Final Reflection

The most formative experience in this class this semester was identifying local opportunities. this helped me see that there are so many opportunities for change around me every day. The experience that I will remember years later is how much my venture has taken form throughout this semester. It went from an idea with no background to everything from finding a target market and looking forward into the future. I am most proud of writing down my failures from this semester and what I have learned from them.

I do think that I have more of an entrepreneurial mindset. Although I never acted upon it, I basically created a whole business model from scratch. I have also started to take a more entrepreneurial mindset in everything I do. I try to take ownership on the projects that I am assigned for work and make them my own by going above and beyond what is asked of me.

I would recommend staying on top of the work in this class early. All the assignments are very constructive and do not take that much time to do. If you start to let a few slip, like I did, it will be hard to keep your grade at the score that you want because there isn't much room for error.

Venture Concept 2

Introduction

1. My idea for a venture is to create an app that allows customers to track the wait times at their favorite restaurants, from the average fast food joint, to the most extravagant luxury restaurants. This will allow customers to find the restaurant with the right wait time to satisfy their needs.

Opportunity

1.     The ideal customer

a.     The ideal customer can ideally be anyone. Everyday people eat out and wait in lines at restaurants to get their food. The main people with this need is those who work and only have a limited amount of time for a lunch break, as well as students in college who may only have a limited time in between classes to go grab a bite to eat.

b.     The initial focus of my business will be to target university students as I have a large network of friends in college at the University of Florida and have access to so many more.

2.     The need

a.     The two main aspects of this need are convenience and efficiency. With anything, most people get irritated when something isn’t running efficiently or does not meet their expectations of efficiency. I personally have experienced this when waiting at Chipotle. After waiting for twenty minutes, I finally got to the front of the line to order my food only to find out that the restaurant had run out of chicken and it would be another five minutes before they had a new batch out. Already irritated, I settled with steak in order to maximize efficiency and get out of the restaurant faster. When walking past Tijuana Flats, I noticed that they had no line and realized that I could have gotten Mexican food from there instead and not have had to wait for 25 minutes just to get something that I really didn’t want.

b.     Customers are currently satisfying this need by placing online orders and calling restaurants ahead of time to see how long the wait in the restaurant is. Unsurprisingly, people are very loyal to online ordering because of its efficiency.

c.     I personally think that this is a big opportunity that can span to many different cities around the country. This need is present from big cities to small college town around the nation.

Innovation

1.     My innovation

a.     My innovation involves developing an app that tracks the number of people in a restaurant at a time and the customer turnover rate that restaurant has. The customer turnover rate is the amount of time it takes from the customer entering the restaurant to the customer finally receiving their food. The average wait time at the restaurants could then be looked up on the app of the customer so that they can compare wait times and factor the time it will take them to wait for their food into their day.

2.     Incrementally Innovative

a.     This innovation is incrementally innovative. This is because the customers will not have to learn any new skills in order to use this product. It will be exactly like any other smartphone app and no new technology would need to be developed in order to make the business idea work.

b.     The way this innovation will make money is through the use of advertising throughout the app. There will be banner ads that will be paid for by businesses to promote themselves. The app will be free to both restaurants and customers. There may also be a later version that charges a monthly fee for extra features once customer loyalty has been built.

Venture Concept

1.     The innovation of the app meets the opportunity of people’s need for efficiency and their lack of time throughout the day. The customer that I am targeting is not directly generating revenue for this business. However, it’s their use of the app and the traffic that they generate that will be the selling point to companies to advertise on my app.

2.     Customers would switch to this product because it is easier to use and gives you real time updates to how long wait times are at restaurants. It is very convenient and will give customers an opportunity to choose where to eat based on how long they have to wait.

3.     I think the current competitors are online pickup ordering as it is a way to completely avoid a line at all and gives you the ability to set a pickup time. Another competitor are the food delivery services because people can use them so they don’t even have to leave their house to get food.

Other Elements

1.     The secret sauce of this business is the relationship with restaurants and response to customers needs. Businesses that usually have short lines because less people eat there will start to get more attention due to the fact that they may be the fastest option when going to get food. Building this trust with restaurants will continue to their want to be represented on our app and will increase the number of users that we have. The higher the traffic the more attractive it is to advertisers.

2.     I think the next opportunity for this venture is to expand to other places such as grocery stores. I think that the app could also be further developed to have a review page for customers to review restaurants and rate the accuracy of the wait times. It could also later be transformed to allow customers to make reservations similar to Open Table. Expanding my business to allow dinner reservations as well will help appeal to an older crowd who rather nice dinners than fast food lines.

