Softi

Softi is a gamified app designed to learn key techniques to improve your soft skills and relationships.

The solution is a gamified learning mobile app that teaches users different techniques to handle daily-life situations that will improve their relationships and soft skills.

It addresses the content in the following way:

• Content is divided into different subjects, displayed as a list on the main screen of the app. 
• A learning path is made clear by adding the need of completing prior subjects before unlocking new ones. This makes the user focus on their next lesson instead of presenting a confusing path.
• After completing each lesson the user will be rewarded with coins and experience on the given subject. This will make them excited to complete new lessons and improve their profile! This way, they have fun while learning valuable lessons.
• There are two types of lessons, content and practice. In practice lessons, hypothetical real-life situations will be presented to test the acquired knowledge.
• Optional weekly tests will be available to make a little recap of users' week, making the focus on how they handled interpersonal situations and discovering which subjects they should revise and pay more attention to.

The mobile app prototype has been designed with react-native and Firebase.

The workforce of today currently puts too much attention on improving their technical skills and little on soft skills. This is a huge problem.

Nowadays there is a giant lack of people trained in interpersonal communication, and this is clearly noticeable in job hunting or any social environment. According to LinkedIn’s 2019 Global Talent Trends report, 89% of recruiters say when a hire doesn’t work out, it usually comes down to a lack of soft skills.

There is an interesting study published in 1918 by the Carnegie Foundation that concluded that 85% of job success comes from having well developed soft and people skills, and only 15% of job success comes from technical skills and knowledge. However, according to the American Society for Training and Development, employers spent $171.5 billion on employee learning and development in 2010, of which only 27.6% went to soft skills training. How is this possible? This has been called The Soft Skills Disconnect phenomenon.

Softi has been designed to be meaningful in the life of any person in search of tools to improve their soft skills. 

Currently, there is a very low offer of soft skills training on the mobile market. There are apps like Udemy or SkillShare that offer soft skill courses, but they don't put the focus on that topic only. We want to offer an alternative that's 100% focused on this, and we think this can be a game-changer.

Another thing we noticed is that there are practically no courses practice-oriented, which is absurd taking into consideration that these skills are improved by practising, not just reading theory. We aim to offer a fun solution to this problem by gamifying the process and offering practice cases.

Initially, the app will be targeted to the IT community of the United States, for people aged 18-36, because we know that there has been raising awareness on how these skills impact a career and we expect to have great acceptance of the app in that audience. However, the app itself won't have any references to this field, making it a comfortable place to improve skills for any person.

While our content evolves, we plan to only target English speakers to ease development. Once the app gets established in the market and our content is tested and reviewed by experts, we plan to translate the app to other languages.

One of the steps taken to understand the needs of our possible users was asking university classmates and colleagues several questions about soft skills. Most of them knew what they were. However, they agreed on their importance and also accepted they were doing nothing to improve them, giving them room to reflect on that.

We came to the conclusion that none of them had any solution to the problem at the reach of their hands, and when they got to know about Softi's idea, they agreed something like that had the potential of improving their chance of success at work and also personal life.

Softi has been in the prototype stage for more than a month. Authentication services, provided by Firebase, are fully functional as well as some app features and screens. The prototype is expected to be finished in 2 months and once it is tested, the mobile app will be deployed to the stores as MVP, moving to the Pilot stage.

Our current prototype and future MVP is a mobile app built on react-native with Expo. This lets us focus on developing a hybrid (iOS and Android) app from a single codebase, without needing to modify any native file.

We rely on Firebase for our authentication service, database, analytics and cloud functions. Thanks to this, we have no need of maintaining our own servers which let us put our focus on developing a great app instead of having the need of maintaining servers and databases, as well as unlimited scalability without hesitation.

For the first quarter of 2022, we plan of launching our MVP and start looking for possible improvements with only a few users. Once the second quarter of the year start, different content creators with self-improvement content will advertise Softi on YouTube, for which we expect a growth of at least 3000 users. By the end of the year, our goal is to have at least 10K users created.

Our main goal is to help people improve their knowledge. By the end of the year, we expect to have taught at least one lesson to more than 5K users.

In our mission to make soft skills training a more recognised achievement, we are planning to release our Certificates feature midyear. We aim to have at least 100 users to complete all our lessons and practice cases this year, to whom Softi would give a course completion certificate.

In addition, we would like to release weekly optional tracking on how the user puts into practice the acquired techniques and tips, and help them understand the importance of doing so.

With simple user metrics, we can manage to gain great insight into our statistics. By measuring how many lessons were completed by each user, and how many users have received a completion certificate, we can easily know how close we are getting to our impact goals. 

We believe we have set realistic, accomplishable goals. However, if for some reason we are unable to accomplish them, it would be due to a lack of capital for advertising and hiring talent.

About a year ago, I found out that communication and dealing with people were some of my passions. 

While reading books like "How to win friends and influence people" and "Never split the difference", I discovered different tips and techniques that are life-changing and would make a difference in my career.

I have an eager want to improve my soft skills as well as to help others improve too, and that desire makes me the right person to lead a project like Softi, that will have the opportunity to make a positive impact on the life of thousands of people.