I got 99 problems and a blog ain't one

Thursday, July 28, 2016

Reading Reflection 3

1) What was the general theme or argument of the book?

2) How did the book, in your opinion, connect with and enhance what you are learning in ENT 3003?

3) If you had to design an exercise for this class, based on the book you read, what would that exercise involve?

4) What was your biggest surprise or 'aha' moment when reading the book? In other words, what did you learn that differed most from your expectations?

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The general argument of the book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck is that we need to focus on shifting our mindset. She focuses on two types of mindset: a fixed mindset and a growth mindset. If you are able to develop the growth mindset, she argues that you will be able to accomplish more, face adversity easier, and overcome setbacks quicker because your mind is more accepting of change and you will see the world in a different way. Even if you currently have a fixed mindset, Dweck argues that this can be changed and you too can develop a growth mindset.
I think this book connected with this class because the growth mindset is basically what this class attempts to develop. One part of the book I remember being very relevant to this class, was that with a growth mindset you are not worried about failure. With the growth mindset the experience you gain is worth it regardless of the outcome. This connects with my second reading reflection as well. Scott Adams argued that failure is how he learned a majority of his skills and really helped him grow as an individual.
If I were to develop an exercise for this book, I think it would be to require students to think of a skill they are not confident in. This could be drawing, writing poetry, running, swimming, etc. Then I would require them to go out and practice this skill for an hour a day for a week. At the end of the week I would have them reflect on their experience and how much, even after just a week, they got better with the practice.
The biggest aha moment for me while reading this book was that you can easily change your mindset. I always assumed you were stuck with the way you thought or at least it would be incredibly difficult to change. This book showed me that while it may be challenging at first, it is in fact possible to change that mindset and that it might actually be good to do so.

Final Reflection - Mama I made it

1) Read through your blog from this semester. Recall all of the experiences you've had a long the way -- the highs, the lows -- the fun moments, and the moments of drudgery, and even the moments of dread.

2) What sticks out to you as the most formative experience? The experience that you'll remember years later? What was your most joyous experience? What experience are you most proud of yourself for accomplishing?

3) At the beginning of the semester, I mentioned that I wanted each of you to develop an entrepreneurial mindset. And we repeated the mantra -- I am an entrepreneur. Now, at the end, do you see yourself as an entrepreneur? Do you think you have moved closer to developing an entrepreneurial mindset?

4) What is the one recommendation you would make to the students who are going to journey down this path in the future? What would you recommend they do to perform best in this course? What would you recommend they do to foster that mindset?

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I think the most formative experience from this class was reading How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big.

This was the most formative experience because I enjoyed reading the book and several of the lessons Adams speaks on are good advice to live by. I think the experience that I will remember the most for years to come is the bug list. That was the first assignment I had to do and really showed me what I was in for with this class. The most joyous experience I had was reading all of the comments people posted on my blog posts. Generally, these were entertaining and occasionally helpful for future assignments. This is the experience I am the most proud of accomplishing because when I submit this assignment, I will have completed the class (almost).

I do not know if I see myself as an entrepreneur just yet. There is so much left to see and do in the world and so many experiences to be had in order to fully become an entrepreneur. I think this class has helped me at least gain a definition of what an entrepreneur is. I have definitely moved closer to the entrepreneurial mindset though. This class has opened my eyes to how to think like an entrepreneur.

My one recommendation to future students going down this path would be simple: make sure you have your stuff together. Many people missed assignments or had to drop the class. If you have your stuff together you will hit deadlines and get all of the assignments in on time. It is all about the system you use.

Venture Concept 2

Here's what you need to do for this exercise.

1) Provide, again, your venture concept description, using this form

2) Provide a summary of the feedback you received from your previous venture concept description. You certainly want to include the student feedback, but you may also include the feedback you received from others during the "What's Next" exercise. You want to summarize all of the feedback, but be sure to place an emphasis on what people recommended you change about your idea. (In other words, don't just describe the positive feedback.)

3) Describe how you changed your venture concept, based on what you learned from the feedback.

4) Include a picture (for illustration!), please include the phrase "Venture Concept No. 2" in the post title.

1) Revised Venture Concept

Opportunity

My product is an app that will help people choose where to go eat. It will focus on restaurants around the University of Florida campus with an emphasis on local or family owned restaurants. The app will break down all the restaurants by type of food, as well as, deal of the day – a function that will show all meals for under seven dollars on that given day.

