Kippa, Reminders for Microsoft Teams
This series of posts is all about the birth of Kippa, Reminders for Microsoft Teams. We started off our journey to build our app for Microsoft Teams in the early stages of the pandemic lockdown and decided to pay forward the experiences we have had in Canada’s tech industry. We wrote a course on how to launch a Startup.
The first post in this series introduced the course, Take Control: Seven Steps to Independence©.
Post #2 in the series, explained the birth of Kippa, our reminder app for Microsoft Teams. It demonstrated how we applied the course’s theory to produce Klippas Technologies inc’s, Kippa – the Microsoft Teams’s Personal Assistant.
We looked at the idea behind Kippa’s birth: where he came from and why we think it’s a good market. We ended that post with the six questions we asked to validate the idea, the theory covered in the course’s Step 2, Validate.
We answered the questions in the post, and followed with the way in which we arrived at the results in Post #3 in this series, which dealt with Exercises 4, 5 and 6 of the course. We ended that post promising to continue in this one with Exercise 7.
Exercise 7—Setting your Objectives
When you launch a company like Klippas Technologies inc., and this is taken directly from the course theory, you need to both understand where you are trying to get to, and how you intend to get there. We have already seen something about business plans, and this is the tool we used to set our objectives.
We want to make money, of course, and the plan demands specific and detailed numbers. Numbers which show where we’re going to sell our app (in the Microsoft Teams Teams store—the equivalent of the iTunes App Store or GooglePlay, but obviously for Microsoft Teams Apps. The business plan also shows when we expect to start selling Kippa – Reminders for Microsoft Teams (i.e. when he will be made available for general release). And then the plan showed the number of licence subscriptions we believe we can make each month after its release, for the next 12 months. This allowed us to set the objectives for total revenues for the next year. We then extrapolated that out to 5 years and that’s our target.
Here’s the sample business plan from the course:
Kippa, Reminders of Teams app market size calculations
The plan for our reminder app for Microsoft Teams is quite different as its cost structure is less complex and it is able to scale rapidly because of the miracle of cloud computing.
Exercise 8—Your Vision and Mission Statements
KTi is aimed at being a multi-million dollar company in the next three years. For us, our vision has to start with Kippa, the reminder app for Microsoft Teams. We have now designed him and built both his bot and Azure halves. He is today reminding Microsoft Teams membersas you read this.
So how does this factor in to our Vision?
The vision statement of a company, again taken from the course, must be:
- concise, but complete.
- easily remembered.
- challenging, worthwhile goals are never easy to achieve; if they were, what would success accomplish?
- forward looking—long term.
- inspiring—how you’re going to overcome the challenge.
Klippas Technologies inc’s Vision is: Helping Microsoft Teams members achieve more. Your digital right-hand, instantly available: efficient, fun, and remember – an elephant never forgets..
Kippa has begun life as a reminder app for Microsoft Teams, but he’s a baby as you can see:
He will mature into a more capable personal assistant when we add to his ability to remind Microsoft Teams members when to do what. That by the way, is Kippa’s command line. You enter it into the Microsoft Teams message bar as, @Kippa Remind me (or@team-member, or @channel or @team) to tell my wife I love her (obviously the more personal kind of reminder), at 3pm tomorrow and every day after that.
As for our Mission Statement?
Apps that boost the productivty of Microsoft Teams in an effortless and enjoyable way.
Our Aapps are easy to use and surprise the user by completing tasks automatically. The easy to use part is something we’re good at. UX Design is our passion and we’ve been doing it for a long time. Won awards. We believe we have this one. Kippa will be easy for Microsoft Teams’ members to use to remind themselves of anything important. The surprisingly powerful part is the key to what separates a good app from an insanely great one. When a new user starts to do something in the app, the first time the app finishes the task automatically, they are surprised. It’s a WOW reaction, because it helps them achieve more. Speeds up their workflow. That takes an especially skilled app designer to accomplish.
According to Paul Simon’s The Zoo, elephants are kindly but they’re dumb. Time will tell just how much we can improve the IQ of Kippa – Reminders for Microsoft Teams.
Stay tuned for post #5 in the series.
Recent Comments