DreamSwapp | Remember Your Dream & Achieve It
You and your best friend build this app that is solving amazing problems in your community, you have billions of users downloading and using it, it never crashes. You get awesome media coverage and have become celebrities overnight. You have security wherever you go because you have become big entrepreneurs and are giving talks all over to up and coming entrepreneurs and app developers.
You get this White House invite for dinner with the president and get this expensive suit. A limo picks you and at the White House you arrive. As you cross over to hug the president, you wake up, you realize it was just but a dream.
But a new app launched in Chicago wants to end this. DreamSwapp is an Android-based mobile application to help users record their dreams and share dreams with friends using social media. TechZulu caught up with the founders and we enjoyed the experience.
When was it launched and where?
Our team was founded in May 2012 and we released our app on October 8th, Chicago, IL.
Who are its founders?
Founder: Roy Rao, consultant with 2-year experiences in telecommunication and manufacturing industries
Co-founder/developer: Chris Johnson, Computer Science PhD Candidate at MIT
What problem do you solve?
Research has shown that people can remember only 10% of their dreams when they wake up, and also that dreams have uses and meanings for psychological research. From our customer research, people would like to record their dreams once they wake up, as well as to share their dreams with their families & friends, but there are no simple tools to do so. People can use DreamSwapp to record their dreams and share them with family through social media on our public platform.
How does it work?
We have a configurable alarm that reminds people to write down their dream when they wake up. Users can record how they feel about the dream (from good to bad), what theme the dream had (adventure, crime, drama, horror, and others), what color they associate with their dream (red, yellow, green, etc) and they can briefly describe their dream. Dreams are added to a personal database which can be searched by topic. In the search page, users can view/edit/delete their dreams and also share with a unique website link that displays the dream in a simple template via social media (e.g., Facebook, twitter, etc).
Take us through your features
New Dream page
Date: set up the time and date
Feeling: rate how you feel about the dream (Oh No!, bad, average, good, Oh Yeah!)
Theme: Treat your dream like a movie and tag its theme (adventure, crime, drama, horror, other)
Color: Track the color of your dreams (red, yellow, green, blue, pink and white)
Calendar page
Dates when you had a dream are highlighted to see when you dream the most.
Swapp page
You can view all your dreams and you can share your dream with a unique website link that displays your dream in a simple template via social media (e.g., Facebook, twitter, etc).
For each dream you share online, your dream will be displayed in a unique website page with a simple template.
Template: I just had a ___ (feeling) dream about ___ (theme)!
Feeling and theme will be in color you choose.
How many users so far?
90 installers, 40 active users.
What is your business model?
Our business model integrates both offline and online presence. This app can be treated as a personal utility to build a dream database, however it also connects with social media to share something interesting. It gives the users the options to use as a dream journal or to have fun as a media tool.
Second of all, our app is free and will be free in future too. We plan on integrating premium features for paying users, which include dream analysis and an ad-free experience.
Competition?
In android platform, there are two other competitors for this market: Dream Writer and Dream Diary
Dream Writer is the app that people can only write down their dreams without any features.
Dream Diary is the app that people can category and color their dreams but cannot share.
How unique are you from the competition?
There are two major unique functionalities in our app: personalization and sharing feature.
We care about how people feel about their dreams when they wake up as well as how people can have fun with their dreams. Thus we create “Feeling” and “Theme” features to personalize their dreams and we create a public platform where you can share your dream with your friends and family on Facebook, Twitter, etc.
In general, our app looks more neat and simple for users compared to other competitors.
Any partnerships?
At the moment, we are looking for partnership with middle & high schools and any professional institutes who are interested in our idea/app.
Any challenges?
At the moment, there are two challenges that we encounter:
- We have very positive feedbacks from our users but not so many people know about our app. We originally design this app for everyone but we have a hard time to popularize our idea so now we are trying targeting specific consumers market, such as middle and high school kids.
- Our biggest feature is to share your dream through our public platform but since not many people know about our app, we have a hard time to brand our app through sharing functionality.
What are your future plans?
We are currently at the stage 1 for our app where we want to get our name out first and work on the marketing campaign progressively. The goal for stage 1 is to explore the potential market and collect feedbacks from users to develop a more user-friendly app.
In stage 2, we will develop our app for iPhone users.
In stage 3, we hope to collaborate with professional and academic institutes and help to create a valuable database for researches and studies. The other goal of stage 3 is to let more people share, explore, and have fun with their dreams on a public platform.
