The Twenty Percent

I interviewed an entrepreneur for a business called Pretty, Stoned and Wired. The owner believes her target customers are married women between the ages of 40-60. Their unmet needs are a boost to any social affair. Elisa, the owner, believes that her product brings liveliness to social effects and a smile to her customers' faces. Elisa usually finds her customers via craft-shows or word-of-mouth. Elisa also thinks that her customers' demographics, besides being married women of the ages between 40-60 years old, are of the upper financial class because her product is not a necessity and is on the expensive side. With no budget for advertising, Elisa primarily promotes her business by word-of-mouth or advertisements created by the event organizer. Watch the inehrtview below.

I repeated these questions to three of the types of customers Elisa described above to see if their answers matched. I asked a married mother between the age of 40-60, a husband married to a women between the ages of 40-60 (to get a males perspective and see if they'd be interested in buying, as well), and a grandmother over the age of 60.
I tried to ask a diverse group of people to get their opinion on who would be interested in buying Pretty, Stoned and Wired products and see if these potential customers were interested in the products to see if this population included more than those Elisa originally believed. Watch the full interviews with these three customers below.

As seen above, the entrepreneur clearly doesn't fully understand her potential customers, but does understand their needs. The primary difference is that most of the customers said that more than them just enjoying the product, the like to buy it as gifts. However, all the customers said they enjoy the products because it's nice for anyone that owns a home and hosts parties, which Elisa does already realize to be the unmet needs for her clients. So the only thing she doesn't understand is her full customer demographics. I believe she might not be aware of her full customer demographic because many people who buy from her give her products away as gifts, so she may not see who actually ends up keeping the utensil.

Half-Way Reflection

1. The primary skills I applied during my time in this course have been my people skills. Talking to strangers and asking them questions and getting their permission to record videos of them, these are the skills I constantly was using every week for this class, and if you don't already have these skills, you will definitely develop them.
2. The time I most felt like giving up was for the three customer interview projects. Constantly asking the same questions over and over felt so tedious, I think this made me loose determination because you begin to get bored of the same idea, or you regret choosing one idea that wasn't thought out enough. For this, I advise really thinking and brainstorming for a good strong business idea that way you won't get tired of it after a week; you'll be talking about it a lot so pick something interesting!
3. a) Like I said above, definitely pick something your passionate about! Only passion will keep this course interesting and allow you to fully enjoy the assignments. b) Don't over-think the assignments. The more you over-think them, the harder they are and the less you get out of the assignment. Just go and do, don't think too much about it. c) Not everything is going to work out, or be "successful." That's ok, it can feel like the assignments are only designed for "successful" ideas, but just keep talking about why your particular idea isn't or wouldn't be successful.

Week 8 Reading Reflection

I was very surprised with the amount of steps and work that went into making a company "public." When you think of starting a company, I always believed that the owner focuses more on the finances side of the business, how much will this cost, how much will you sell the product for, how will this be different enough to sell, who will I sell to, is that a large enough population to keep the company afloat, etc? However, I rarely thought about the legal aspect to it all and having to file paperwork to get your company approved etc, meanwhile, the process in order to take your business public is all about the paper work and legality of it all, it appeared. So this seemed like 3 times the work because of the extra "stamps of approval" you now need as the business owner. But, going public does seem to bring in probably the most revenue or backing to a company so I could understand how this extra work would make sense for that extra financial support.
The most confusing part of this reading was the differences between all the different financing sources, I understand that the author was trying to give brief descriptions by not going into too much detail so that the chapter wasn't a novel in itself, but some of the financial backings seemed so similar I'm not sure what the difference was. I also don't understand how you would make your decision as to who to turn to for financial support as a business owner with so many different options. How do you know which is the best for you?
Where do you start, that'd be my first question. Is there someone you can go to for advice on this? Can you go to a financial advisor for advice as to which finical source to apply to and can they help you with the application process to make sure you're prepared and will be successful in your financial sourcing search? I'm also curious if any small-business owner can apply for any single one of these backings? Can a small-business owner of say, a local boutique, apply for an IPO?
I know nothing about the financial beings of companies and financial funding process so this chapter was much too over my head for me to know if I necessarily disagreed with the author on anything. Everything he said seemed to make sense to me and I liked that he tried to explain this complicated subject in such a simple and  basic way so someone like me, who like I said had no prior understanding of the topic, could understand it at the root of it and at least kind of understand it and research it in more detail on their own.

