Final Reflection

1.) Recall

2.) To me, the most formative experience of this class has to be all the interviews we had to do with potential customers in our segment. Honestly, I lost count of how many people I actually talked to for this, and I know without a doubt I’ve gotten a lot comfortable going up to people and asking their opinions on things (i.e. new business ideas). As for the most joyous experience and the one I’ll remember years later, I really loved the “What’s Your Secret Sauce?” assignment where we had to interview 5 people close to us and record what they said our particular human capital is. It was just a really memorable experience in my mind. I’m probably most proud of myself for just coming up with a business venture and fleshing it out and refining it week after week with the assignments. Typically, if I have a cool idea, I just say it out loud, acknowledge that it’s cool, and then drop it there. So to stick with this for a number of weeks made me proud of myself.

3.) Now that we’re at the end of the semester, I still don’t quite see myself as an entrepreneur, but I do see myself as someone with the potential to become one. Currently, I have a lot of moving parts in my life and my plate is already really full as it is, but after this class I now feel like I have the tools where if I wanted to later on down the road, I could definitely get something going on the entrepreneurial field. As a result of this class though I think my mindset has evolved from a little bit naive about business in general and has in fact, moved towards a more entrepreneurial approach. 

4.) One recommendation I’d give to students going down this road in the future is to dream big and think outside of the box. Many of the really cool ideas I’ve come across this semester I never would have even thought about if I hadn’t take two seconds to get out of my own bubble and just to think “what if”. To perform best in this course, the only thing I can really say is to plan ahead. Because if you don’t, it will ABSOLUTELY come back to haunt you. And finally, to foster good mindsets for this class, share ideas. Understand that not much is off the table. And realize that if you want it to, this class can absolutely take you places. 

Venture Concept No. 2

1.) Revised venture concept:

Opportunity:

The new venture I'm discussing is a matching service for people and their ideal cleaning products. I'm using the information I found from interviews from previous assignments. 

-Who has the need? The need for this service extends to pretty much everyone who lives on their own or is responsible for some of the cleaning duties of their household. This service is mostly needed by busy, middle-class individuals who are conscious of the price spent on cleaning products and restricted by a busy schedule.

-Nature of the need? This is a consumer need. It will be a program that has reviews, different price points, and matching systems to match the ideal cleaning product with each consumer, all in the reach of the customer at the touch of a button and as quickly as possible. 

Forces in the environment creating this opportunity is the constant invention and updating of cleaning products, leading to a larger and larger market of things to choose from. An example of this would be vacuums. Just from a simple Google search of "Dyson vacuums," there are at least ten different models that come up and even though there are some immediately noticeable differences, many are variations of the same model. This market is slightly different geographically due to the type of environment outside. For example, If someone lives in Oklahoma, they will need cleaning products able to deal with the red clay or the region while if you're living in New York City, this would't be a problem. Customers are currently satisfying their need by online searching for product reviews and by word of mouth. Sometimes, specialized stores give demonstrations of the product, but there is nowhere currently that offers all of these services in one place. I feel as if this opportunity is relatively large, strictly because as long as people have their own living spaces, there will always be a need to clean them up. Also, the window of opportunity here isn't really something to worry about either because of the previous reason. I do feel like this is something to be capitalized on soon though, just because there may be more markets to break into than I initially thought. 

Innovation:

The product here is a matching service for consumers and cleaning supplies/ tools. Ideally, this would be some sort of app or online website. There would be a questionnaire when a new member signs up, which would have questions about their location, lifestyle, amount of pets and children, type of flooring and appliances in their house, etc. Then, based on these answers, there would be different categories the customer could choose from to look through. Some of the categories would be Vacuums, Kitchen, Outdoor Maintenance, etc. Under each of the tabs would be a list of ranked supplies or products that we believe the consumer would benefit from, with the highest match listed first and then lower matches listed in descending order. Under each individual product, there would be customer reviews, other linked products maybe used with the product, and videos of the tool in use. There would also be a set up in the app for online ordering for anything listed. This is part of where revenue comes in, I would arrange a commission from the actual companies selling the product off of everything sold, as well as getting a cut from product advertisements. I want this process to be as fast as possible for the members, and I want to be able to make the different categories extremely easily available in store and on the app. This idea is focused on saving time and effort by having someone else compile information about products a customer may need before they even really need them. So I want that to be reflected and if there are ways for the questionnaire process to be more streamlined, perhaps with different prompts based on answers to previous questions, that’s the direction I want to move in. 

