Challenge

I am a co-founder of a startup named Solbib and currently lead a team of 7 people. Two years  ago, I got an idea that I thought might be the game changer. I discussed it with some of my  friends (Software Engineers) and they were willing to give it a try. We needed to get a proof of  concept that whether this idea is worth pursuing or it can be done at all. We wanted to provide  security surveillance through security cameras and providing the users streaming anywhere on  their android or IPhones so they can monitor all the activities at their homes and offices from  anywhere. We wanted to provide automatic alarms for abnormal activities or detecting humans  in some sensitive areas where they are not supposed to be and wanted to accomplish this by  some Artificial Intelligence techniques.

Selection

We wanted to quickly test our idea and get a proof of concept whether this can be done and is  this really worth continuing and getting answers like, are the customers really interested in a  product like this?

Application

For the first learning launch we wanted to test whether it can be done with the expertise we  currently have or are there any technological constraints? So we decided to develop a small  prototype and quickly test it. We were a team of 4 at that time. We successfully developed the  streaming part and were able to provide live streaming of cameras on our website, android  application and an IPhone application. We incorporated motion detection and also successfully  incorporated Human detection, Fire detection and Smoke detection by some AI based  techniques. We weren’t able to do what we called “abnormal activities” previously because  those activities were different at different locations and we had problems defining them and  when we opted for some fixed suspicious activities like fainting, falling, quick movements etc.  We realized that these weren’t the easy tasks and we lacked technical expertise for that and  these needed a lot of research and resources.

For our second learning Launch, we decided to test our product with real customers with only  the features that we were able to successfully implement and excluded the abnormal activity  part. We organized a free demo of the product at our office and invited people from industry  and the people nearby to test our product and get feedback. When we presented our product,  we came to know that people were satisfied with what we were providing and were happy  even with Human, fire and smoke detection systems that relied on cameras only and didn’t  need any extra sensors. So here we earned that we only need to focus on what we currently  have and quickly build a deployable solution as some of the people asked us to install the  system at their houses and offices.

Insight

By applying learning Launch tool, we came to know that we don’t need to implement that  sophisticated “abnormal activity detection” that we previously considered to be the real selling  point of our product and started focusing on the features that we developed in our prototype.  Now we had a proof of concept that not only this is doable but the customers are very much  interested in buying our product and suggested some more features which were easy to  implement that we incorporated in our beta release.

Approach

From the results of applying this design thinking tool, we inferred that learning launch was the  appropriate tool. We gained insight to our own limitation and customer needs and had a strong  reason to continue our idea and develop a scalable product on the basis of our prototype. Now  we’ve grown to a small company from a startup and providing state of the art security solutions  in the area.

