We wanted to create a product that would respond to this question: How might we reduce the effect social media has on highschool students that ultimately causes them to procrastinate?
Below is the slideshow as well as the script that goes along with it that our team created for our pitch to the judges at our school.
Pitch Script:
Good morning judges and listeners, we are the A Button Away team, and we are dedicated to reducing the temptation and distraction of social media for high school students. I am Kavika, this is Rebecca, and this is Erica.
According to a research conducted by the Washington Post, the average teen currently spends around 7 hours on their electronic devices everyday, with most of this time spent using social media. This leads to potential procrastination and ineffective work habits. According to research, around 20% of the population is affected by procrastination caused by social media usage. Surveys of the student population suggests that procrastination is pervasive with some surveys suggesting that 85-95% of students have problems associated with procrastination.
For most students, only a small percentage of their day is spent productively doing work, while distractions like social media makes it almost impossible to focus for most teens when their time is unstructured. From our research, we found that the most effective way to escape the evil cycle of procrastination is to eliminate distractions, increase motivation to commit to the task, and to promise yourself a reward. Our chrome extension combines all of these, which makes it the ultimate tool to defeat procrastination.
Our product will motivate the students to finish their work before they go on social apps. Our purpose is to reduce the effect social media has on highschool students, drastically decreasing their procrastination caused by distraction of social media.
Our product is a Google Chrome Extension. Our add-on will connect to the Google Classroom “turn in” button. Google Classroom is one of the most widely used online school platforms that aims to grade, assign, and turn in assignments online.
Once this product has been connected with google classroom, the user can select certain projects that they wish to complete with the help of our extension. Not every assignment will automatically be linked because we believe that it would only make sense that the user should be able to choose which assignments they would like to work on and be affected by our extension.
A customizable list will appear once you open the user interface, this is called the block list. You can insert the links of as many sites that distract you from doing your work on this block list. Until the “turn in” button is pressed, the social media apps/websites from the customizable list will be locked on the student’s laptop. Our goal is not to take away the freedom of our users, we simply want to make distractions as inconvenient as possible. There will be an on/off switch for each site on the block list. The user will be able to turn the switch off for a maximum of 3 times a day, for a set amount of time.
For example, if the user is having dinner after a long productive period of work, they might want to watch netflix while they're eating. The user may recognize that when they take breaks like these, their breaks are all about 20 minutes long. Knowing this, they can set the time of which the switch will stay off for, to 20 minutes. After 20 minutes the switch would automatically turn back on and the user would no longer be able to be on the app, in this case Netflix. This user would escape netflix binging and go back to finishing that assignment due tomorrow.
To give users a little more studying motivation, we have designed a simple rewarding system along with the extension, for every 3 assignments finished, and turned in, the user will gain a unique virtual button that can be found in the “collection” tab of the extension interface. This additional feature will come with a “refer a friend” system, we encourage users to invite friends to download our extension by awarding them 2 buttons per invitation, each user will have a unique invitation code.
Here is what our launched extension would look like. Here you may ask, why an extension? Why not an app? We want this project to be as successful as possible. Our plan is for the long haul, we are thinking of the big picture of helping as many people as we can. This is why we are starting our project which has an ultimate goal of helping people become free of procrastination by launching an extension. An extension is much cheaper and easier to create and to launch. This way we will be able to spend more of our budget on marketing and expanding our audience. Once we have a strong foundation to work up from (profit-wise, and information about what worked best? What should we get rid of?) we will expand this project to an app, which will then allow even more users to join that do not use chrome or apple.
To market our product, we will be sponsoring content creators, and buying ads on Youtube and Instagram, some of the most popular social platforms among teens. 200, 000 impressions on Instagram and 100, 000 impressions on Youtube will in total cost around $11,340 USD, at most.
In addition to our budget for our marketing strategies, we will have a budget for hired professionals to assist us with bringing our designs to life. We will be hiring a professional coder and a professional graphic designer. The budget for the coder is $60 USD per hour and we will be working with them for 80 hours. The graphic designer will be hired $50 per hour and we will be working with them for 50 hours. This is a total of $7300 USD for the hired personnels.
We will be asking for $30 000 USD after putting into account the cost for hired professionals, marketing, and sponsorships. We are asking for only $30 000 USD which includes the extra costs that may come up in the developing process.
Our profit from this project will come from payments by users after a free trial. The users will be able to install the extension for free, having the full experience free for a month.
After the free trial program, the users will pay $2.99/month with multiple billing options available. We will be accepting PayPal, Apple Pay, Visa, Mastercard, and other debit and credit cards. .
We estimate that we’ll earn back the cost of the project within the first month, along with a 10-15 thousand dollar profit in USD the month after the free trial. The profit will grow at a larger scale after the break even with the profit. From our promotion impression of around 300,000 people we expect the initial registered user number to be at least 15,000. Our profit gained from memberships will increase along with the growth of the user base.
Compared to other productivity tools, our product, A Button Away, is unique because it provides direct effective support in eliminating internet distractions when teens are working on assignments, while charging an extremely low fee. Our product is quite straightforward. Simple. We believe that straightforwardness and simplicity with just the right amount of colour and fun is key to a productivity tool like this. By having a focused goal of our product, we make sure that our product itself is not part of our users’ distractions. Our product will be there to guide many students out of the endless maze of procrastination.