dcsil / dream-team

Team repository for Dream Team

DreamTune

Demo Video

DreamTune is a company founded in the Music Copyright industry and is dedicated to streamlining the process of music payment. By integrating into our customer's POS system and tracking relevant information, we aim to become the seamless solution for businesses to pay royalties quickly and easily.

Application

You can view our production application hosted here. See our README.md in the app folder to read more about our app.

How our Team Works

We are using issues as the main way to delegate tasks. We are also using the projects tabs and milestones to help organize this information. Communication will happen mainly over our private slack channel. Some of our internal documents will be hosted on Google Drive, but as needed we will convert them to markdown and upload to GitHub.

Table of Contents.

• People
• Diversity
• Product & Research
  • Market
  • Roadmap

dream-team's Issues

Competitive Landscape

Part 3: Competitive Landscape
Understanding your competitive landscape is a hot button issue for strategic-minded entrepreneurs. It is especially critical to deeply comprehend and extensively utilize competition information in developing your Business Model Canvas. Business plans, developed with elaborate, clear, and concise understanding of competitive landscape, provide critical information that are essential for investors and other stakeholders, this is because competition is a major source of risk to your venture, and its prosperity and their investment. Moreover, pausing and investigating the competitive landscape will give you an additional perspective on prioritizing what products/services to offer your customers.

“It’s not enough to build a company that creates a lot of value, you have to also capture significant levels of that value”.

[Christine] Establish APA format for the paper

• create Google Doc for the final assignment
• establish APA formatting
• edit introduction paragraph; add emotion!

Record changes and updates to architecture

Record any decisions, changes, and updates to your StackShare Stack and update your Architecture diagram from A3.

[Ryan] Story Boarding/Drawings to accompany A2a

[Christine] Literature on State of the Market

Set up Continuous Integration (CI) in GitHub Actions

USE GitHub Actions
https://help.github.com/en/actions/automating-your-workflow-with-github-actions

Business Model Canvas

Part 1: Business Model Canvas
The placement of Business Model Canvas (BMC) at the opening of this assignment is a strategic move to encourage you to work through the rest of this assignment with the concept of BMC in mind, specifically when designing and prototyping your products/services. Your strategic customer offerings, infrastructure requirements to support such offerings, and the financial viability of such venture are the determinants of your success in attracting strong and trustworthy investors. You are already equipped with the right framework to identify and analyze customer value in Value Proposition Canvas (see part 2 of this assignment). However, the challenge you will face is building a roadmap that allows you to succinctly transform ideas from value propositions to strategic business elements.

Business Model Canvas Deliverable

In Assignment 3, you developed personas for your targeted Customer Segments. These personas are a guiding principle for the entire customer facing business model design process and will validate your choices regarding Value Propositions, Distribution Channels, Customer Relationships, and Revenue Streams. From this point you will be in a position to articulate your venture’s Key Activities, Key Resources, Key Partners, and the Costs categories needed to execute the business model. Figure 1 shows how the cycle of Value Proposition Canvas and Business Model Canvas is closed in an iterative process. You will need to go through this cycle throughout the assignment, but the BMC should be at the opening of the assignment. The rest of your written work should provide enough arguments to support and validate the content of your proposed BMC. The deliverable of this part of assignment is an initial draft of a Business Model Canvas for your venture in its original template found in here (Links to an external site.). You also need to include a description explaining the different components in your canvas and provide supporting arguments for specific claims you have made in identification, evaluation, and validation of your findings. Most of the content and components will be hypotheses, at this stage, nonetheless, the quality of your argument and the sufficiency of supporting information can be judges by an informed reader and will be used to assess your work.

[Sarthak] Market Research: 5-10 stores

Segmentation:
Geographical: all in Toronto for our research
Firmographic: asked different types of establishments: stores, restaurants, etc.
Behavioural: questions about product use. How do you currently pay these dues? Do you need a service that lets you work with a charged admission? Do you need a service that accommodates live music performance?

Questions to ask:
Does your venue play music during its operational hours?
Does your venue charge an admission (all clubs/bars probably)?
Do people conduct physical activity to to music (such as dances/fitness classes)?
Is live music ever played at your venue: i.e. Karaoke, DJ, Live Music performance
How do you currently pay these dues?
Are you satisfied with the ease and efficiency with which you can complete this payment?

Open ended questions about what they would like to see …

[Ryan/Christine] Condense Part 1 findings into Assignment 2a text

Reminder! Team meeting Monday, January 13th, 10 am. Gerstein, Room 1220.

