Michiko Quinones  YadaGuru - College Application Reminders Update #20

The team met last night at DevNuts. Discussion centered around who our real user is. It kind of started with the art major toggle. We thought that it would be a lot of work for a smaller subset of students. And probably, students who are art majors are more energized and motivated to understand the nuaces of portfolio submittal. That led to a sort of aha moment for us that we aren't really looking to support kids who already have a lot of support and/or are super on top of what they have to do. What we really want are kids who don't have support for the college application process and/or are having a hard time figuring it out even when they try. What this means is that the kids are applying to 10 schools (two of them Ivys) are probably not the kids who need yadaguru; assumed they already have some support or they are super motivated and will figure it out. We are looking for the kids who might be the first kid in the family to go to college, or in a big school system where it's hard to reach them to give them the information they need, but who sincerely want to go to college. That means that from an application perspective, we're going to have to remove some of the extras; like a toggle for art majors. We also want to talk to rolling admissions, which is sometimes a less grueling and demanding application options. To date, we haven't talked about it. We have added in our disclaimer that we handle regular decision and not early admissions or decisions. But we figured out last night that we need to also say something like 'hey if you are doing rolling admissions, pick the earliest date you can submit and we'll gear your reminders in that direction.' We also talked about cost. We are thinking it will be about .80 to $1.00 per student to use Twililo. We will obviously need some funding. But this can also be something we can ask schools to do - raise funds or contribute for their students. This might mean we might have to enter a sponsor code if someone has already paid for that student's texts. We also talked about login, and decided that we will use the mobile number and a password. We will authenticate though the phone with an initial text with a temporary password. Finally - realized that we need to use the universally recognized gear icon for settings and not the power icon. All of these issues will be written up in github if folks want to contribute.