Final Reflection

      This has been an unusual class experience indeed, one I knew little about before signing up for the class last day of drop add after being recommended by a faculty staff at the business school. I believe the most formative experience has been approaching people, trying to convince them take a moment from their busy lives to give you a little help. That was something I was reluctant to do, grew more confident as time passed by and feel very good about going forward because I understand it’s an quality to have in the world of entrepreneurship. The most fun moment was trying to give away dollar bills and the looks in people’s faces; I did disclose the reason of what I was doing after I had gotten their reaction so their reaction to the class exercise was also priceless. I do surely believe this class has had an impact in the our entrepreneurial mindset as well in the sense that it has made us more aware of the ins and outs and the challenges that come with it. For the future students I recommend to put themselves out there and find the courage to try, that’s the only hard part, everything that follows is nothing short of exciting and rewarding.

Week 15 Reading Reflection

This was a very refreshing read and probably one of most entertaining to read. I loved the humbleness with which the author describes everything and why and how it worked despite the fact that with huge success gain one might expect people to lose modestly. Scaling up customer loyalty is a phrase I had not heard of before and just they went about achieving that by trying to understand their customers very culture is quite incredible. This was an inspiring lesson to those who are intimidated about thinking big or are afraid their concept will never scale up, if you apply few basic concepts about how scale can be achieved and what they benefits and costs are, there is nothing to fear!

Venture Concept No. 2

Venture Concept No. 1

-       Opportunity

When I first arrived in college, about 4 years ago, I signed up for classes, read the classe’s syllabi and quickly began to stress out about all the books I needed to buy. I realized that the cost of books was very high at the bookstore in campus and all out of sudden was faced with the reality of outrageous cost of education in this country, but as an unaffected foreigner up to that point I had just not experienced what the sources of these costs were. At first, I did what mostly all lost freshman do; buy the books wherever I could find them, at any cost, just because I thought it was super important to have them as soon as the semester starts. In the next semesters I realized, there was ways to save by using some of the online options, renting, seeking to buy from other students and so on. Never have I spent hundreds of dollars in books again before exploring all the options out there. However all these other options were very time ; We can build an integrated platform to facilitate the book sharing and in the process of making other people’s lives easier, helping reduce waste and damage to our only planet, make some money as well. The college student population was an enormous 50 million in 2015, and most of them could use some help in reducing college cost. The window of this opportunity is as long as we don’t entirely switch to e-books, which despite recent trends is difficult to see happen before the next decade is over.

Innovation

What’s innovative about this concept is putting together a number of resources that we have been using a long time now, to create a service that facilitates a process that is utterly scattered at the moment and very inefficient. The examples of not so genius concepts that have turned into incredibly successful business models are plentiful; Facebook is one of them, there had been plenty of social networks before it and after it, but Facebook simply happened because of few details it got right, better than the competition combined with other circumstantial  factors such as timing and context. Our website Care2Share.org is going to be a place where you find the books other people no longer need by just searching by class code and avoiding all the searching effort it takes anyplace in internet to put each class’ materials together. Similarly, those who want to get rid of these books will just as effortlessly be able to list those books in that website by just submitting them whereas the listing is done online. Whenever an order is made and a transaction takes place, 20% of the of it will go to Care2Share for the services provide and the other 80% will go to the supplier of the book a much better deal than anyone in the market currently provides.

Venture Concept

Currently college students are mainly purchased in three ways, bookstore, online (amazon and chegg) or bought from peers via Facebook posts or cragslist. The direct competitor to our concept are amazon and chegg, which have been widely successful. Their weakness is essentially their strength; they are large companies with a tremendous reach and penetration of the market that I believe they are not inclined to look at the problem with the customers’ eye anymore. To go and post in any of the platforms for each individual book is pretty tedious process and same goes with other end of the process which is searching for a book you need. Given the amount of the books these websites have listed there is always to get the wrong book because of a mismatching author, ISBN or whatever other minor characteristic of the book. Also, although economies of scale these companies have reached do have their benefits, the fact that they store their books in few large warehouses means that there is shipping cost involved that we do not incur. I have heard people say that shipping is free; that is a good marketing trick but nothing comes free my friend, for Amazon you’re paying the prime membership which depending on your shopping volume may or may be not worth it, and for any other platforms that claims free shipping, it just means the shipping cost is included in the product or service price itself; to counter that we will have to prove that our cost is lower by at least however much the shipping cost for Amazon would be. I think this is a major selling point for us not just for it proves why we would be cheaper but also more environmental and less wasteful. Why should you buy a book that comes from a warehouse in Minnesota when the same number of students take that same finance class every year; with our platform these books never leave Gainesville because and they shouldn’t have to. Craigslist on the other hand is another tool used by many to trade items however similarly to Facebook, you won’t be able to find all of your books at once, you’ll have to agree on price, meet up place and time with every person you’re going to buy from/sell to and that level of inconvenience will simply make you rather more expensively rather than put so much time and effort in coordinating with craigstlist buyers and sellers.

