Finessify - The Intuitive Daily Scheduler

A Scheduling App that Creates an Individual Daily Schedule through Machine Learning and Web Scraping in Hopes of Improving Mental Health Across the World

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Inspiration

As students, we've struggled firsthand with managing our time in quarantine due to a lack of structure. This has fueled horrible habits such as procrastination and poor concentration, struggles that I'm sure we can all relate to. It is clear that everyone is struggling to find a deeper purpose in quarantine. Momentary distractions such as social media turn the focus away from getting necessary work done, in turn hurting mental health when our brains are flooded with large quantities of low-quality information. Hours spent scrolling through tweets and news, the majority of which is negative, is directly correlated with an increase in depression and anxiety. We want to fix this. How will this widespread problem be fixed? By optimizing time using an easy to use, custom curated schedule that keeps the user accountable.

What it does

Currently, in the market, nearly zero planning apps incorporate mindfulness and break-taking as a part of a user’s daily routine. This is not only unhealthy for the users, but it also establishes a false idea that the user should only be working all day long. Finessify not only makes it easy for users to plan their schedules and receive notifications at specific times throughout the day, but it also sends automatic reminders for users to take breaks and maintain their mental health. Finessify is targeted towards users of all ages. Each year, roughly 150,000 deaths are caused by overworking. To mitigate this problem, Finessify uses the Pomodoro method to guide users to take care of themselves while working effectively. Our core feature is the AI-based schedule, available only on the premium $6.99/month version. Phone notifications are sent out to remind you when it is time to exercise, socialize, and self-care. Not only does Finessify keep you accountable for accomplishing daily tasks, but it also provides free guides that redirect you to the best resources for building crucial life skills. Finessify’s goal is to help you build good, responsible habits in quarantine by guiding you in structuring your life.

How we built it

There was a variety of software that went into building Finessify. Raghav coded and deployed Finessify’s landing page on Netlify using front end frameworks such as React.js and HTML/CSS. He also built the interface of the web app. Praneeth developed the core machine learning model to integrate NLP processing of speech in order for the user to communicate their daily tasks to the app, as well as Google Calendar and iCalendar integration in the beta version of Finessify’s web application. He worked mainly with the back end of the web app. Amanda created the Figma mockup for Finessify outlining how the web application will flow on both the desktop and mobile versions. She also developed the slides on Canva and pitched them. Together, we bring our unique perspectives to Finessify to help users finesse their way to be their best!

Challenges we ran into

The few challenges we ran into were coordinating the team meetings since one of our team members lives halfway across the world in a different time zone than us. However, we were able to get past this by being proactive in communication with each other. Another challenge was getting the web app done in time since that required an extensive amount of effort on our part. One of our team members had to learn React frameworks almost from scratch to build it. So the web app was the biggest hustle, but totally worth it! Our last challenge was finding time to get all of this done in our busy schedules involving school, extracurriculars, and meetings (something that hopefully Finessify will make easier in the future.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of finishing the web app, pitch, Figma mockup, and intro site in time. We put a lot of time and effort into this and are sure that you'll enjoy it! Most of all, we wanted to build an app that would help people solve an issue that they really do struggle with, which is in our case, time management in quarantine. Hopefully, this will impact a lot of people as we grow the service!

What we learned

All else, we learned the value of teamwork. Going into this, we were people with wholly different skills and mindsets. But when we came together, the collaboration ensured exponential growth in such a short amount of time! Also, we got to know each other a lot better through this hackathon and are really glad that we're working together. It's been an amazing experience nerding out together!

What's next for Finessify - The Intuitive Daily Scheduler

Going into the future, we plan to release a user survey asking about the pricing to determine if the $6.99/month subscription fee is too expensive (one of our main pain points). From then, we'll expand the web app itself so that once it's finished, the user will be able to download it on both Google Play and the App Store. Perhaps if it receives enough downloads, we'll build a startup off of this together as co-founders and build a solid team of people who have experience in areas that we don't, such as finance, so that we can actually sell our monthly $6.99 subscription service on Finessify. Many great things are to come, believe it! Our main revenue stream is through ads and users who choose to pay for a no-ad experience. Finessify will collaborate with all sorts of appropriate companies who wish to have their ads displayed on Finessify as well as mindfulness organizations or apps such as calm.com to create more content on how to take care of one’s mental health while getting work done. Finessify is also going to cooperate with mindfulness YouTubers or bloggers who are interested in promoting our app. By 2025, we aim to have 20 million users worldwide after the deployment of both the website application and the mobile app.

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