Deploy a web app to a production environment

You must have your app available online (if a web app) via a public URL. If you are not making a web app, you must have your app available via a compiled artifact in a GitHub Release for the teaching staff to install. We should not have to do anything than open the install file.

Tip: Use DCSIL’s Heroku Account

[Shiyao] [A2] Market Analysis Q2: Target market and customer

Google doc

Describe your target market and target customer. Take a deep dive into market segregation research and reflect results of your finding. Stay away from excessive descriptions and avoid repeating the material that reader can readily find by looking into your sources. Your job is to assimilate information and report your consolidated analyses and synthesize in the form of market segmentation analysis. Be authentic and make it your own work.

Preliminary user interface design and paper prototype

An initial design to map out the basic user interface and functionality

Update Roadmap After UX Research

Update roadmap using insights from the UX research

Acceptance Criteria:
Updated github issues to reflect changes in the roadmap
Updated wireframes and high fidelity prototype

[Ribhav] Preliminary research on market size

[Ryan] Market Research: 5-10 Restaurants/Bars

Segmentation:
Geographical: all in Toronto for our research
Firmographic: asked different types of establishments: stores, restaurants, etc.
Behavioural: questions about product use. How do you currently pay these dues? Do you need a service that lets you work with a charged admission? Do you need a service that accommodates live music performance?

Questions to ask:
Does your venue play music during its operational hours?
Does your venue charge an admission (all clubs/bars probably)?
Do people conduct physical activity to to music (such as dances/fitness classes)?
Is live music ever played at your venue: i.e. Karaoke, DJ, Live Music performance
How do you currently pay these dues?
Are you satisfied with the ease and efficiency with which you can complete this payment?

Open ended questions about what they would like to see …

Assignment A2

[Christine/Sarthak/Ribhav] Prepare for presentation in class on Wednesday, Jan 22

[Shiyao] [A2] Market Analysis Q1: Identifying Industry

Google doc

Identify the industry that you have decided to work in. If your business idea crosses the boundaries and cannot fit into conventional industry classifications, then start with target market and target customers right away.

CSC454: Homework for January 15, 2019

https://q.utoronto.ca/courses/131212/discussion_topics/492699

Completed: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_ogugcOOLigmWVn0nNKMek3P3tlZORCTAJ9cJzPxIZo/edit?usp=sharing

Value Proposition Canvas

Part 2: Value Proposition Canvas
For each persona you identified in Assignment 3, you evaluated the jobs, pains, and gains that were most significant to your customer segment. In this section you will define possible products, services, or features that can potentially be used to help complete your customer’s jobs and indicate how that will relieve pains and/or create gains.

Financial Analysis Write-Up

Include all relevant charts in your assignment writeup and elaborate the significance and importance of these charts. Do you believe they reflect a realistic estimate? Discuss each chart and identify what are their major contributing factors/variables? How sensitive is the chart to these particular variables/factors? For instance, if in the break-even analysis, the number of units sold determines the break-even time; how sensitive is your cash flow chart to changes in the units sold? You also need to elaborate on the possibility that sales projections do not reach the estimated figures, and it’s impact on the startup’s financial viability. What are the financial risks that threaten sustainability of the startup over 5-year plan? How likely is it that an investor finds this deal appealing and invests in it? Your answers to these questions should only be based on the financial assumptions, the input financial data and the charts of this section. The charts that you will need to include in your writeup include:

• Annual Revenue / EBITDA
• Net / Gross Margins
• Cash Balance
• Annual Subscriber Growth
• CAC Payback
• Make sure to include a coherent interpretation of each excel generated graph that you include in your writeup.

Summarize user tests and develop insights

Include any notes, questions, mistakes, and feedback from the user in the final submission as an appendix

Summarize how the research sessions went in the main report. Reference the notes if needed.

CSC454 Send email to SOCAN with questions

Conduct user tests and record observations

For at least 2 users to whom you give the survey in CSC454/2527, also ask them to complete a research study with a prototype

The prototype can be a paper prototype, mockups, an Invision doc, Figma doc, or other form of visual interface

Explain to the user what you want them to accomplish, not which parts of the UI to interact with
As they work to complete the task, take notes on anything that seems interesting, any mistakes they made, and any questions they ask. I recommend recording the conversation if possible.

Include any notes, questions, mistakes, and feedback from the user in the final submission as an appendix

Summarize how the research sessions went in the main report. Reference the notes if needed.

