In 2012 I went on the Startupbus, a crazy competition where handpicked folks pitch ideas and form teams to build a startup in 3 days on a bus-ride to SXSW. My team took one of the biggest, most fundamental issues around: Happiness.
Happstr is about challenging yourself to take notice, and tap-in every time you feel happy, and then share that happiness with your friends. This works because happiness is actually contagious and the network effect of sharing happiness is surprisingly powerful. Obviously, you're happier when your friends are happy (by about 15%), but research shows that you're also 10% happier when their friends are happy. Even crazier, a friend of a friend of a friend being happy increases your likelihood of happiness by about 6%. Compare that to only a 2% increase with a $10,000 boost in salary. (Source: Wellbeing: The Five Essential Elements (2010))
To convey the essence of the concept we built a simple responsive site, to make it easy to tap-in wherever and whenever, from whatever device you happen to be near. The site geo-tags your check-in, and then let's you see a map of people's happiness around you. It has been thrilling to see the world light up with over 10,000 tap-ins.
We were finalists in the competition, and were covered by Mashable, The Atlantic and BusinessWeek.
Logo sketches
Color pallete
Pitch deck slide.