Week 7 Reading Reflection

I was very surprised from the start of this reading passage as I was under the assumption that advertising did in fact base its advertisements on demographics such as age, sex, education and income. I could see where the non demographics such as preferences and tastes could be successful, and can recognize these strategies by looking at any modern advertisement, however, I thought that it was a cause-effect type theory. I believed that demographics, such as education, influenced non demographics, such as tastes, and thus was why demographics were still important in the modern age.
I was little confused about the article's goal. Most of the article seemed to be trying to convince the reader why old-school habits of advertisement worked best, appealing to buyers of a certain demographic and improving the product based on those findings, while educating the correct customers on what the product itself has to offer. However, reading further into the article it began to seem as though the authors also saw the worthwhileness of using other non demographic factors to appeal to potential buyers. It all began to get a little jumbled for the overall goal in the middle, and while the article concluded decently, I'm still unsure on the authors' opinion. I'm not sure if they were trying to say one method was right and another wrong, or just educate on how to properly advertise, but it just was a little confusing.
I would ask why appealing to possible customers dreams or pleasures is bad? Not that they necessarily said it was bad, just that there was a better way to advertise. Which leads me to my second question, why could you not combine these two factors into advertisements to reach optimal marketing strategies? The authors at the end state that they hope their article showed why the believe non demographic facts don't work, but I just don't think they reached their full potential.
If I had to pick anything to disagree with the authors about, it would be what I stated above, that I believe these two statistics could work nicely together for good advertisements. I believe by properly appealing and educating to the proper demographic, as they suggest, while also showcasing the "luxury" or "dream-like" a product is can, together, create the best advertising strategies.

Elevator Pitch No. 2

I really appreciated the comment on my first Elevator Pitch because I hadn't even thought of how I would keep products uncontaminated behind the scenes. Luckily, someone pointed this out and I decided to add this to my new Elevator Pitch.
I decided, after realizing I had missed this detail, that I should explain my company in more detail in general, not just behind the scenes, in the kitchen, but also a more in-depth description of how a customer would go through my bakeries experience. I added what the store would look like coming in from the front, never having been there, and what my bakery would look like in the back, in the kitchen.

Week 6 Reading Reflection

I was very surprised with one fact being that it's not about who's the biggest company, but rather the most profitable. I don't know if that fact was necessarily surprising or educational, as I had previously thought that whichever company was the biggest was the most profitable.
I was most confused about substitutes and how these can come from other industries. Though I could see how this could by rare and infrequent chance occur, I don't understand how this can be a real enough possibility to have been mentioned in the reading. I know some inventions have sometimes been made for one original purpose, and later discovered to work better for another purpose, however I don't understand how often this could really happen.
I would ask him if there were any "subcategories" to these five forces, as well as how learning these five competitive forces we can use this knowledge to our advantage? By understanding that we should focus or time and energy on all of these categories, and learning, or becoming experts, in all these categories, how can we use this knowledge to become more innovative and unique?
There was really nothing I could disagree with, especially as Professor Porter is an economic expert, and I am not. I really enjoyed his layout of the five forces for strategy and thought they were well-thought out and very realistic and understandable. It was rather obvious that once reading his publications and applying his teachings, you could become a successful business owner, not by being the biggest, but the most profitable.

Customer Interviews No. 3

I still think I'm talking to the right customers, since I believe my target audience in my bake shop would be college students because the sop would be in Gainesville, close to the UF campus. I was considering also interviewing more people with those specific dietary restrictions I've discussed my concern with, however, I still think the people that any student feedback is worthy because I could not just thrive off of students with dietary restrictions alone. I need to make sure that all students would be interested in eating at my bakery as it will be open to all students and thrive off of primarily students, so the more the merrier. I need to make sure that the interest in the product exists among a majority of people that would be walking by the shop, which means the majority of all students, not just those with specific restrictions. 
You can find my interviews here.
I learned that conducting interviews is a great way to get immediate feedback about how successful a possible business idea you have would be without breaking the break. I discovered that people can be more standoffish than I had originally thought and that it is your job to get a good, honest interview out of them, not theirs. By doing so, you can get the best and most important feedback for your future business. I also learned that an interview is not a "poll;" it is an "interview" because you are talking to them, not polling them on some multiple-choice questions. This means that as prepared as you want to be before going into an interview, you don't want your planned questions to restrict you as you should be listening to the interviewees answers and responding and asking further questions based off of those, not continuing on with you planned questions just because that is the layout you previously made.