Proposal – Tyles App (Excerpts)

Tyles

“Believe, a way to relieve”

By Amrit, Anika, Asma, Md, Yifang
March 16, 2018
The City College of New York

Writing for Engineering ENGL 21007-E
Professor Maryam Alikhani

Executive Summary
            We are HAX, a group of students who are currently studying the vast field of computer science. With this in mind, obviously, we had to come up with an app. With our knowledge of coding, teamwork, and communication we bring you “Tyles”. Tyles is a mobile app that targets stressed-out teens and young adults by incorporating art through various given prompts. Tyles’ smooth interface will engage users to use the app, helping to lead them to a stress-free lifestyle. Tyles will help to relieve the constant stress high school and college students experience by providing the concept of interactive touch, enabling them to create their own works of art. We will also allow users, or Tylers, the ability to share, browse, and edit through the work of other Tylers. Tyles will help to relieve the constant stress high school and college students experience by providing the concept of interactive touch, enabling them to. create their own works of art. We will also allow users, or Tylers, the ability to share, browse, and edit through the work of other Tylers.

Tyles

Business Plan

“Believe, a way to relieve”

 

  1. OPPORTUNITY RECOGNITION

 

1.1       Introduction/Problem

Most high school and college students today experience stress at unprecedented levels due  to school work, personal problems, and family problems, making them feel overwhelmed and exhausted throughout their day. They often lack time for themselves, but with Tyles, people will be given a platform to destress in a very convenient way. As an Android app, Tyles will offer features such as free-hand drawing, browsing, sharing and editing upon others work to make the app interactive and unique. Tylers will be able to use this app on the go during anytime with our offline mode making it easily accessible.

A study was held, in which researchers observed the ill create art, reporting back that art filled occupational voids, distracted the thought of illness, reduced stress and increased positive emotion. In other words, art creates a positive difference in emotion and personality. These benefits can be experienced by both people with illnesses and everyday people who experience stress.

Our survey shows that 88% of teenagers say they feel stressed very often, creating a need for our app. Furthermore, 68% of teenagers stated they use Facebook and Instagram specifically as a way to deal with their stress. As a result, Tyles offers both browsing and sharing as its features. Our app will help Tylers alleviate their stress effectively with methods they are familiar with.

In addition, our surveys demonstrated that 80% of teenagers would want to download an app that involves creativity and 52% who would want an app that gives users methods to relieve stress. This would show people will be ready to download our app, being that Tyles is the perfect tool for young people to relieve stress in the most effective and engaging manner.

1.2       Mission Statement

Tyles will help to relieve the constant stress high school and college students experience by providing the concept of interactive touch, enabling them to create their own works of art. By both partnering with high schools and offering Tyles as a freemium app via Google Play, Tylers will be able to relieve their day-to-day stress via free-hand touch drawing, browsing and editing others’ work, and using Tyles as a creative outlet.

Short-Term Goals:

         Tyles’ direct-to-consumer model will use several guerilla market promotional methods to grow and build. Tyles will look to grow both its B2C and B2B2C business models as a short-term goal. For the school subscription model, we’ll look to get two high schools on-board for a pilot program by January 2019, and look to grow the number of schools and subscriptions over the course of the year. We will post promotional content, such as contests, articles, and the occasional quote of the day, on Facebook and Instagram on Mondays and Sundays twice a day. From our surveys, our target audience is stressed the most on these two days. This will help us spread our app faster to others. From social media platforms, we aim to obtain 300 total likes/follows on Facebook and Instagram within 3 months. Throughout this three-month period, we will add some new but minor functions within the app, optimizing it so that we obtain more users. An example of this would be adding in a new color pack or even a coloring utensil.

 

Long-Term Goals:

Tyles plans on adding new features to the app to our future updates with existing features included which are coloring, editing, browsing, and sharing.

New Features:

  • One new feature is a wish list feature which allows users to save others’ artworks that they want to edit later with a click of a button.
  • Another new feature is a multiplayer free-hand drawing mode that allows users to sync together and draw the same word prompt in their own interpretations. A gallery of all their interpretations of that one word would appear after they are done. Our goal is to continuously add new features to the Tyles’ updates to gain more users and to keep our existing customers engaged.