Venture Concept:

I feel as if customers would want to buy this innovation because it's a time-saver, and it's personalized so as to eliminate the need for having to return defective products or buyer dissatisfaction. I think customers would switch to this service because it would be approved by the seller companies rather that being a new brand altogether, and it brings all aspects of household shopping to one place. Because of this, I think there would be a relatively low level of difficulty in getting customers to switch. And after listening to feedback, I have almost no doubt at all that the shortened process of not only shopping but finding something to fit a particular need of an individual, would cause people to switch to my app very easily. As far as competitors go, by having ads from the seller companies on my app I would hope to eliminate competition from that front. The only other competition I feel would be any in-person appliance stores. My layout of my app would play a big role in the overall success of the product. The design would have to be very bright and clean, as well as overall being user friendly and not hard to operate or to get help with (tutorials, help buttons, etc.). I want the app to maybe have predictor setting as well, to help guide the users towards products like what they’ve been searching for, and I’d also like to have various autofill features to save time. In order to support the "business," I would need to have product researchers and testers, as well as demographic/geographic surveyors working pretty regularly in order to keep up with customer needs and with the release of new products from the seller companies. Ideally, I feel as if a team of maybe ten employees were to work together, all of this and more could easily be accomplished. They would each get a cut from the overall app profits.

Three minor elements:

1- The most important aspect of this product is its personalization to the customers and the ability to save so much time in shopping and advertising.

2- The next thing for this venture would be the actual launching of an app. A possible next app revolving around the same general idea as this one would maybe be with healthcare products. The difficulty in this idea would come with working with healthcare providers, and some of the materials would not be able to be sold by a third-party seller, so there might be more planning hangups with that idea.

3- What's next for me after this venture is possibly more work into research. All of the research and interviews that have gone into this idea was really fun and eye opening for me. While I may not be a huge entrepreneur in the future on my own, I would maybe choose to opt for being a part of the research department for other budding ideas that I decide to be a part of.

Three minor elements:

1- The most important aspect of this product is its personalization to the customers and the ability to save so much time in shopping and advertising.

2- The next thing for this venture would be the actual launching of an app. A possible next app revolving around the same general idea as this one would maybe be with healthcare products. The difficulty in this idea would come with working with healthcare providers, and some of the materials would not be able to be sold by a third-party seller, so there might be more planning hangups with that idea.

3- What's next for me after this venture is possibly more work into research. All of the research and interviews that have gone into this idea was really fun and eye opening for me. While I may not be a huge entrepreneur in the future on my own, I would maybe choose to opt for being a part of the research department for other budding ideas that I decide to be a part of.

Three minor elements:

1- The most important aspect of this product is its personalization to the customers and the ability to save so much time in shopping and advertising.

2- The next thing for this venture would be the actual launching of an app. A possible next app revolving around the same general idea as this one would maybe be with healthcare products. The difficulty in this idea would come with working with healthcare providers, and some of the materials would not be able to be sold by a third-party seller, so there might be more planning hangups with that idea.

3- What's next for me after this venture is possibly more work into research. All of the research and interviews that have gone into this idea was really fun and eye opening for me. While I may not be a huge entrepreneur in the future on my own, I would maybe choose to opt for being a part of the research department for other budding ideas that I decide to be a part of.

Three minor elements:

1- The most important aspect of this product is still in its personalization to the customers and the ability to save so much time in shopping and advertising.

2- The next thing for this venture would be the actual launching of an app. A possible next app revolving around the same general idea as this one would maybe be with healthcare products. The difficulty in this idea would come with working with healthcare providers, and some of the materials would not be able to be sold by a third-party seller, so there might be more planning hangups with that idea. With this app however, I would want to just branch out into other sectors of cleaning, for example maybe pool cleaning equipment. 

3- What's next for me after this venture is  research. All of the research and interviews that have gone into this idea was really fun and eye opening for me. While I may not be a huge entrepreneur in the future on my own, I would maybe choose to opt for being a part of the research department for other budding ideas that I decide to be a part of.

2.) Feedback:

So for this assignment the first time around, my feedback was pretty positive and didn’t include many suggestions about what to possibly improve upon or where to move in a different direction. However, I believe there is absolutely always room for improvement. My comment I did get was about this idea would save a lot of time, so when I got to thinking about it I decided to go in that route when changing my first venture concept post. 

