Our Story: How team Mentavisor won the Saucecode Hackathon 2020
“An amazing team can be the sauce for your success”
Mentavisor is a team of innovators or “codelums” as the team members fondly call themselves. The idea started in 2020 when a team of tech-savvy guys decided to join the Saucecode Hackathon.
AbdulMatin Sanni (full-stack software developer and the team lead), popularly known as the Unconfused Medical student started the team with his friend, Fawas Kareem (backend developer and computer scientist).
They decided to work on the mental niche of Health care, as there was a rising demand for the need for quality mental health and support in Nigeria, especially during the outbreak of the Covid pandemic and the social unrest in 2020.
Fawas brought his friend and colleague, Peterson Oaikhenah who likes to be called Nextwebb (full stack developer and first-class student of computer engineering) on the team in no time.
The name Mentavisor was formed meaning “Mental Advisor”, with the platform focusing on providing affordable and easily accessible mental health services and support throughout Nigeria. Mentavisor is built to offer audio-visual consultations that connect patients to therapists and volunteers, its services are available at an inexpensive rate, and the appointments can be booked in 40 seconds or less.
In an interview with the team, AbdulMatin mentioned that the team worked for about 3 hours daily on average and completed the MVP of the Application in three months.
The team worked consistently, and solely focused on making a second-to-none dauntless platform. The motivation was strengthened by people’s acknowledgment and appreciation of the idea. The team members were also motivated to work with each other, as part of the members partook in the Hack4Justice competition earlier in February 2020.
The idea had a really bright outlook as it got a lot of inspiration, and everyone had great expectations. The team saw further motivation when Peterson shared information about the “Doctor In Demand” application, a similar service that provided Digital Healthcare in the US, they had also integrated the audio-visual form of consultation.
During the interview with the team, Fawas stated that he told his friends “Guys, we can do this, I’m extremely positive”. This made a great combination of friends that focused on collaboration, mutual support, and the strong desire to win. The team received support from Dele Bakare (CEO of Findworka) who validated our idea and gave tips on how to make the product successful. The team mentioned, “Mr. Dele really helped us to make our work better. An hour call with him was worth 5 years of experience”.
Also on the team was Olabisi Abesin (a creative writer), who worked as the Software tester on the team. The team faced quite a lot of challenges while completing the task but none was due to interpersonal relationships. Everyone on the team was awesome! They were a bunch of talented individuals that bonded well, understood each other, and completed the task within the time limit. In addition to anecdotes, the team shared strategies and tools they used in building the solution. Peterson A.K.A nextwebb commented, “I’ll say I didn’t envision my team winning the hackathon. It was all “pure vibes and God’s grace” and as we saw a lot of validations from people we told about it, winning became real”.
The team won the Saucecode2020 Hackathon and is taking all the feedback from the amazing judges into building a usable product by the public. They also have the goal to make the platform work better and build a complete startup that would pioneer mental healthcare in Nigeria, and hopefully, Africa.
“I didn’t really believe in teamwork, but now I realize, you just need to get the right minds and the product will build itself”.- AbdulMatin, 2021.
