Week 11

Day 3

I'm so excited that my pitch got chosen as one of the four companies. I'm really excited to start working with Meredith, Olivia, and Alex. In my pitch I said I needed someone who was organized, someone who had an eye for design, and someone who wasn't afraid to reach out to the customers. In my head I already had some people that I knew I wanted to work with. I was lucky enough to be able to choose team members who had my company as their first choice, who filled the requirements I stated in my pitch, and were people I was excited about working with. I have not been able to work with Olivia and Meredith outside of Entre but never in class, this is my third time working with Alex. Every member has had the opportunity to work with at least one other person on the team. None of us are strangers so we have a solid idea of everyone's strengths and weaknesses. I think I have a solid team. There is a great balance between our differing personalities and our work ethics. I'm excited to dive in with my great team.

Clearly I was excited to dive into our final projects. It really meant a lot to me that my pitch was chosen as one of the finals. I was ver naive in the beginning about how much we would need to do to make our company work and about how my team would work together.

Day 5

Today we got to meet our mentor Jodi Marchewitz. After having a great phone conversation with her the day before, reading her bio and hearing all the enthusiasm that she had we were all really excited to get to meet her. I definitely had some nervousness about meeting Jodi because meeting new people especially someone who is so established in their own business is always a little bit scary but Jodi was awesome. She was very open and welcoming and everyone felt right at ease with her. We had been pivoting a lot in the first few days a we were a little lost as to what our focus should be for next week but Jodi came in with a really great idea about pivoting from a subscription service to kiosks located in grocery stores. We will be researching this idea this coming we and I hope we can get into product development by the end of next week.

As always I was ambitious and excited here about getting into the "doing" part of the project instead of doing some serious research. Jodi is probably one of the best people I met in the business world. She had the bluntness we needed but still had the excitement that we felt.

Today we split up so we could cover more ground and get some serious research done. Alex and Olivia went out of the building to get more interviews this time with our kit idea in mind and Meredith and I stayed back to look into find Customer Acquisition Costs and the cost of breaking into our market. We also looked into how many people would actually be in our target market. I knew a little about CAC from back with our work with Chutney Rolls but I did realize how much more I would need to know to be able to give really concrete numbers to the sharks when we have our shark tank. I think it is extremely important to have good solid data that could be back up with proof so a lot of this week will be spent doing research. We also need to look into the plausibility of partnering with local bakeries and if we do, what of their products would they be willing to offer. We are kind of at a chicken and the egg stage. Do we start designing our kit and present the bakeries with that idea or do we talk to the bakeries first and design our kits based on that. I'm looking forward to getting a lot of work done this week.

For my final blog post I chose one of my team blog posts this shows another of my teams using the divide and conquer technique. Even thought this was one of the later team blog posts we were still in the middle of the pivot.