Recently I wanna join HackUST 2016 with a new Mobile App idea used between friends. The idea will be named as “IOU Something” at this moment.
The concept:
If you owe your friend $20, a lunch or whatever, you can return it by a task.
The story:
One of my friends doesn’t have enough space to store goods. He wanna put them in my office and give me “rent” as return. But it’s quite odd to receive money consistently from friends. He suggested to record the balance. Whenever I wanna have lunch or buy something, I can ask him to pay for the expenses. He would reduce the balance until it’s used up. Well and it’s a suitable way to handle debt between businessmen.
After few weeks my balance was spent as below:
- A jojoba oil
- Lunches & dinners
- A4 printing paper
- A movie ticket
- A short trip to the mainland China
Not an easy task to record the expenses. Date & time, item, amount are required to form a returned item record. But the afterthoughts were noteworthy:
- Debts between friends are not necessarily required to return instantly
- Debts between friends are not necessarily settled by real money
- Debts between friends can be settled by small tasks
- Debts between friends are similar to digital wallets. You can ask your friend to settle it when you two are hanging together, provide that the friend is not a cheapskate.
- Returning debt by small tasks is quite fun & useful. You can ask your friend (a.k.a. debtor) to do something you don’t wanna do. And he will be responsible to remind you. Not to mention you can receive “Push Notification” when you ask him to do tough tasks or weird things.
- A friend in need is a friend indeed
And so i decide to join HackUST 2016 to create an IOU – a debt manager app. The purpose of the mobile app will be
- Record the debts owed by your friends
- Make your friends return the debts (via a task)
- Make fun of this process
Several scenarios I thought of:
- When you had lunch or dinner with friends but you don’t have enough cash
- When someone do you a favor but you wanna return it in the future
- Get the phone number from a new friend due to money issue
- Make a payment record (Well I still remembered a Mainland China customer paid me $6,000 web design down payment and marked it on a fast food restaurant tray paper…)
If you feel interested after reading the article, please feel free to ping me to join HackUST 2016 together! You can reach me via bennychan[a]sillycube[dot]com