The need for a product like this is had by college students (the eighteen to twenty-five-year-old range), which is why I would focus primarily on restaurants within a fifteen-mile radius of the University of Florida campus. The need is not critical, however, the college-aged demographic is often missed by other similar applications. Many apps focus on an older demographic or to families. The University of Florida has over 50,000 students, many of whom are living on a budget. This environment has created the opportunity. The opportunity would be limited at first to major universities because these are the areas where the most people fitting the demographic live. College campuses also tend to host some of the best, local restaurants. Customers currently use word of mouth, the internet, or another food app, such as Yelp!, to meet their needs. I do not think they are extremely loyal because none of these solutions are great at finding the best, cheap and local restaurants. This opportunity could be huge if one or two college campuses took, but gaining that kind of foothold could be tough with populations that move so frequently.

Innovation

Like I mentioned in my first paragraph, my innovation is an app that will help, mainly college students, choose where to go eat on an evening out. It will have two main features: type of food and deal of the day. The type of food option is nothing innovative, it will simply break down the restaurants in Gainesville by what cuisine is served. For example, it would break it down by Mexican, Italian, American, Sandwiches, etc. This would be useful because many people tend to go to one restaurant for each type of food they eat. Meaning they will go to Chipotle for Mexican food, Leo’s for pizza/Italian, Subway for sandwiches, and so on. This leaves people roughly five to seven places they eat at and they never expand their horizons because they do not know of other alternatives. By listing each restaurant by type, people could go beyond the one or two places they know under each food type and expand their horizons. The deal of the day function is what will make my app stand out from competition. This will focus on meals specials/ deals that are under seven dollars. Many restaurants have promotional activities for given days of the week. For example, you have the classic taco Tuesday and slice of the day, but there is also $3 Burger Monday’s and Wednesday’s, Throwback Thursday’s, Wing night, BBQ night, Irish Sunday, and a plethora of other local deals in Gainesville. Many students who do not expand their horizons miss out on all of these possible deals at various locations and find when they leave after graduation, they only know where the chains are.

This won’t be a huge money making idea. I plan to make enough money to keep it running by selling ad space on the app, as well as, promoting special events for venues. This will both gain usage of my app because people will be able to see what is going on this week/month but it will also boost attendance to these venues. If they agree to give 10% of the profits for that night to me, I would need to have the highest attendance possible. With an increase in downloads I would also gain more profits from ad space as I would have more traffic on the app.

Venture Concept

My app will solve the need for the demographic I am aiming at because they will now have an app that directly relates to their lives, instead of a partial solution that occasionally meets their needs. Since I am offering an app, and the app store and Google play are difficult markets in themselves, it will be free to customers. This is why I would need to sell ad space on the app. Due to the fact that it will be free, I believe, more people would be willing to download it and tell their friends to do the same. This will be necessary because it will be hard to gain awareness, as a result, I will need word of mouth to help gain popularity. Once people have heard about my app it will be easier to gain adherence, however, separating myself from all the other apps may be difficult in the beginning. My main competition would be Yelp!, simply because of name recognition. By focusing on only one market, I think I would be able to take some market share around UF.

I think once I have gained traction with restaurants I could easily transfer over and do the same thing with bars and clubs. This is another area that would be specific to college students that is currently be under represented. There is already an app that does this in Gainesville, as a result, I could partner with them to combine apps, or sell my app to them, to further take over the market.

After launching my app, I would hope to move to a few other college campuses and gain popularity around the state of Florida. I do not want to hold on too long because I would not have the capabilities to monitor all these locations for changing deals. As a result, I would try to exit in roughly five years after gaining popularity around UF.

2 + 3. Feedback and What I Changed

The feedback I received was slim. One comment told me to include a breakdown of deals for the restaurants. This is basically the foundation of the app. So I figured based on that comment I would keep that in there and not change the app. The only other comment did prove to be useful. This comment mentioned that there is already an app in Gainesville that focuses on bars. Based off of this, I edited my venture concept to potentially include partnering with this app or buying/selling. That was the main piece of feedback that I based my revisions off of.

Making it real

Here is my resume. Enjoy.

My Exit Strategy

1) Identify the exit strategy you plan to make. Do you intend to sell your business in the next 5 years for a large return? Do you intend to stay with the business for several decades and retire? Do you intend to protect the venture as a family business, and pass it down to your children?

