Today's Entrepreneur: Debbie Levitt

Kristin Karaoglu · October 8, 2012 · Short URL: https://vator.tv/n/2abb

No. 1 mistake: Asking users the wrong questions or leading questions

Today's Entrepreneur is Debbie Levitt, founder of CheckInOn.Me. According to her VEQ, Debbie is a thought leader and is good at product management and thecnology design.

Vator’s community is the home to entrepreneurs who embrace their passion and follow their dreams. Our profiles allow members to express themselves by sharing their interests, lessons learned, as well as bits and pieces of their roller-coaster journey.

These profiles give entrepreneurs an opportunity to showcase themselves and tell their story. So if you are an entrepreneur, a serial entrepreneur, or even an aspiring entrepreneur, we'd like to hear from you.

I am a(n):
Entrepreneur

Companies I've founded or co-founded:
CheckInOn.Me

Startups I worked for:
Various secret startups in stealth mode

If you are an entrepreneur, why?
I want to change the world.

My favorite startups:
eBay and PayPal back in 1998.

What's most frustrating and rewarding about entrepreneurship/innovation?
The rewards are constant. I nearly cried when I found out a college-age female friend of mine was using our MVP when she rode her bike to and from work. I love knowing I made someone's life better. Frustrations... I lucky don't have too many of those. I think the main one would be when people assume that CheckInOn.Me is one of the many panic button apps out there. Our technology offers so much more, and with our API, ours will be the technology all those panic buttons should integrate!

What's the No. 1 mistake entrepreneurs make?
Asking users the wrong questions or leading questions. As a UX person, I know that how you interview someone affects the answers you get. The trick is to have as little junk science as possible, and create a space where people can honestly answer open questions.

What are the top three lessons you've learned as an entrepreneur?

Don't be afraid to change. I thought our MVP would be perfection. Users loved the idea, and wanted to use it, but didn't like using a website to do it. They wanted smartphone apps. That was an executional pivot, and I was afraid of it at first. Now, I'm wildly excited about it!

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Kristin Karaoglu

Woman of many skills: Database System Engineer; SplashX event producer; Author of Startup Teams

All author posts

Related Companies, Investors, and Entrepreneurs

CheckInOn.Me

Startup/Business

Joined Vator on July 21, 2012

CheckInOn.Me is a proactive automated personal safety system designed for mobile phones. We'll check on you as often as you want, whenever you want. If we don't get the right response in the right amount of time, we contact your selected and confirmed friends and family. Our smartphone app maps everybody, and facilitates communication between your emergency contacts so they can coordinate getting help, if it's needed. Perfect for online dating, Craigslist transactions, realtors, teens and college students, commuters and travellers, and the elderly or infirm.

Our products are a smartphone app (B-to-C) and an API (B-to-B). The app is in Google Play as an early alpha [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ciom.checkinonme]. Our API in is public beta as of mid-September 2012 [http://checkinon.me/developer-api]. Try them out!

Competitive advantage

We have many competitive advantages. One is that we have a patent dating back to April 2011.

We are the only service properly addressing the two things a safety system has to be to truly work: it must be proactive, and it must be difficult or impossible to disengage. Any safety system or panic button that waits for you to do something, or any system/app that is easy to disengage or cancel is not truly keeping you safe. Our system is proactive and nearly impossible to disengage.

We also learned a great deal from the user interviews we've done and the MVP we released in 2011. We had about 50 people try it. People loved the idea and wanted to use it, but found our execution (a web interface for extensive setup) to not be what they wanted. They wanted a smartphone app. So 2012 has been spent on rethinking a smartphone execution, design, and doing the programming and testing. We're starting with Android, which is harder, but we believe that iPhone users have less patience for alpha/beta software than Android users might have. Our team are Android users, and we're used to software being a bit buggy, complaining to the developer, and seeing a new version come out the next day.

Debbie Levitt

Joined Vator on July 21, 2012

Debbie pioneered website development back when most people were wondering what AOL was. Her passions are in UX, interaction design, usability, and how to use those to make lives and businesses better.