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Annnnnnnnnnd action 🎬

Broadly speaking the development of Poola in the next six months will be split into three;

1) Designing the solution
2) Testing and refining the software and
3) Implementing the solution.
 
Our backend will be built on Firebase. which will allow us to integrate Google based solutions such as Google maps, real-time database, user authentication, hosting, machine learning, cloud functions and testing solutions. 
It is service that is designed to be flexible and intergrate quickly with Flutter with the added benefit of being cost

effective to use in our start up phase as Google charges relativly little until we start to get of the ground or build more advanced features.
 
The enviroment in the beginning will be fully remote and rely on a git-based version control system featuring advanced code intergration/code deployment mechanisms enabling our engineers to distrubute and develop coding tasks effeciantly and transparently. Iterative and incremental development, where work is divided into short sprints typically lasting two to four weeks, reduces backlog, needless meetings and minmises code related conflicts. Using the scrum method we can allow for flexibility and adaptability in the face of changing requirements and an evolving economy.

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Concept and Design

 

Formalising wireframes and finalising designs based of preliminary consumer (friends and family) research.

Mobile Configuration.png

App Development

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Cross-platform framework will significantly cut our start up time and costs without sacrificing quality.

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A/B Testing

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Collecting tester data to

understand pooler behavior,

engagement rate, pain points,

and satisfaction within Poola.

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Digital Marketing

 

Targeted advertisements and

refferal programs and making

sure virality is embedded at

the core of our product.

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SEO Analytics

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Collecting and analysing raw

data to better inform our

search engine optimization

efforts within crowd-funding.

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Support

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Consumer issues need to be

addressed as they happen.

Reliable support resources

are key for user retention.

Month 1

Firstly, we will arrange the business as remote base by making project information and materials, like logos, graphics, icons, and existing development code, easily accessible. Our flow charts will be discussed with engineers so that we can begin the process of turning existing UX concepts into functional code, and developing a solid and dependable navigation architecture. On the back-end site we will be integrating Firebase into our pubspec and configuring it to our app, setting up authentication, and starting to use services such as Realtime Database or Cloud Firestore to store and retrieve data.

Main tasks

Description

Wireframe

• Finishing on Adobe XD all of the app’s screens and how they connect, along with the visual designs for each of those screens. In our case, we are also building an interactive prototype to give a sense of how using the app will feel. It is essential that the path through Poola’s content is logical, predictable, and easy to follow with as little friction as possible. Poola combines multiple navigation styles;

 

1. Experiance driven for our engagment features lets our users move freely through content. The content itself defines the nvaigation whilst keeping the number of taps, swipes, and screens to minimum.

 

2. Hierarchical navigation for our standard features such as settings and saved pools provides a clear path with familiar touch gestures. One fast and easy choice per screen enables the ability to retrace steps without  calling attentionto itself, and keeps the current task clear and focused.

BLoC Navigation

• Our chosen state management solution must be predictable, simple, and highley testable to increaes the engineers comfortability and confidence towards building and maintaing the robust product that we have set out to build. Thus, we chose the BLoC pattern and its Flutter implementation through the flutter_bloc package.

Authentication

• Firebase provides backend services, and ready made UI libraries to authenticate users into Poolas network. Our log in / sign up screens must support email and password, phone number authentication, as well as options for signing in with social media or Google and Apple so that there is as little friction as possible when signing up / in.

Home and Pool Pages

• Individual campaigns must be allowed to convey a core message in an attractive way that can resonate with their supporters / audience. Our platform is focused on contributor retention and providing those who start pools to better target those with the capacity to contribute and propensity to give to their narrative. We must allow for millions of contributors and poolers to remotley stay connected, and respond with agility asnd ease.

Month 2

Enabling our users to have incredible flexablilty when contributing funds, wether it be in bite sized increments, large sums or subscriptions, is vital to Poola taking over the crowdfunding market. For this reason a dedicated payment systems engineer will work to ensure that we can provide Poola’s users with the fastest and easist platform to contribute as a crowd. Building on this ambition of flexability we will create searchability features that have flexible inputs so that our users can discover pools all over the world but also very specific ones based of their search history.

Main tasks

Description

Search Functionality

• It is essential all pools are universally accessible through a simple search as it is an mission of ours to make Poola the homepage of crowd sourcing. With a TextFieldWidget and either creating our own SQL or using external API’s, users can dive deeper than ever into crowdfunding with flexible inputs like name, location, campaigns, or categories.

Map Functionality

• Encoding Googles map functionality with the google_maps_flutter plugin. Once added to the pubspec we can begin to customise the appearance and behavior of the map, such as adding markers, polylines, designing unique map markers to show where local pools are in real time,  implementing interactive pool info windows and other types of overlays.