Getting More Users:

  • Tyles will look to expand to 4 more high schools ahead of the 2017-2018 school year. We will reach out to public, private, specialized, and charter high schools in the New York City area, as well as special needs programs and local universities.

 

  • Once Tyles gains 10,000 users through word of mouth, guerrilla marketing, and promotions, we will replace the ad-based business model and subscription business model to a business model that features growing artists’ artwork.  Artists will get the chance to promote their work through Tyles by paying $3.00 to post an artwork that will be featured on our home page for a week. This will help give growing artists fame, expand our galleries, and give it more diversity.

 

Expand Our App:

  • Currently, our app will target teens and young adults located in New York City, but once Tyles obtains $10,000 in revenue, we plan on using this revenue to expand our means of promotion by making it available for those across other states in the United States. We will also look to expand the subscription model to schools across the East Coast. As a result, this would be an opportunity to understand our target market better with providing us an outlet to make necessary improvements we receive through reviews on the Google Play Store.

Partnership:

  • Moreover, we think that our app could provide assistance for the students in special need programs because these students often face more difficulties than regular schools’ students, whether it’s in terms of their comprehension skills or articulation skills. With Tyles, it will make their learning process much easier and fun.

 

2.6 Challenges

 

Short-Term Challenges:

Setting up our initial pilot programs with NYC high schools will prove to be a challenge, but once these are in place, we’ll be able to use what we’ve learned from these programs to improve the subscription program. Tyles may face other new direct competitors which would negatively affect the number of our app downloads. Another short-term challenge Tyles may face is increasing the amount of likes and followers to our social media pages outside our personal circle of friends and families. In addition, our promotional method of giving students flyers and stickers about our app may not interest them to download our app, which would make this promotional method not effective.

 

Long-Term Challenges:

Getting people to use our app often will be challenging. Our app is not able to get many users to join and stay because they only use our app for a short amount of time and only days when they are most stressed and need an outlet. In addition, the majority of people who use our app every few weeks is also less likely to buy our in-app purchases or spend money because most of our target market would go for free apps and features, considering that they don’t earn money or earn less money than any other groups.  We would like to partner with schools and school boards to expand Tyles’ reputation as a stress-relief app for students, which will take a significant investment of time and relationship management with school administrators.

 

  1. We will promote through social media platforms, such as Facebook and Instagram. We chose this method of promotion because in the surveys we took, 68% of our respondents said they purposely use social media as a tool to destress. Taking advantage of this, we decided to get the word out of our app through social media. We have made plans to post on certain days of the week, preferably Sunday and Mondays, being the most stressful days as stated by our survey respondents.
  2. We will also distribute flyers and stickers to school administrators, where we will get a chance to attract more Tylers onto our app. We will also provide our school subscribers with flyers and stickers, which will get their students to use our app. These stickers and flyers will include a QR code for those who want to easily download our app.
  3. Another method of promoting our company will be going to art exhibitions or art related gatherings around the city. This would be due to the fact that our app targets teenagers and young adults that have a psychographic of being on the artistic side. By doing so, we will gain app awareness and be able to receive data on the app to further enhance it, making it more appealing to consumers.
  4. Through social media, we will hold small contests in which the users will have the ability to enter their personal drawings. The winner will have their work showcased in the recommendations portion of the search in the app. This will allow our consumer to engage in our app and feel that the Tyles’ community takes in consideration of their opinion. The contest will encourage more users to download the app and spread the word to their peers.
  5. We will advertise to schools from all types through pitching about our app and by handing in stickers and flyers. We aim to convince at least two schools by January as our pilot project. Not only will our target market receive knowledge, but it also gives opportunities for us as a company to grow and expand in terms of awareness and usage.
  6. We will put an ad campaign on Facebook when students start school where we will boost our posts. We plan to use the profit we earned from the first eight months to further increase the amount of users to download the app and gain awareness on social media.
  1. CONCLUSION

 

As you can see we all go through the grind nonstop day in and day out full of stress. That is why Tyles is here to provide you an outlet to destress through incorporating art. Tyler’s can create their amazing art through free hand or through adding upon their friends drawing. And with multi shades of color available and along with being able to share through social media, Tyles will allow you to have fun and show others. We will strive to bring excellence in this application by listening to the feedback from the community on ways to improve the app, and further exposing our app to potential customers. The future is bright for an app like this, technology is ever-expanding and we are at the forefront of it.