[Christine] Market Segmentation Readings

Link to Readings Notes Doc
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zXR4JLNYq3-nSmESVYxVcuUJe2d2qX2n-vn6B55M-e4/edit

[Shiyao/Ribhav] Market Segmentation Graphs for the A2a

Define Cost/Revenue Models

The Revenue Model
Before you jump into populating the financial templates, you must ensure that your assumptions about the revenue and sales figures are based on factual market potential data and not merely based on your intuition. You need to go back to the market background research and ensure it is done accurately. Complete the below steps and provide all of the explanations, justification and details in your assignment writeup.

1. Understand your Market
2. Understand your per-user economics
3. Develop your revenue model and select the financial template that best suits your model

The Cost Model
There is one more step before populating the financial templates, you must ensure that your assumptions about operations costs, cost of goods sold, and payroll are based on solid figures and are not mere hypothesis. Complete below steps and provide all the explanations, justification and details in your assignment writeup.

1. Develop your hiring plan
2. Forecast Operating Costs

[Shiyao/Ribhav] Condense findings of Part 2 into Assignment 2a Text

Define Financial Statements Forecasts

Even though you may start and operate your startup in its early stages without any need for financial statements, you can not raise funds without them. Investors will always ask for your financial statements based on your projected data. Each of the templates provided to you, produces and delivers same financial statements even if they do not seem similar on the surface. “Monthly Proforma” or “Annual Proforma” sheets and similarly “5-Year Annual P&L” or “5-Year Monthly P&L” sheets depicts the projected financial performance for your startup over a 5-year timeframe, including the following components

1. An Income Statement that forecasts Gross Margin, SG&A, Operating Income (EBITDA)
2. A Balance Sheet that forecasts the venture’s projected net financial position over the 5-year plan
3. A Statement of Cash Flow (Capex and Cash Flow) that forecasts the venture’s anticipated cash position and funding requirements over the 5-year plan

Set up Developer Environment and Bootstrap Script

Write a script named script/bootstrap, it should setup much of your system for you.

It is fine if the script targets one operating system (mac, linux, or windows).

Make note of this script in the README of your app. If you have a getting started guide, this can be in there but you should make sure that that guide is mentioned in the README.

Docker and Docker Compose is a good option here

[ALL] Add your individual responses to A2a Part III (Team Culture)

Team Culture
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1eNoH_nesl6vtv9K4I3-LQRtPIEWydYaEprCbiaRiPgU/edit#

Rehearse Presentation for Wed, Jan 22

[Christine] Answer Part 2: Market Analysis, Rationale

[Christine] Synthesize individual responses in A2a Part III into paragraphs

[Christine] Create Bibliography and format assignment into APA style

[Ribhav] Market Research: 5-10 Clubs

Advice: look for parent corporations that manage several clubs

Segmentation:
Geographical: all in Toronto for our research
Firmographic: asked different types of establishments: stores, restaurants, etc.
Behavioural: questions about product use. How do you currently pay these dues? Do you need a service that lets you work with a charged admission? Do you need a service that accommodates live music performance?

Questions to ask:
Does your venue play music during its operational hours?
Does your venue charge an admission (all clubs/bars probably)?
Do people conduct physical activity to to music (such as dances/fitness classes)?
Is live music ever played at your venue: i.e. Karaoke, DJ, Live Music performance
How do you currently pay these dues?
Are you satisfied with the ease and efficiency with which you can complete this payment?

Open ended questions about what they would like to see …

[Ribhav] [A2a] Business Opportunity: Statement of The Problem

Google Doc

1. Explain your business idea, and the problem associated with your idea. (You may do this in revers sequence, you can start with the problem then present your business idea)

2. Why do you think it is a major problem, worth resolving? (do not tell us what you want to do, or how you want to solve it, only elaborate the problem, its significance and perhaps its aspects)

3. What intrigued you to decide to solve this problem? (was it a persona encounter, or someone suggested it to you, and if this is your passion, why?)

4. How do you think solving this problem will impact your life and others’ lives? (not economically or financially; this is more of thinking how this will change day to day life of the people)

[Ryan] Business Opportunity - End Result in A2a

1. What are you creating? How does it look like when done? Is it going to be a tool, an application, a product, a service, or both?

2. If it is a software tool, what is the platform it is being developed for? Is it a mobile platform or web platform? Who uses it? What are the common usages? what context? How?

3. If you are building an accompanying hardware for your software tool, describe it. What does it do? How? What are the usage environments? Is it to be used indoors or outdoors? Can you draw it?

[Christine] Market research: 5-10 Venues

Segmentation:
Geographical: all in Toronto for our research
Firmographic: asked different types of establishments: stores, restaurants, etc.
Behavioural: questions about product use. How do you currently pay these dues? Do you need a service that lets you work with a charged admission? Do you need a service that accommodates live music performance?

