FINALS WEEK

It's been a long four months, and I'd like to spend time reflecting on the moments of this semester. The interviews, the discussions, the comments, all blend to form a single experience that has been ingrained in me throughout this time. The most formative moment for me in this time has likely been having to assemble the team to truly perform the venture that I had envisioned. I do see myself as an entrepreneur after going through all the lessons I've had to to get here. To those coming after me, I'd say just remember to understand how to keep your work priorities at a distance so you don't remember to forget how important they are.

VENTURE CONCEPT 2

I seek to combine the opportunity provided by animals being near areas where people drive cars and the innovation of modern cellular technology and consumer bases to start my venture concept. In it I shall find the means to successfully develop an application service that allows people to keep their streets clean at the push of a button.

The feedback I received over these months has made me become more direct in seeking methods of communication as well as being tighter on what I define a success as. What was most important that I learned was to really think about the innovation around me and the times that I live in.

What I decided to change from my initial plan was the more loose structure of gathering customers via mouth-to-mouth reception. The truth was that the Internet is simply a more successful path to reaching a wider customer base. Also, I've become more dedicated to having a staff for this.

EXIT STRATEGY

All good things must come to an end so it seems, and therefore I have begun my plans to develop a proper exit strategy from the business and pay for a vacation in the Philippines. I'm betting on selling my business out within the next 5 years. From a realistic point of view, it's not gonna work out and we all gotta get ready to jump ship. My plan is to sell it to a property realtor or even wait until a new Starbucks comes to town and sell it then. Or if it goes well, more so than expected, then I'd gladly give the company over to someone more ready for the position. I've decided it's best this way because honestly I wouldn't give the burden of owning a business on my children, and I'd like to get on with my life now. I think this plan will now affect my major decisions instead of having always been. Now every plan is made with a more immediate risk in mind, and therefore we have just widened our profit margin by a great deal.

BOOK 3: THE LAST CRUSADE

This week I read Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson and found a lot of quite interesting regarding details but overall having seen two movies about this guy it's retreading some familiar territory. That said, what really surprised me is how in-depth and rather cynical Steve Jobs' approach to marketing and business was. In a way, this is the quality I both admire and rather despise of his: his approach to selling was rooted in familiar, iconic, and artistic statements and has ultimately lead to the era of "cool" marketing, which is a huge deal but also has lead to a rather bleak view of art in the modern age. Masterpieces don't exist beyond their potential capital now. Jobs faced a fair amount of adversity (as is a common trope with these successful individual narratives in America), mostly stemming from what is believed to be his childhood feelings of being unwanted and inferiority. As a result he became an extreme individualist, feeling the ego and will were the main contributors to rational and overall sanctity in the world. This leads into what were his main competencies; his completeness of vision. In an objective view it can be said Jobs was not the greatest programmer or even an intellectual of the craft, but he was absolute in his vision and knew what he wanted based on what he felt the people needed to be sold. What was rather confusing was his death at the hands of pancreatic cancer; upon diagnosis he began moving headfirst into alternative medicines and extremely strict diets. It makes sense given his history in the whole hippie movement, but it's still rather bizarre behavior from one of the faces of American business history. The two main things I wondered about this guy were what his favorite contemporary (at the time) album because its clear he thinks highly of the power of art in my opinion. I would also ask him if he feared that the more automated and user-friendly he made his products, the closer we would live to a completely automated society without choices. He likely would've said no but I still would've liked to hear him say it. Regarding hard work, Jobs strikes me intensely as the definition of work smart, not hard. He never worked towards hardening his skills and standing in the world more than he did attempt to manipulate the forces around him to establish a strong position (usually against the will of those around him).

FAIL COMP. MUST WATCH

Look, the biggest failure that I've ever committed in my life is something too personal to go into so I've decided to look upon failure in the less human sense and more mental path. In other words, I'd rather not look at personal crises and moments of absolute weakness and degradation and instead towards moments where a simple case of thinking would've solved something quite quickly and made everyone's life easier. Ironically enough, my big failure involves one of my first successes in being able to travel to Ireland with the Innovation Academy. I had been accepted on the trip but also failed to contact a representative before leaving on my flight, failed to check and use my new computer, and failed to convert any currency to carry on my person. As a result I was lost in a foreign airport without a hope in Hell (in my mind, at least). I ended up having to pull $100 in Euros to pay for a taxi to drive me to the college where we were meeting before almost losing my luggage on a wayward bus. Once I had landed and gotten settled, I found my computer had contracted some malware and was without it for a week of studies. Another few hundred dollars and that was fixed, but all in all by the end of my travels I had barely $40 to my name after it all. In general, I learned that having a contingency plan for every action you commit is ultimately one of the best ways to live your life in terms of monetary gain and a stress-free existence.