Payment Intergration

• Stripes is the current payment API of choice. Its ease of set up matches our philosophy of getting into the market at a fast pace. Its product soloutions are robust enough to handel recurring transactions and subscriptions, plus it can these transaction happen fast, which will already give us a suprising and dramatic edge over the competition.

 

• Stripe connect is the product that we will use to scale poolers end-to-end payments and drive revenue growth. With it we can onboard users quick whilst also handeling all PDS2, KYC and other obligations as local payments verification requirments evolve.

Firebase Cloud

Messaging

• Having real-time messaging and cross-platform support is paramount. Our users should be eaisly able to provide up-to-date information to their contributors or alert them of important events or changes. *Explained in detail in Showcase.

 

• We can utalise FCM further for improving our engagment with poolers by making our FAQ and customer service section avalible from the messaging function, providing ease of use for users.

 

• As an added benifit FCM is free to use for up to 1 million messages per month, making it a cost-effective solution for us in our start up phase.

Month 3

The majority of the home screen set up will, at this point, be complete. Our backend should be smoothly handling data connectivity, storage, interaction with other apps, and other core development needs. To ensure our apps quality we can now test our main features, such as Messaging, Maps and Saved pages, with experiments on virtual machines in different usage environments. We do this in the aim of releaseing our MVP (even if we only have essential functions and design) to test Poola on the market and track user retention / feedback. Conversations with our end users is vital step towards our success.

Main tasks

Description

Push Notifications

• Notifying our users on app and web about developments within Poola, when a pool gets a contribution, new pools started in their areas and more will help to increase engagement. We can build local and remote notifications with firebase_messaging and flutter_local_notifications.

Settings

• Using the flutter_settings_screens package we can create a basic settings page that our users can use to control app behaviour. This page will get more complex as we develop, however at this stage we only need it to complete basic functions.

User Profile

• We will create a user profile that has nice a nice UI but limited functionality as it is not vital for user aquisition at this stage. We will want to store information such as the user’s name, email address, profile picture and contributed pools. By utalising the cloud_firestore and firebase_auth libraries already in our project we can create a new collection in Cloud Firestore to store user data.

Penetration

Security

• Our app requires our users to store sensitive user data and financial information. Other than the security that firebase provides, we will also explore the RASP approach when securing Poola. This would enable us to integrate a customised security solution for our users. RASP can be deployed directly into the application, making it easy for us to naturally monitor application behavior and self-protect. It prevents attacks with high accuracy, distinguishing attacks from  legitimate requests and reducing false positives.

Release of 

MVP

• Once we complete the mapping and communication features Poola will be a product that is vastly different from all previous crowdfunding platforms. The next stage is to monitor these features in different use cases by putting Poola into the hands of a select group of people; some of whom with crowdfunding experience and some who are new to it.

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• Testing our riskiest assumptions and tracking customer feedback are vital efforts in proving our concept. The main goal with releasing our MVP is to make sure that we are providing value and a great crowdfunding experiance, if not we may need to go back to the drawing board with some redesigns.

Month 4

We will be carefully monitering the release of our MVP by focusing on feedback, user acquisition and performance stability. Talking to our users about our product is a vital, we do this through questionnaires, in app reviews and organic conversations with our projected end users. In addition to performance monitoring we will be rapidly prototyping our accomplished code to track, prioritise and fix any stability issues that might erode app quality. Whilst the back end engineer focuses on app quality, our front end engineer will be working on the complex interactivity of our dashboard and ACA’s.

Main tasks

Description

Responsive Dashboard

UI

• The dashboard is a complete view of a pools performance. It ensures quick access to fresh to  data and allows our pool starters to collect timely, relevant, and actionable feedback from poolers. Building the tool to allow our poolers to monitor and visualise their pools clearly using key metrics like latest contributions, pool data, media response and the global reach is complete game changer in the crowdfunding industry. Think of Youtubes creator studio when you release a video only for crowdfunding campaigns.

 

• In the beginning we will create basic re usable widgets that can display a simple list of information, such as total visits, contribution amounts and the countries of those who contribute.

 

• Because this is a first of its kind feature within crowdfunding we will need to A/B test and track how our users respond. Asking what information they want to see in the future, and how they find the experiance will provide valuable information for the future of our dashboards.

Alternative Contribution

Abilities

• Through centralised efforts, our poolers can raise funds, petition, share skills, organise, and contribute, all across one platform. We aim to provide a quick and easy tool kit for action orientated audience, however we need to experiment . Starting with two alternative contribution abilities that users can interact with each other with the chosen two are:

 

1) Petitions - Each week over 1.2 million new users visit change.org’s website, totalling 467,258,754 visits in 2021, further more on 41,000 petitions are started each month. This is a high number of users that we can bring to our platform by desinging a simple signiture function with various Esigniture API’s like Signnow or PSPDFKIT.

