1) You. Who you are. What your talents are. What your skills and experiences are. Also: what are your aspirations? Specifically regarding your business concept, how do you see this business (if you were to start it) playing a role in your life?
My name is Julianna Johnson. I am a student at the University of Florida majoring in Sociology and Family, Youth and Community Sciences with a minor in Nonprofit Organizational Leadership. I have talents in connecting with people whether in a personal or professional setting. I have worked with kids for years and in order to connect with a child you must first establish their trust which I do with many of the students I work with. In the future, I plan to help end the cycles of poverty by means of real estate investing. I will teach others how to invest and also use my funds for causes I find important. If I were to start this business, I believe it will give me a financial foundation to do other things I would like to do such as investing in real estate and communities.
2) What are you offering to customers? Describe the product or service (in other words, how you'll solve customers' unmet needs).
Often times, people, especially students, struggle to find open seating to study or do work. This is a prominent issue in college towns that causes individuals to waste time looking for available space. My service (an app). allows users to know before they arrive at a location if there is adequate open seating so that they can conserve their time.
3) Who are you offering it to? Describe, in as much detail as possible, the demographic and psychographic characteristics of your customers. Think especially of this question: what do your customers all have in common?
I believe this service can be useful to anyone, anywhere so I am offering it to all people. However, I believe that this product will be the most popular and necessary in college town for college students. For that reason, I am offering it to three groups: individuals and universities. Individuals, including students and anyone that may have work to do outside of the office such as teachers or business people can use the app. Universities can also choose to purchase a subscription to the app that all of their students can utilize. Last, I would market this service to businesses such as coffee shops that are popular for workspace. I would market to them so that they could be included in the app and possibly see an increase in their business.
4) Why do they care? Your solution is only valuable insofar as customers believe it's valuable to them. Here, explain why customers will actually pay you money to use your product or service.
I believe that individuals will pay me money for this service because there is an increasing importance on saving time as we become more inundated with things to do. This service offers them another way to save time and increase their hours for productivity. Universities will pay me for this service because they are constantly looking for ways to compete with other universities. This service is another feature that they can add to their list to make them more appealing during recruitment.
5) What are your core competencies? What sets you apart from everyone else? Also: what do you have that nobody else has?
Currently, there are no companies that offer similar services which focus specifically on study space so this service is unique. This service offers something novel to both individuals and universities.
I believe all of these elements fit together nicely. I only have a few concerns. The first one is the necessary connections to build something of this magnitude. First it would require connections with someone who can build an app, as well as universities and businesses. I also believe the marketing can be quite complex as I market on different levels and scopes.
Hi Julianna,
ReplyDeleteI think you seem passionate about this concept and I think that it will be a huge success at universities, offices, and coffee shops. I would suggest however narrowing down who you are offering it to since you said you would offer it to all people. If you start on a smaller scale and just offer it to universities and offices, I think it would have greater potential to expand on its own through word of mouth rather than trying to market it to such a broad community. I do also agree with you though that people will want to pay for this since many people have the mentality of getting things done as quickly as possible.
Julianna,
ReplyDeleteYour post not only did a great job of wrapping up what you’ve said before about your product, but it helped to broaden at least MY understanding of why you decided to pursue it in this class. Not only this, but your “about me” section of this was pretty impressive. It sounds like you’re a very ambitious person. Maybe one day you could make this little study space service become a reality.