3.     In five years, I want this venture to have expanded to every major college town in Florida, Georgia, and Alabama. Depending on the success, I would also want it to be in all the major cities in these states as well.

I mostly received positive feedback from my peers. The biggest thing that people have said is to expand my target market to adults as well. The best way to do this is by offering wait times at nicer restaurants as well as allowing reservations through the app to make it more convenient. I have already touched on adding these to my venture in the past to continue to expand. Another thing was expanding to large cities rather than just college towns.

The thing that I changed in my venture concept was specifically stating that I plan on expanding to an adult target market in the future, and what things I would add to my business in order to go after this new target audience.

Reading Reflection No. 3

1. The general theme of the book was, in order to gain a large social media following, start treating your social media account like a business rather than a hobby that you do to just pass time. It also touched on how it is important to create content that other people want to see, and that it isn't all about what you want to share. Obviously you are supposed to create content that you enjoy and that you want to share, but it isn't about writing rants on different topics that no one cares about.
2. One big thing that this book connected with this class on is the idea of getting more people knowledgable about your product or your brand. In this class we create a venture based on an opportunity that we see in the market. Since social media is such a large part of our everyday life, knowing how to effectively promote your brand through social media is important if you want your business to grow.
3. An exercise that I would design for this class based on this book would be a mock social media post. In this assignment, the student would create an account, and write all the details about their account such as a username, profile pic, and bio. They would then create a mock up of a  post that they would make on social media.
4. The biggest surprise to me was that you shouldn't try to create too many social media accounts because you will get quickly overwhelmed and won't put enough time into each of them. This surprised me because I assumed the more accounts that you have, the larger the audience that you could attract.

Your Exit Strategy

1. My exit strategy is to sell my company in five years. 
2. I selected this strategy because I think after five years,  my business will have grown enough for me to receive a nice return from it. Although I do think running this venture will be enjoyable, I don't see myself running it long term and I'd rather work in the finance industry. I think that running this venture will give me a perspective on the business world that a lot of people won't have an opportunity to get at such a young age. Although it would be great to make money off of this venture through the years that I am running it, and when I sell it, I think that the learning experience in of itself will be more valuable to me.
3. My exit strategy definitely influenced how I saw my opportunity. Since I knew that I wanted to be pursuing this venture for the short term, I knew that I was only going to pursue the most readily available customer base, which is college students. This will insure quick growth for my company and then maybe a few years down the road, in year 3 or 4, I would expand to working adults as well. Most of the ideas for my company were formed on a short-term, quick growth basis.

Celebrating Failure

1. This semester, I have had multiple interviews for summer internships for this upcoming summer. Through the interviews, I would always make it to the second round or further, but I was never able to actually secure the big internships that I wanted. Although I do have an internship for this summer, it is not the one that I was hoping to get or the one that I believed I would learn the most from.
2. There are a lot of things that I learned from this experience. One of the main things that I learned through trial and error and research was the type of questions that are most commonly asked in interviews and what they interviewer is usually looking for in an answer and how to tie the answer back to the position that I am applying to.
3. Failure is very tough, especially when you fail at something that you want to be good at or you fail to get something that you really wanted. However, it teaches you what you did wrong and you quickly learn how to adjust yourself to better obtain your goal the next time. The biggest thing that failure has taught me, at least in this sense, is that preparation is key. Before, I would go into an interview blind and wing all my answers. I know have 5-7 skeleton stories that I can change around for specific questions that are asked, and it has made me a much stronger interviewee.

What's Next

Existing Market

1. The main venture for my product is to develop an app that shows the wait times at restaurants. On this app I want to give users the ability to rate accuracy of wait times and give feedback of what in the app can be improved upon.
2. What makes the most sense to grow in my current market is to first secure a couple of popular restaurants that will want to be included in the app if a certain number of people download the app. Once I secure this, I will start advertising to students at my school of this new app that shows wait times at restaurants. I would continue to advertise to new freshman classes to get more students interested in the app as there will be a quick four year turnover of people who use this app. It makes the most sense to target college students first because of the ease of access and the very smartphone app centered society that is college students.
3. To continue to grow, I should start providing ways to review restaurants that people ate at in order to increase the use of the app and the types of customers that it would reach. Also, once a loyal customer base has been achieved, I may roll out a subscription based upgrade to the app for people to access more features and for the app to be ad free.