Questions to ask:
Does your venue play music during its operational hours?
Does your venue charge an admission (all clubs/bars probably)?
Do people conduct physical activity to to music (such as dances/fitness classes)?
Is live music ever played at your venue: i.e. Karaoke, DJ, Live Music performance
How do you currently pay these dues?
Are you satisfied with the ease and efficiency with which you can complete this payment?

Open ended questions about what they would like to see …

Create prototype for user research

The prototype can be a paper prototype, mockups, an Invision doc, Figma doc, or other form of visual interface

Customer Value Proposition Team Pitch Slides

Irrespective of what you have covered in your write-up, your pitch presentation must follow a strict sequence. This is to allow panelists and judges asses your work against a pre-build rubric. If you do not follow the expected sequent, the judge will assume you have missed some required content, and that will impact your mark.

In your presentation include below topics in the same sequence, however, the number of slides per topic can vary as you find it suitable. You will be limited to a maximum of 8 minutes of presentation and 5 minutes of Q&A.

Here is how you should structure and sequence your presentation.

• Introduction (What is your business? Give an introductory explanation about your startup)
• Customer Personas (Who is your key customer? Introduce them briefly)
• Customer Profile (What are the most critical jobs, pains, and gains identified for your key customers?)
• Products/Services (What are your products or services? Show mock-ups if you have created them?)
• Value Proposition (How do your products and services map to your value proposition?)
• Competitive Landscape (Introduce direct/indirect competitors. What entry barriers do they impose?)
• Your Differentiation (How will you differentiate yourself and attract your target customers?)
• Business Model Canvas (What are the key strategic components of your BMC?)
• Technology and Special Know-How (What technology plays a critical role in your competitiveness?)
• Talk the audience through the development of both sides of your Value Proposition Canvas only. The Customer Segment(s) and Value Proposition(s) and how you learned what you did along the way and how this experience shaped and adjusted your initial thinking and hypotheses. Don’t cram the slides with text. Talk through what you learned about your customer(s) and the offerings that they will find of enough value to pay you for.

Then articulate to the audience the competitive landscape that you will be operating in and how your value proposition clearly differentiates you from your competitors whether they be direct, indirect or possible replacements to your offering.

Against the backdrop of the above outline your Business Model Canvas speaking briefly to the remaining seven (7) elements in your specific case. Some the elements will be in more of a hypothetical state than others and that’s fine but a line needs to be drawn on the sand.

Set up a Financial Research Findings Meeting

Please set up one appointment now with the teaching team so that we can assist and mentor you through this assignment.

After a considerable amount of research required for assignment 5 has been completed.

Preparatory Financial Research

Pre-Assignment Requirement
This assignment does not contain “Relevant Readings and Resources” section, the reason is the only way to learn this material is to read through the financial model spreadsheet, read reference material on-line, understand what are input data, interact with the teaching team, do independent research, think critically, dig in and just get started. Please set up one appointment now with the teaching team so that we can assist and mentor you through this assignment.

[Sarthak] Powerpoint Creation

Design a user test through tasks and evaluations

Explain to the user what you want them to accomplish, not which parts of the UI to interact with

As they work to complete the task, take notes on anything that seems interesting, any mistakes they made, and any questions they ask. I recommend recording the conversation if possible.

Include any notes, questions, mistakes, and feedback from the user in the final submission as an appendix

[All] Ideate! Preliminary Thoughts to Share on Wednesday

[Shiyao] Market Research: 5-10 Community Centres/Gyms

Hart House, Toronto Community Centres, etc

Segmentation:
Geographical: all in Toronto for our research
Firmographic: asked different types of establishments: stores, restaurants, etc.
Behavioural: questions about product use. How do you currently pay these dues? Do you need a service that lets you work with a charged admission? Do you need a service that accommodates live music performance?

Questions to ask:
Does your venue play music during its operational hours?
Does your venue charge an admission (all clubs/bars probably)?
Do people conduct physical activity to to music (such as dances/fitness classes)?
Is live music ever played at your venue: i.e. Karaoke, DJ, Live Music performance
How do you currently pay these dues?
Are you satisfied with the ease and efficiency with which you can complete this payment?

Open ended questions about what they would like to see …

[All] Contribute to A2a Bibliography!

[Shiyao] [A2] Part 2 Q2 Target market and target customer

Google doc

Describe your target market and target customer. Take a deep dive into market segregation research and reflect results of your finding. Stay away from excessive descriptions and avoid repeating the material that reader can readily find by looking into your sources. Your job is to assimilate information and report your consolidated analyses and synthesize in the form of market segmentation analysis. Be authentic and make it your own work.