 

2) Time - We can make volunteering time a simple interaction. Starting by building its backend with Cloud Firestore and test it with Firebase. Pool starters will able to display a set of times and a place, then mark their pools as accepting ‘alternative contributions’. Those who wish to contribute can then slide the contribute button and select the hour that they can make. From that point they can communicate further with our messaging function.

Month 5

Monthly continuation of maintaining and improving existing products and services. This may involve fixing bugs with crashlytics, improving performance, and conducting code reviews to ensure that Poolas products and services are of high quality. We will continue to stay up to date with the latest developments in Flutter and crowdfunding best practices, this will involve reading technical blogs, attending online conferences, and participating in online communities. Lastly, dynamic links will be created so that when someone is sent a link to contribute they can open it in the platform they are on or if they do not have Poola installed, they can be prompted to install it and then be taken to the pool page.

Main tasks

Description

Branding

• In the previous months our designer will have developed a visual brand language, logos, choosen a color theme / typography, and have created other visual elements such as graphics and imagery. Making sure our tone is consistent across all channels and continuing to create a unique identity for Poola that sets us apart from competitors and anchors in the minds of consumers.

Saved

• Though there will have been a basic ‘saved’ page in our MVP it is important that we advance this feature with new widgets. The ability to allow poolers to play a continued, significant part in a campaign provides an authentic user driven experience and seperates us from the competition. Through staying connected with clean UX, users will hugely contribute to a pools consistency and growth.

Remote Config

• With cloud_firestore and firebase_remote_config we can create updates to Poola without having to republish our app. This means we can dynamically turn features on and off depending on user reaction, personalise by audience segments, and run experiments without shaving to set up any complex infrastructure or releasing a new version.

Langauge

• It is vital that Poola is built for this diverse world as we want to create a crowdfunding network where users can tap into pools of contributors from around the world. Making Poola a home for polygot countries we can create long-lasting relationships between poolers and pool starters. Translating an app from one language to another requires a lot of persistance and their are currently two main ways to do this:

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1) Human translation: our team is built by people from around the world, all of whom speak a second language and understand the nuances of their respective cultures.

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2) Machine translation: The software approach of algorithimcally translating text from one  language to multiple others. Phrase, Lilt and Lokalise are all services that can provide us with localisation services to power our drive into different geographies.

Month 6

By this point we will have built a reliable, fully modular Flutter application coded so well that any given feature could run independently, allowing total control over feature addition and deletion, and maximizing its reusability across different applications. Initially, we’ll cultivate tiny networks of extroverted users to help us expand our network, once they are onboard we can continuously improve our automation at scale, measure our metrics of CAC / LTV, and expand our use capabilities. We will also need to stay up-to-date with any changes to Flutter, Firebase, or other APIs that we are using.

Main tasks

LTV and CPA

Atomic Networks

Description

• We will utalise Google analytics to monitor and measure our advertising ROI, calculate CPA and make adjustments as needed based on data and feedback. With GA4’s ML capabilities we can analyse a variety of behavioral insights: users impressions and experiance, click activity, alternative contributions and detailed views of engagment. From this data we can further power our app and web advertising campaigns, understand our users needs more and help our brand to reach potential poolers aroud the world. *google ads will be where our advertising budget will mainly be allocated upon release.

• When approaching a high-value city (one which is most likely to contribute funds), research will tell us what that demographic is searching for online, what community services they have in place and the local problems affecting the area. We then create pools to service the most commonly interacted with needs, increase referral amounts, target advertising, and find local organisations to contribute match, thus creating our ‘Atomic Networks’.

Maintenance,

support and the

development

of new features

• The main prioritiy at this point will be to reguarly check code (firebase crashlytics), update libraries and third party services, and adapt to any new versions of opperating systems. We will also be expanding rapidly and have the resources to begin developing new features based on our growing buisness needs, for example;

 

1) Firebase Machine Learning - Once we have set up Firebase ML, we can design and implement a recommendation algorithm that uses user data (pools searched, pools contributed to and pools in their area) to provide personalised campaigns and notifications to our users.

 

2) External Pool Widgets - By creating crowdfunding web extensions readers can become contributors, and news can become newsworthy. A proactive collaboration with media has a huge potential of driving positive change, shaping new ideas, and developing creative ambitions across the internet. Our widgets will be easily embeddable and sit quietly on both app- and web-pages. They will look and feel like an integral part of the page with the contribution ability of Poola.

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