I’ve been kind of too optimistic about writing the mission statement this week. The process was much more circuitous than I envisioned, especially after starting the competitor analysis. The top barrier during this process is that the more I researched, the less confident I felt for my project. There are a lot of aspects that I didn’t even think about! Also, I felt a little lost on the core values of my project, which made me more frustrated in writing a mission statement.

So, I first started by researching related products and their mission statement. Here are some examples from my competitor list (some are not so-called mission statements but more like purpose or goal):

Based on these inspirations, I came up with a couple of early stage mission statement: 
+ Live a better life
+ Take better care of yourself
+ To inspire you to live a healthier life
+ Make healthy eating easier, more engaging, and more enduring
+ Passionate for life/Enjoy life
+ Having fun while you eat healthy food
+ We believe that a healthy eating habit is not hard to establish

However, these statements didn’t resonate with me. This is like I said in the beginning, when I saw too many existed products, these inspirations draw the line for me to think outside of the box. So I chance to my graphic design mode and think my project as a branding identity design: what can make my brand stood out in this APP jam world? I started to flesh out ideas categorizing in the following section:

+ Audience

Young Adults (18-30) who are usually facing lifestyle changing and pay less attention to their health.

+ Purpose

To help them eat healthier, form good habits that can last, and feel more control over their new-to-independent life (Potentially overcome anxiety)

+ Values

Delight, loveliness, passionate (more are still coming)

+ Attributes

Fun, cozy, relaxing, cheering, and supportive.

After I did the competitor research and analysis (see details here), I was happy that the direction I’m heading is pretty unique to the market. There aren’t many products using gamification features and engaging award system. Also, most food/nutrition tracking apps provide really good advices on nutrition intakes and meal plan, but they don’t usually have features for reminding users to have meal on time. Most of the experience is very based on self-commitment, which is also a big challenge for my product. Lumen did a great job on making the self-check of metabolism super simple and easy to use. This effortlessness is exactly what I envisioned my product. Besides, weight loss is still the top hierarchy for promoting products in the competitors. It isn’t for this one. It only suggests healthy eating habits that are customized to the users’ needs.

So here comes the more refined one:

1. Guide people to live their best life.

2. Guide young adults to form their best lifestyle.

Next Step

+ Keep develop mission statement
+ Refine competitor analysis (add habit builder competitors)

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