As for the secret sauce of the company, I frankly right now believe it is the mere fact that people are too stuck in the status quo in the moment and won’t realize before it is too late that this actually works. It is the same secret sauce Tesla had. People had failed making cars electric, why would Musk succeed? Oops, they work, well now it is too late to rival Tesla’s position in people’s mind as the absolute leader in the section of the market, even though Tesla has made public all of its patents which are free to use by anyone, an absolutely impressive daring move by them.

The next thing for the venture would be expanding this service to lower levels of education and go beyond college textbooks. Another layer would be partnering with schools and government to make collective effort to reduce cost of education which is a good to society as a whole.

In five years from now, assuming this venture is successful, I see myself going back to my list of start up ideas that aim at making a contribution to the people and the planet. I want to use the experience and resources to help developing countries like my own (Kosovo) catch up with the world, create opportunities and value for other aspiring people like myself.

The feedback was overwhelmingly positive; there were mostly words of encouragement and minor ideas and how I can refine it and what not; there was comment addressing the problem of competition especially from craigslist which helped me add to the part where I address competing forces. I want to thank everyone for being so kind and inspiring with their comments. The yin yang image that I picked as the illustration picture for this post is up for interpretation.

 

Google Gold

I had long wanted to start a blog to document and share my experiences of studying abroad since high school but never took the initiative. This class provided me with the great opportunity of finding out just how easy it was to set up a blog and use the platform to get your stories to the world. However, since this was a first time experience I have yet to get to a level of sophistication where I can use strategic tools and promote the blog to audiences. In fact I first became familiar with such strategies when we had a guest speaker specialized in online advertising back at the beginning of the semester; my keywords were textbooks, start up, entrepreneurship etc. The only social media I used was Google Plus and to my surprise my shares were viewed by a lot of people despite the fact that this is not a popular social network for the people I know. My first few posts were viewed the most because I believe people were curios to know about this entrepreneurial idea, and as the exercises became more formal and repetitive that interest decreased over time. My very top reviewed article was the Free Money post, perhaps people were fooled by the title. My keywords are extremely competitive hence I didn’t dream of them making to first results of Google, that would be an unrealistic goal.

Very Short Interview, Part 2

Entrepreneurship Interview:

Hello mr. Rama, thank you very much for agreeing to a second interview with me. I would like to start with by asking you about how has business been in the past few months?

Rama: I think our brand is getting better recognized despite the fact we do not use any kind of advertising. It is satisfying to see our customer base grow from simply word of mouth.

Me: Last time you spoke of the possibility of expansion once your sons graduate from college. I realize one of your sons is graduating this semester. Will this catalyze your expansion plans?

Rama: We look forward to have one more hand in handling the business. I believe for another year at least we will focus in consolidating our brand here and only then look into expansion more seriously.

Me: Give the dynamic changes in the restaurant industry as a whole, how much do you dedicate to updating your offering and experimenting with new items in the menu:

Rama: Matter of fact, since we have a rather traditional offering of Mediterranean ethnic food we do not worry too much about experimenting because we strongly believe customers that come here would rather have us make our menu food in a consistently and reliably.

Week 13 Reading Reflection

Another chapter of the book focused on the financials but this time primarily on valuation in the event of selling the venture out to potential acquired. The author highlights the different methods such as discounted cash flows where the projected earnings for the life of the firm are discounted back to time zero to find a net present value for the firm. However I believe the views of the options in this chapter are rather simplistic and in fact the range of options is much wider; I would like to see more about how the founders can still remain involved in the venture after an acquisition has taken place because they’re often given a lot of space and benefits to continue to run the companies that they know best.