, if we would take the most difficult challenge to tackle, we would also be able to learn more from this experience. During the Kick-Off, we met Lysander, who decided to join our team as well. We were now 4 people, 3 of us were guys, so we realized it made sense to add another girl on the board, and so did we. Ana was the last to join our team that day. We were all Management & Technology master’s students and almost all of us were in our first semester, besides Lysander who was in his second semester. True, there was not much diversity in our team, but we all had experiences in different fields. Christian was very good at coding, Lysander had already a social startup, Nico was good in engineering, Ana was good in business, and I had already had some experience with creating business models, pitching, and marketing. We were good to go. At the end of that day, we decided to go for Huawei’s challenge.
The first thing we did was to come up with different problems we saw in our everyday life and possible solutions for them. Each of us would bring up to 3 ideas. Some wanted to learn a language in a better way, make an app that scans the fridge and suggests to you what to cook, or make better speech-to-text software. And many others. Then we would go and ask people about these ideas if there was really a burning need out there. When we couldn’t find a burning need, we would go and iterate again. Only after 3 or 4 weeks, we had found a problem in which we believed there was a real need and that we could find a possible solution.
I must say that our coach Sonja was really supportive. She would share with us her experience, lead us by asking questions, and explain to us how to do hypothesis testing. Now that we had an idea, and that was to make women feel safe while walking on the streets, especially at night, the next step was to validate our hypothesis. We did so by asking people in the streets and also online. We received some really good feedback.
Once we were done with the ideation process and competitor analysis, it was time to focus on the prototype. Firstly we did some mockups, no coding just designed a simple app and asked people to use it and to give us feedback. We would remove features or add new features in every iteration we made. In the end, we had kind of a suitable solution in our mind and decided to work on it. Christian was the one who knew how to code well so he was the one who did most of the programming, while Nico helped him with coding some features too. Lysander was trying to find partners and I and Ana were focusing on the pitch and the video. However, during the journey, all of us were involved in brainstorming, ideation, hypothesis testing, research, and the pitch. We really wanted to collaborate with Munich’s municipality but that ended up being very difficult. However, that didn’t disappoint us. We ended up giving a really good pitch, for which we had practiced until midnight. Since the topic we were talking about, women's safety was considered a really important and impactful one, Huawei decided to give 4 prizes instead of 3 by calling us the winners of the public’s heart. That was a really fulfilling moment.
After Demo Day and the positive feedback, we decided to continue with our idea. We were motivated and energized. I and Ana were even invited by UnternehmerTUM to join an event with Vice President of AWS Professional Services, Todd Weatherby, at the Amazon Headquarters in Munich, to talk about how to include more women in the entrepreneurship world. Pitching our idea on Amazon was a great experience. We were then offered support from the team of Amazon and we had another meeting with them later on.
We also applied for XPLORE, XPRENEURS, and TIE2. But that is another story. You can learn more about our prototype here.
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