3.) How you changed the concept:

I didn’t change the concept too much, because a lot of it was explaining about my product in general. My changes are mostly additions. I chose to focus more on streamlining the experience a user has on my app. I want to try and find the fastest and most accurate way to get from Point A to Point B, so to speak. 

4.) Picture:

An oldie but a goodie...as far as illustrating a streamlined process and design.

Your Exit Strategy

1.) The exit strategy that I plan to make is along the lines of keeping with my venture for maybe the next 5-10 years, and then either sell it for profit, or turn it over to the people I’ve selected for my team. As a long term goal for my life, I’m planning on working in the medical field and in 5-10 years, I’d be at a point in my life and career where I’d need to focus more on that area and I feel like I wouldn’t be able to single-handedly give the venture as much effort as it deserves. 

2.) I’ve selected this particular strategy because I feel as if it would be fair to try and turn over the program to the people that I would’ve chosen to help me bring it to life and the help grow it even more. Also, I feel like if I went down the sale route, I could use the basic app principle and sell that to a variety of areas for a great profit.

3.) As far as the other ideas concerning my concept, I think the exit strategy I came up with is keeping in mind the assignment from a few weeks ago where we had to look at a completely different demographic to sell our product to. In that assignment, I really got to thinking about the different uses of the app infrastructure rather than just the cleaning matching service. I think by thinking of a potential exit strategy, I see a lot more room for growth and versatility in the app/ service ideas than I ever did before. 

Celebrating Failure

1.) One of my biggest failures this semester was involving sleep, and making it to class on time. I took a pretty big course load this semester, and needless to say I spent a lot of late nights up working on things, only to turn back around and be out at the bus stop by 7:45 every morning. One of the most memorable moments (and not in a good way) was one particular day that I had a project to present starting at 8:30 and I woke up in a state of complete panic at about 8:55, still having to shower and catch the bus. Safe to say I failed in a pretty big way that day. Most days though, I’d just wake up closer and closer to when I needed to leave, and I’ve pretty much been living on coffee the past few weeks. 

2.) What I learned from this? Definitely to try and be better with my time management and procrastination. I also learned how to get really good at taking 20 minute naps, but I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or not, so take that however you will. I also learned to always, ALWAYS put your phone, with the alarms set and volume on, on the other side of the room or at least out of arm’s reach so you can’t grab the phone from bed and shut the alarm off to go back to sleep. I’m not someone who needs a full eight hours of sleep to function, but when I started averaging five hours a night, having a reliable wake up plan was something I really needed to get serious about. 

3.) In general, I think failure is helpful-to a degree. Failure can be something as simple as dropping an egg on the floor while cooking breakfast, to something more impactful, like getting fired from your dream job because of something you failed to do. I think failures are necessary though because they teach you that nothing is ever guaranteed and in order to accomplish the things you want to, you have to practice and work through several obstacles. Personally, I feel like I have a pretty good relationship with failure. I grew up with parents who were always very real about things and matter-of-fact when it came to realizing your shortcomings and learning from them. So little daily failures, I tend to let roll off my back with minimal stress. But when something bigger comes up, I do tend to get really distracted as far as other aspects of my life goes and I become centered on the certain thing for a while until I can kind of snap out of it and come up with a plan to either fix it if I can, or come up with my new route of approach. As weird as it may sound, my usual best place for thinking through things like this and clearing my head is on a long run usually late at night. Finally, this class has changed my perspective of failure by making it seem a little less monumental. Knowing what I know now about all the failings entrepreneurs have to deal with every step of the way, it makes it a little more comforting to see that ordinary people do hit a wall just as much as famous and successful ones do. I feel like compared to a few months ago, I would be less afraid to take a risk. I would still be skeptical because I am a realist, but knowing others are going through struggles too make it easier to take a chance and jump on a leap of faith without as much fear of failure because sometimes, you have to fail before you can fly. 

What's Next?

