Story Of My Life

Everyone's life has repetitive patterns. I have finally identified the repetitive pattern of my life. 

Loop

 

Step 1: Duniya ka sabse vahiyaat idea dimaag mein aana

Step 2: Idea ka keeda ban jana.

Step 3: I open big mouth and share idea

Step 4: Everyone now expects me to implement the idea

Step 5: Implement idea and die of overwork.

 

If Dead:

          <Put Cremation>

Else

          <Repeat Cycle>

 

End Loop

Us Samay ka karoonga kya? - One of the most important stories of my life

एक समय की बात है। मिस्र में एक अंग्रेज काहिरा की ओर जा रहा था। रास्ते में उसे एक अकेला बूढ़ा आदमी  चलता हुआ मिला। अंग्रेज को दया आ गई। उसने अपनी गाड़ी रोक कर उस बूढ़े आदमी से पूछा, "आप कहाँ जा रहे हैं?" 

"काहिरा जा रहा हूँ।" वृद्ध ने उत्तर दिया। 

पता नहीं वृद्ध के व्यक्तित्व में क्या आकर्षण था, अंग्रेज़ ने न्योता दिया, "आइए, मेरी गाड़ी में बैठ जाइए। मैं आपको ले चलता हूँ। आपके पूरे पाँच दिन बच जाएंगे।" 

वृद्ध पहले हतप्रभ हुआ, फिर धीरे से मुस्कुरा कर ना की मुद्रा में सर हिलाते हुए कहा - "पर पाँच दिन बचा कर मैं उस समय का करूंगा क्या?" - ऐसा कह कर, वृद्ध ने अंग्रेज़ से विदा ली और चलने लगा। 

ये मेरे जीवन की सबसे महत्वपूर्ण कथाओं में से है। समय और पैसा, किसी गेम करन्सी जैसे हैं। जब हम कोई गेम खेलते हैं, तो उसका पैसा उसी गेम में कमाते हैं, और वहीं खर्च करते हैं। उस पैसे को गेम के बाहर न तो लाया जा सकता है, न ही उसका गेम के बाहर कोई मोल है। 

हमारे जीवन में भी, पैसा और समय, ऐसे ही हैं। इस जीवन के बाहर, न तो उनका कोई मोल है, न उन्हें ले जाया जा सकता है। समय बचाना तो अच्छी बात है। पर उस समय का करोगे क्या, यह और भी महत्वपूर्ण है। 

पैसा कमाना और संजोना, दोनों अच्छी बातें हैं, पर उस पैसे का प्रयोजन क्या है, उसका उपयोग क्या है, यह और भी महत्वपूर्ण है। 

पाँच दिन बचाकर, हम करेंगे क्या? 

अमूमन गेम में हम उस XP और पैसे को खर्च कर के, कुछ सीख लेते हैं। जीवन का भी ऐसा ही है। उस पैसे और समय (XP) को तो गेम से बाहर नहीं ले जाया जा सकता, पर गेम खेलते खेलते हम जो सीखते हैं, उसे साथ ले जाया जा सकता है।   

Why we chose Judgify.me as our Contest Management Platform

We wanted to do a start-up contest for students. That meant that we needed a contest management software. 

The first step was to search for a WP plugin that offered an end to end contest management. We did find a few but they needed integrations, or were missing some key functionality. 

Next, we evaluated YouNoodle. 

Younoodle was already the platform being used by another startup contest where I was on the jury. The UX was so bad that we put it in the negative list almost immediately. 

After this, we came to the final step - yes, SaaS: An external platform that offers end to end contest management functionality. 

Our key asks were: 

A. Good UX, because this was for young students. We didn't want a data heavy, clunky UX. 

B. Flexibility. 

C. Ease of use 

D. Privacy 

E. Functionality - Assignment of Judges, Judges should be able to view and score online. 

F. Admin should be able to assign judges, see when they have scored, who needs nudging, and download scores, etc. 

G. User experience should be intuitive and easy. 

In the end, it was between 2 platforms : 

A. Dare2Compete 

B. Judgify 

Dare2Compete is a full fledged, feature-rich platform that caters to end to end contest management. The other thing that worked in favour of dare2compete was that it takes 3% processing fee for fees collected and also gives us access to its own native set of users. All events are manually checked by a review team before being approved, so that quality of contests available is also quite good. 

Judgify.me, on the other hand, appears to be a more recent platform. 

Eventually, we chose Judgify.me over Dare2compete. For those of you looking for a SaaS platform for contest management, this experience might be useful. 

• Friendly URL

Our URL was simply judgify.me/empower. This is easy to remember. It was customisable. A friendly url makes a world of difference to user experience for participants. 

• The creation process

The contest creation process at Dare2compete is very thorough. It is also long and does not allow us to save as draft. One event creation takes 30 minutes. It took 3 efforts to create a single event. 

• The event review process 

This, I thought, was a plus with Dare2compete.com. It builds the credibility of the platform. The review takes under 24 hours, and ensures that the quality of contests (and by extension, the quality of participants) we get is likely to be good. Judgify.me had no review process. Since we did not depend on the audience at judify.me, it did not impact our experience of the platform in any way. If we had wanted to borrow audience, we might have given Dare2compete more weightage. We did list the event there though, and got 6 registrations, none of which paid the registration fee. So the audience premium did not really translate for us. 

• The UX - Contest Participant 

Clearly, this was the clincher. The UX of Judgify.me for a contest participant is very easy, intuitive, and flexible. It allows the user to: 

   A. Partially enter their data. 

   B. Save entry as draft. 

   C. Make changes after submission. 

 

We found that the screen flow was very intuitive, did not involve a lot of learning for the user, and was neither clunky nor field heavy. There weren't so many fields that a person gets intimidated, nor so few that we can't get the information we need. 

• The UX - Jury 

When I tested the Jury interface, it was so perfect! When we register on Dare2Compete, we find that the jury member gets an email saying "password reset required." The jury member would and should not click on such an email. One does not password reset on a platform where they have never registered. We asked support if we could change the content of the email OR suppress it entirely. They said that both are not possible. That was a deal-breaker. That was not the experience that we wanted our jury members to have. In this day of security consciousness, password reset is absolutely the most unacceptable subject line to have. 

• Admin UX 

The Admin UX is adequate in both. There is some learning curve and some manual work that needs to be done. In Judgify.me, some jury members did not receive the emails and asked us to change the email id. So, I had to create them as a new entry. But overall, the Admin UX is fairly intuitive and we found it to be better than in Dare2Compete. 

• Support Responsiveness 

Another super important area for any event organiser. On this front, Judgify.me wins hands down. 

Disclaimer: In spite of being an Agile PM for over a decade, i am never in a hurry. When we raise a support ticket, we always have at least a 10 hour window for its solution. So, if responsiveness means 5 minutes or less, or if you are the kind of organiser for whom everything is L1, this rating may not be useful. 

Dare2Compete was only available on email, with an average response time of 24 hours. Further, there was no continuity in the messages. 

Judgify.me had a much shorter response time. But what was better was that even though it was only emails, one knew that one was talking to a real person (Joseph, in my case) and there was continuity. 

Expect an average response time of 2-5 hours. 

So, that is the story of how we chose our contest management platform.