Back in 2010, I had a kick-ass idea (or i thought) and for about next 1 and a half years that idea kicked my ass.

And here is how that happened:

Being an international student in college, I was mostly low on money. So I decided to apply to a Community Advisor role at residential life department, thinking this job can help me with some of the food and living expenses.

I really wanted to get this job hence I started studying the role, trying to understand the duties, the requirements of the job, the organization structure of residential life department, the problems residential life is facing etc. I approached several people from the department to ask them about duties and expectations for this job. I contacted their sister department, (First Year Experience) and asked them questions on residential life. Just so I would be better prepared for my interview and be able to present myself coherently.

I interviewed well but did not get the job. No biggies! however, I did get something meaningful out of this experience; loads of insights from all the people I have been asking questions about student life and key responsibilities of the residential life department, which I concluded were to increase student engagement on campus.

I was intrigued by the problem of diminishing student engagement, as being the vice president of International Student body I have experienced this problem first hand and clearly saw a yawning gap between enrolled students and campus events. The only crumbling connection campus events shared with students was an ugly piece of paper posted on every single wall of campus, to which students paid no attention as they walked past it, lost in the world of apps, tweets and notifications.

I had this idea which I executed by developing a new kind of connection, built on the platform that was trending in technology clad young generation and more efficient in communicating with students. I collaborated with two of the most brilliant fellows at the CS department in my college to develop Campusdodo, an event recommendation app that would match students with events in and around campus based on their interests.

The app was received well, during the span of 8 months we had around 7000 (out of 14,000) students signed up. But my personal problem persisted; I was still low on funds, and I decided to sell the application to my college. My university was interested and wanted to try out the application campus wide and I even got a meeting with Chief Information Officer to implement the technology we developed but I required them to start paying me upfront if they wanted to use it.

... and this was a mistake because I made the SALES PITCH before I presented the problem and lost a great opportunity to refine the product and get it market ready for other schools as advised by one of the proponents of customer development process, Ash Maurya. According to his approach, I would have let that procurement officer talk about the problems they are facing while making an effort myself to understand the student engagement problem better based on what he was talking about or more so, if I was smart enough, I could have signed an engagement letter with him for constant feedback as the product was still young and going through beta version. Nonetheless, because of my constant sales pitches and demand that this is the final product, spec'd out only by my own brilliant mind (without any feedback) and they must pay for it to use it. I lost the first batch of interested listeners who would have questioned some of my false assumptions.

My developers transferred to another university and a startup lab in Seattle invited me to work on campusdodo under a new product name called inCampus (more on that later).

But.. I still think over Campusdodo sometimes and ask the question; what if I had taken a different direction there? And what if I would have engaged with my university to see how their student engagement workflows and processes like? Maybe the fate of the project would have been different. But I was too obsessed with my idea and V.001 of the product that I refused to listen and take insights from the actual users of the product and stubbornly jeopardized Campusdodo... depriving it from seeing the light of any customer money that could have helped it grow further.