Existing Market:
Step 1: In terms of products and services for my venture, I think launching the cleaning matching app would be next. For new products and services, there could maybe be regional sections with local stores that would be specific to only a few cities that have specific local retailers. 
Step 2: In my next three interviews, two of the three said that they would love for the app to be launched. The third person was probably mid fifties, and said that the idea sounded neat but they personally wouldn’t use it because it seemed a little too technologically advanced for them to use on a regular basis. I described to them all how my app would be a product guide, matching service, and a step in the purchasing for household cleaning products and tools. When asked about what I should be doing with the app, one of the interviewees, a male, mentioned to maybe extend to make an automotive or outdoor activity section with things like grill cleaners or rust removers for bike and motorcycle chains. This is kind of related to the part about what customers might want next, but in my interviews I also was told that the only way this product would not only work but grow in popularity is if it stayed up to date with all the new product releases. I agree with this completely, so that would be something to stay on top of. 
Step 3: For this venture, What makes the most sense in moving forward would be a lunch for the app, and then the hire and collaboration with several different people with specified skillets to help further the venture even more. For example, I don’t have a lot of experience with fixing app interfaces, so I may want to get the help of a tech person to fix any bugs that might happen immediately after the app’s launch and then again as new products are added. A customer reviews section would have to be sorted through, and then possible interviews with existing customers would have to happen, so a HR person or team would have to come into the mix. As far as the other roles, I would just have to work on butting together a cohesive and very specified team to help the venture become successful. 

In addition to this, A next step would be to work on sponsorships and relations with the seller companies. In order to decrease competition and get a good commission off of sales, I would probably have to negotiate with each individual company and adjust the app accordingly. Also, in order to grow this market, I would maybe need to also look into higher-end products for other customers such as large cleaning companies or hotels that would mass buy a product. 

New Market:
Step 1: A radically different market than one I am targeting would probably be the very wealthy upper class with much higher average incomes than the average middle class that I’ve been targeting so far. 
Step 2: For this new market, I don’t think this product would initially be very valuable to them. However, the software itself might be. For example, if a person in this new market was some sort of a swimsuit or jewelry designer, they might be able to benefit from the personalization aspect of finding out what a specific customer will want to buy. To be honest, I think the new market would only find value in this venture if they adjusted it to fit their needs as sellers, or if I changed the entire product set to something very high end, like luxury cars or fancy vacation packages for example. 
Step 3: For the interviews of two people in this new market, I had to get a little creative. I have a part-time job delivering groceries and one of the interviewees was a resident of a very wealthy neighborhood. This woman actually was hosting a clothing trunk show when I walked in, so when I explained a little bit about the product, she immediately saw its value to her being more on the selling side where she could further her clothing boutique. As far as meeting other people in this customer range, she said with her social circle and circles even more elite, most of the advertising is passed around by word of mouth, and tried and true results. In other words, I would have to make absolute sure that the service is up and running well before even circulating the idea for use to a higher income clientele. 
Step 4:

This new market was kind of surprising to me because I really knew nothing about it before this interview portion. The second person I interviewed was a sort of local celebrity friend of a friend who comes from a family with old money. The woman is a singer, so she travels a lot making different guest appearances at music events. My original expectations were correct in the fact that the people I talked to in this market had little to no need for cleaning products themselves, as most of them either used cleaning service or preferred much higher end products than the people my app would usually target. 

As far as this market in general, I feel like they still would’t be the best choice for my original idea about the app regarding cleaning products. However, I am interested in the idea that the app itself could be made very versatile with higher end clientele. What I mentioned before about the woman with the clothing trunk show was intriguing, because it got me thinking about what other sorts of products or services the app and personalization targeting could be used for. Obviously, some aspects like the ads and tutorials might not be the same or even applicable anymore, but the general idea behind the app itself could be used. Personally, I feel as if sticking with the original idea and market would be preferable though simply because it is a wider market, that I feel has more areas to branch off of and expand. 