2) Why have you selected this particular exit strategy?

3) How do you think your exit strategy has influenced the other decisions you've made in your concept? For instance, has it influenced how you have identified an opportunity? Has it influenced your growth intentions or how you plan to acquire and use resources?

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I intend on holding my business for 3-5 years depending on popularity. If I can gain a firm hold on the college-aged market in Gainesville, and can spread to other college campuses, say UCF, USF, or FSU, quickly I will likely sell my venture after 3 years. However, if it takes longer to gain a following or my product does not take off at UF I will sell my business, if possible, after five years. I am not in this venture for a huge gain, so I will not look to make a lot of money off of the sale, unless that is what I can sell it for.
I have selected this particular exit strategy simply because I do not think this app would be a great way to make money. I think that this app will help people, but I do not see it growing into a huge money making industry that could challenge the likes of Yelp!.
This exit strategy has influenced some of my thinking. It is why I chose the college demographic, so I could focus on major universities. It is also why I decided to on only expanding in Florida first. This will allow my app to gain popularity and make it attractive for someone to buy, but I won't have to have a huge network of employees around the country.

Thursday, July 21, 2016

Venture Concept #1

Opportunity

The need for a product like this is had by college students (the eighteen to twenty-five-year-old range), which is why I would focus primarily on restaurants within a fifteen-mile radius of the University of Florida campus. The need is not critical, however, the college-aged demographic is often missed by other comparable food applications. Many apps focus on an older demographic or to families. The University of Florida has over 50,000 students, many of whom are living on a budget or do not have the desire to eat at upscale restaurants as often as people who have “made it” in this world. I think this is what is the environment that has created this opportunity. The opportunity would be limited at first to major universities because these are the areas where the most people fitting the demographic would be located. College campuses also tend to be host to some of the best, local restaurants, from my personal experience. Customers currently use word of mouth, the internet, or another food app, such as Yelp!, to meet their needs. I do not think they are extremely loyal because none of these solutions are great at finding all of the best cheap and local restaurants. This opportunity could be huge if one or two college campuses took, but gaining that kind of foothold could be tough with populations that move so frequently.

Innovation

Venture Concept

My app will solve the need for the demographic I am aiming at because they will now have an app that directly relates to their lives, instead of a partial solution that occasionally meets their needs. Since I am offering an app, and the app store and Google play are difficult markets in themselves, it will be free to customers. This is why I would need to sell ad space on the app. Due to the fact that it will be free, I believe, more people would be willing to download it and tell their friends to do the same. This will be necessary because it will be hard to gain awareness, as a result, I will need word of mouth to help gain popularity. Once people have heard about my app it will be easier to gain adherence, however, separating myself from all the other apps may be difficult in the beginning. My main competition would be Yelp!, simply because of its name recognition. By focusing on only one market, I think I would be able to take some market share from them around UF.

Celebrating Failure

I fail at something almost everyday of my life, this isn't a bad thing though. This summer one of the biggest failures occurred during the first few weeks of Summer A. We started the summer understaffed at work. As the manager, I felt like it was my responsibility to make sure we were properly staffed so this felt like a huge failure on my part. After the first week of feeling bad about myself, I took this as a challenge and sought to overcome it. Summer B was much better and we had just the right amount of staff. However, some people had to go out of town and I was left trying to cover a large amount of shifts. Again it felt like a failure on my part for not having enough staff. After talking to my boss, she convinced me that I had not failed but learned that it is better to be overstaffed and have people with fewer hours than they asked for, than to be understaffed and have everyone at the absolute maximum they asked for.
I learned that failure is more of a challenge than an ultimatum. There is always another way out, it just takes some creative thinking and good advice from someone who's been there before. This is why connections and networking are so important, you cannot possibly know everything, but someone out there can help fill in the gaps.
Sometimes failure really puts me down. I feel that I let a lot of people down and that I let myself down. Once I get through those feelings, I see failure as a challenge and I attempt to control what I can control and roll with the changes after that. My opinion of failure has changed this summer, but I would not say this class caused any part of that change. I think my experiences have changed that thought process. The second book I read for this class had an interesting take on failure, but reading something does not, in my opinion, change anything because you usually aren't failing while reading or going to think about the book when you fail. But that is just my opinion on the book/class.