Leon, the students daily companion
Leon is a start-up project that aims to enhance students wellbeing by providing them a companion to manage some aspects of their life.
Important note, this project is about a fake start-up, the project was conducted during the entrepreneurship course of the Master MINDS @ INSA Lyon
Problem statement
Nowadays, many studies conclude to the same thing, many students feel overwhelmed by their studies, which results in stress, exhaust, anxiousness or even depression.
In France, 60% of students are suspected to be under psychological distress, and one third of students declare to consider stopping their studies because of stress. If we look at a higher scope like Europe, it is said to be around 40% of students that experience difficulties with well-being or mental health. sources : les Echos, Campus France
Studies create a high risk of stress for the younger generations which are also the future of every single society, this is a widespread crisis which needs to be considered, especially if we aim to create a better society.
One of the main problem is that students have to manage everything alone, their “free time” is not a real free time, they need to manage this time to study, work on projects, find internships/apprenticeships, work part-time, which gives little place for their free time and well being. Many students also tend to find it difficult to actually find a proper way to manage their time and will add too much study time or not enough.
Solution
Leon aims to be a daily companion to help students in their life, it can look at their time table, their goal and their current biomarkers and propose a planning on their free time to optimize the student’s study/life balance, allowing them to sleep, to study and to have actual free time at once.
Additionnaly, Leon can give immediate recommendations to help students manage immediate problems, for exemple immediate stress before an exam or a presentation.
The idea is to make Leon into a companion that works in real time, behind the scenes and become visible when necessary, without being “too much” and whithout requiring the user to actively open the app to get recommendations.
Branding
For the branding of Leon, we decided to first choose two main colors, first the green which is our primary color, the color that is used to highlight important information, and distinguish our brand from others, and the second one is off-white, used mainly as our background color, but also for text on a green background.
Color theory
The green is in many peoples mind related to nature, and health, where off-white has the advantage of giving a more premium look to our app and brand, it also additionaly is nice as it does not look aggressive to the eye. Then, we added a dark brown color as a third color that can be used to bring some difference between information.
Mascott idea
Next, after thinking alot, the idea of a mascott became an important idea, it helps alot in branding as a character that makes our application and brand more alive and warmer, it also help to communicate and fit the name of our company “Leon”, now, Leon is also our mascott.
Fonts choice
To properly design the application & communicate, text is necessary, thus fonts became necessary, at first two fonts were choosen, first Fredoka as the main font for the logo and important text, and then Poppin for the content. Finally, after designing the application, only Fredoka remained as it fits better the branding, design and idea of the company.
Logo
Finally, a logo for the application was necessary, along with everything already created, from the idea of the company to the different branding elements, it was pretty easy to generate an SVG file with Gemini that could then be used. 3 versions were then made in Figma, in two flavors : 
Design
Now that the branding elements are defined and the idea is set, it is time to design the MVP (Minimum Viable Product), that will be presented during a pitch, this MVP mainly aims to show what the app will be about, and not to be an actual product.
First with Figma’s AI generation tool it was possible to generate a base design. Then, with the specific visual language of the app, the different ideas that were added overtime, the design was fully remade from 0, removing pages that were not useful and adding small details. The design ended up with 4 main pages :
Home : The main page that users see when they open the app, it contains a recap, some recommandations & the next events
Calendar : The calendar that contains both events from other calendars (ical & google calendar) and the generated events (planning feature)
Insights : This page contains bio-markers (BPM, sleep, steps, …) and recommandations made by the app & the AI
Profile : Contains the user profile and parameters
Note: This design is a base but then got modified during the process of developping the demo for the pitch presentation of the start-up.
Market
The market of the app is great, first of all, it is at the intersection of health and productivity along with AI, all of these 3 markets are growing rapidly, both in investment and in market size.
We know that young people prefer to spend money on their wellbeing than previous generation and they see this as an highly important investment (source: McKinsey), we can see more gyms opening, more products marketed as healthy, and more demand for software & hardware related to digital health.
On the other hand, productivity apps get more and more important in peoples life, in the past few years the most notable productivity focused company to stonk is Notion, in just a few month it gained an important amount of users and became known especially by students.
Finally, the AI market is the market driving the current economy the most, with billions in investment and the fastest adoption seen when ChatGPT got publicly available, we can see also many start-ups using AI to solve problems that were not possible to manage before.
Our solution is focused on students, therefore it will answer the most important problems that students face, one of which is time management and being helped at specific times to manage their stress, avoid injuries doing sports, and stay healthy overall. From the best of our knowledge, there is no current solution that answers this problem. And importantly, most start-ups targeting health or productivity take the “heal” route and not the “prevent” one.
If we want to solve some of our most important societal crises, we need to look at how can we avoid these crises and not simply how to solve the result of the crises.
Finally, our solution is more relevant to our target, yes, we depend on other companies that provide the necessary hardware (phone, smart-watch / smart-band, …), but even though some of them could be competitors, they still are irrelevant to students, for exemple, have you ever had this “you should do some exercise” notification on your watch even though you currently are in class ? This is a simple exemple, but this simple exemple give you an idea as of why current solution don’t properly answer students problem.
Final note
This project was done during the entrepreneurship class of my Master @INSA Lyon, which explains why the prototype was not a main part of the project but rather a cool bonus.
Also, many ideas come from the company Alan, the visual style of the characters are abased on the visual style of their mascott, though the mascott idea did not come from Alan.