Venture Concept No. 1

Opportunity:
The new venture I'm discussing is a matching service for people and their ideal cleaning products. I'm using the information I found from interviews from previous assignments. Before this assignment, six different interviews had taken place with six different people chosen at random.
-Who has the need? The need for this service extends to pretty much everyone who lives on their own or is responsible for some of the cleaning duties of their household. However, this service is mostly needed by busy, middle-class individuals who are conscious of the price spent on cleaning products and restricted by a busy schedule.
-Nature of the need? This is a consumer need. It will be a program the has reviews, different price points, and matching systems to match the ideal cleaning product with each consumer.
Forces in the environment creating this opportunity is the constant invention and updating of cleaning products, leading to a larger and larger market of things to choose from. An example of this would be vacuums. Just from a simple Google search of "Dyson vacuums," there are at least ten different models that come up and even though there are some immediately noticeable differences, many are variations of the same model. This market is slightly different geographically due to the type of environment outside. For example, If someone lives in Oklahoma, they will need cleaning products able to deal with the red clay or the region while if you're living in New York City, this would't be a problem. Customers are currently satisfying their need by Online searching for product reviews and by word of mouth. Sometimes, specialized stores give demonstrations of the product, but there is nowhere currently that offers all of these services in one place. I feel as if this opportunity is relatively large, strictly because as long as people have their own living spaces, there will always be a need to clean them up. Also, the window of opportunity here isn't really something to worry about either because of the previous reason.
Innovation:
The product here is a matching service for consumers and cleaning supplies/ tools. Ideally, this would be some sort of app or online website. There would be a questionnaire when a new member signs up, which would have questions about their location, lifestyle, amount of pets and children, type of flooring and appliances in their house, etc. Then, based on these answers, there would be different categories the customer could choose from to look through. Some of the categories would be Vacuums, Kitchen, Outdoor Maintenance, etc. Under each of the tabs would be t=a list of ranked supplies or products that we believe the consumer would benefit from, with the highest match listed first and then lower matches listed in descending order. Under each individual product, there would be customer reviews, other linked products maybe used with the product, and videos of the tool in use. There would also be a set up in the app for online ordering for anything listed. This is part of where revenue comes in, I would arrange a commission from the actual companies selling the product off of everything sold, as well as getting a cut from product advertisements.
Venture Concept:
I feel as if customers would want to buy this innovation because it's a time-saver, and it's personalized so as to eliminate the need for having to return defective products or buyer dissatisfaction. I think customers would switch to this service because it would be approved by the seller companies rather that being a new brand altogether, and it brings all aspects of household shopping to one place. Because of this, I think there would be a relatively low level of difficulty in getting customers to switch. As far as competitors go, by having ads from the seller companies on my app I would hope to eliminate competition from that front. The only other competition I feel would be any in person appliance stores, for example, a Maytag store selling refrigerator filters and things like that. My layout of my app would play a big role in the overall success of the product. The design would have to be very bright and clean, as well as overall being user friendly and not hard to operate or to get help with (tutorials, help buttons, etc.). In order to support the "business," I would need to have product researchers and testers, as well as demographic/geographic surveyors working pretty regularly in order to keep up with customer needs and with the release of new products from the seller companies. Ideally, I feel as if a team of maybe ten employees were to work together, all of this and more could easily be accomplished. They would each get a cut from the overall app profits.
Three minor elements:
1- The most important aspect of this product is its personalization to the customers and the ability to save so much time in shopping and advertising.
2- The next thing for this venture would be the actual launching of an app. A possible next app revolving around the same general idea as this one would maybe be with healthcare products. The difficulty in this idea would come with working with healthcare providers, and some of the materials would not be able to be sold by a third-party seller, so there might be more planning hangups with that idea.
3- What's next for me after this venture is possibly more work into research. All of the research and interviews that have gone into this idea was really fun and eye opening for me. While I may not be a huge entrepreneur in the future on my own, I would maybe choose to opt for being a part of the research department for other budding ideas that I decide to be a part of.

Customer avatar

For my customer avatar, I created a pretty average-looking person. Because that’s the majority of people that hold my segment together! Many of the people I interviewed are family people, so as far as a car they’d drive, I’m thinking definitely an SUV or something life that. With dark colored interior show spills from kids don’t show up. Probably grey or another dark color for the outside too so if they get super busy with other aspects of their life, you can’t tell if it’s been a little bit since they washed the car. For hobbies, it’s probably something that can be done at night, after kids have gone to sleep or something relaxing from their day jobs, like reading, playing puzzles, or maybe a musical instrument. Also, my avatar is super likely to have a pet, and love it like it’s a member of the family and not just an animal. As mentioned, most people in the segment do have kids, but the ones that don’t are typically focusing on their career and have either pets, or large friend groups to keep them busy and occupied when they’re not working. They’re from all over the country and even the world, and have backgrounds ranging from only child to adopted and living with friends out of cars while road tripping across the country. The live a fast-paced life, but still need to fit in time for decompression and fun. The biggest thing about this segment is they are everyday people like you and me, and are every bit as unique as well.

Myself and the customer avatar have a very busy lifestyle in common. I have school and work and care a lot about helping out friends and travel most weekends, so I lead a very busy life like many of these family oriented people. Because of having this in common, I understood and shared a lot of their points of view and criteria for selecting and using a product that we discussed in earlier interviews. I don’t really think this is a coincidence, because most college kids ARE super busy, and need something quick and cheap that can fit their needs but still work well.