New Market

1. My main target in the existing market is college kids who usually eat at fast food restaurants. I think I will expand to cater to people who are more affluent or may want to eat at nicer restaurants. I would add in the wait time to be seated at these restaurants and give the ability to users to place reservations straight from the app.
2. This will create value to these people because (1) they will have an easy and convenient way to make reservations to some of their favorite restaurants, and (2) they will have the ability to find restaurants with the shortest wait time if they did not make reservations at a restaurant.
3. I think that people in this market would be happy to hear about the ability to know the wait times at nice restaurants. Many people either decide that they want to go to a nice sit-down restaurant at the spur of a moment, or just never think of making reservations. This app could help them find restaurants with short wait times as well as help them make reservations.
4. This venture could also be expanded to super markets and grocery stores such as Walmart, Target and Publix. This app could be the one-stop shop for anyone's wait time needs.

Venture Concept No. 1

Introduction

1. My idea for a venture is to create an app that allows customers to track the wait times at their favorite restaurants, from the average fast food joint, to the most extravagant luxury restaurants. This will allow customers to find the restaurant with the right wait time to satisfy their needs.

Opportunity

1.     The ideal customer

a.     The ideal customer can ideally be anyone. Everyday people eat out and wait in lines at restaurants to get their food. The main people with this need is those who work and only have a limited amount of time for a lunch break, as well as students in college who may only have a limited time in between classes to go grab a bite to eat.

b.     The initial focus of my business will be to target university students as I have a large network of friends in college at the University of Florida and have access to so many more.

2.     The need

a.     The two main aspects of this need are convenience and efficiency. With anything, most people get irritated when something isn’t running efficiently or does not meet their expectations of efficiency. I personally have experienced this when waiting at Chipotle. After waiting for twenty minutes, I finally got to the front of the line to order my food only to find out that the restaurant had run out of chicken and it would be another five minutes before they had a new batch out. Already irritated, I settled with steak in order to maximize efficiency and get out of the restaurant faster. When walking past Tijuana Flats, I noticed that they had no line and realized that I could have gotten Mexican food from there instead and not have had to wait for 25 minutes just to get something that I really didn’t want.

b.     Customers are currently satisfying this need by placing online orders and calling restaurants ahead of time to see how long the wait in the restaurant is. Unsurprisingly, people are very loyal to online ordering because of its efficiency.

c.     I personally think that this is a big opportunity that can span to many different cities around the country. This need is present from big cities to small college town around the nation.

Innovation

1.     My innovation

a.     My innovation involves developing an app that tracks the number of people in a restaurant at a time and the customer turnover rate that restaurant has. The customer turnover rate is the amount of time it takes from the customer entering the restaurant to the customer finally receiving their food. The average wait time at the restaurants could then be looked up on the app of the customer so that they can compare wait times and factor the time it will take them to wait for their food into their day.

2.     Incrementally Innovative

a.     This innovation is incrementally innovative. This is because the customers will not have to learn any new skills in order to use this product. It will be exactly like any other smartphone app and no new technology would need to be developed in order to make the business idea work.

b.     The way this innovation will make money is through the use of advertising throughout the app. There will be banner ads that will be paid for by businesses to promote themselves. The app will be free to both restaurants and customers. There may also be a later version that charges a monthly fee for extra features once customer loyalty has been built.

Venture Concept

1.     The innovation of the app meets the opportunity of people’s need for efficiency and their lack of time throughout the day. The customer that I am targeting is not directly generating revenue for this business. However, it’s their use of the app and the traffic that they generate that will be the selling point to companies to advertise on my app.

2.     Customers would switch to this product because it is easier to use and gives you real time updates to how long wait times are at restaurants. It is very convenient and will give customers an opportunity to choose where to eat based on how long they have to wait.

3.     I think the current competitors are online pickup ordering as it is a way to completely avoid a line at all and gives you the ability to set a pickup time. Another competitor are the food delivery services because people can use them so they don’t even have to leave their house to get food.

Other Elements

1.     The secret sauce of this business is the relationship with restaurants and response to customers needs. Businesses that usually have short lines because less people eat there will start to get more attention due to the fact that they may be the fastest option when going to get food. Building this trust with restaurants will continue to their want to be represented on our app and will increase the number of users that we have. The higher the traffic the more attractive it is to advertisers.

2.     I think the next opportunity for this venture is to expand to other places such as grocery stores. I think that the app could also be further developed to have a review page for customers to review restaurants and rate the accuracy of the wait times. It could also later be transformed to allow customers to make reservations similar to Open Table.

3.     In five years, I want this venture to have expanded to every major college town in Florida, Georgia, and Alabama. Depending on the success, I would also want it to be in all the major cities in these states as well.