All that said, I like failure as a concept. It is a necessary part of society, and I feel efforts made towards moving people away from the possibility of failure ultimately do more harm than good. To eat only sweets and never know a bitter flavor in your life? That's not living. Me, I try not to get existential about it. It is what it is, and you sweep it up and put it with the other failures in your life. After this class, though, I am more willing to see where failures will take me in terms of a narrative.

NEXT STEP

The next step in terms of my products and projects is likely going to lead us to sell more animal-cleaning products, so I went to the Pet Smart and other stores of that nature to see what people had to say about the idea. First I interviewed some person with a dog, asking them what they thought I needed to do. Specifically, what should I be planning to do that I'm not already? The person I asked said I should look towards selling products that allow people to perform my service without me having to do it. That way, eventually it'll lead to a point where the products I sell become sustainable enough that they'll consistently sell in that market. The other two people were standing by this person and agreed with them after I asked them the same question.

I pondered the reactions that I received from these strangers and began to devise a plan for the future of my project. The first step would have to be beginning to plan out how to compete in this market against other cleaning and garbage services. The major companies already have a stranglehold on the people through advertising, marketing, and long-term campaigns that keep people returning to their products. To break into that monopoly will take a lot of dedication and require much expansion on my part.

The next part would have to focus on innovation in the market. Money and resources would have to be diverted from maintaining the service offered to the market and towards research and development of products relating to what our service is. This would hopefully allow us to leg in on the competition of cleaning services and even compete with other products in outdoors or animal-based markets.

The new market that I'd like to reach out to beyond the demographic I'm already aiming at is a more upper-class group. The University itself is also on the map, as it generates high enough income in the surrounding area. But, specifically, those who live in gated communities will be my next targets. They're always looking for a new, niche cleaning service. To study the market, I snuck into a gated beach community of sorts and managed to interview two youths playing with NERF guns. They said that the better option for entering this new demographic (I'm paraphrasing) was to sell products instead of using a service, because most families in the area have a maid or gardening service of sorts that they could get to do work for them.

This new market was rather interesting to me. I do come from a middle-upper-class background, but to see the kind of gathered wealth in one area was new to me. My family was rather isolated deep in the farmlands of Maryland, and a neighborhood of people like us was rather unnerving. It did surprise me to see how many of my predictions came true, as ironic as that sounds. Political banners on front lawns, people of minority ethnicity doing labor outside, brats left unattended by possibly alcoholic parents. Yeah, kind of the whole nine yards on a rich as Hell neighborhood.

After I left I did more reflection on the market compared to what I had previously going on and did some studying on it. The demographic of middle and lower class citizens had more stability in it given my relationship with my own neighborhood, but the chance to make more money increased as the class of people I aimed for did. Also of note is that my theory of humanity's movement towards complete automation pays off better in the upper-class neighborhoods, as they'll likely be the first to go. It's still an appealing new market, and I'd like to move towards it despite all the risks compared to the original plan.

BIG PAPER TIME

The opportunity that I am leaping upon with the utmost intensity of all of my skills regards the local suburban neighborhoods and their lack of proper animal carcass care. This opportunity is more than anything in the fault of government structure that emphasizes maximizing profits and cutting corners at the cost of environmental concerns and the lack of proper environmental and biological education that is accessible to all the masses. The market I'm aiming at is specific to Florida; Floridian suburbanites in Gainesville who generally live along the middle to lower class lifestyle and tend to either lean more democratically or at least more pro-childcare and environment. The customers usually satisfy their needs for clean streets by picking up the animals themselves and endangering their household to a number of bacterial diseases or simply leaving the corpses where they are and ultimately multiplying the bacterial presence outside their home. Their current methods are admittedly tribal in many aspects, but their loyalty to the old ways is wavering in the age of automated capitalism. Simpler, quicker, and faster are always better among these people. The opportunity is admittedly small-time for the foreseeable future, given the size of Gainesville and the general scope of the project. That said, a potential profit still exists and it's enough of a chance that it's worth investing in. Plus, the window of this opportunity isn't necessarily going anywhere until the dystopian era where animals are but a memory in the collective unconsciousness. It's playing it safe, and that leads to less possible contingency plans.

The innovation that I an bringing to this area is the introduction of a brand new service that functions in the same vein of modern businesses such as Uber or even PayPal. The main focus of the innovation is being an online service, one that functions similarly to a garbage or mail service but is accessed and operated by the consumer in a fashion that makes more sense for those living in the 21st Century. The process of paying and interaction follows a likewise fashion, developed around an app advertised in social media platforms and, more interestingly, at outdoors and public stores where most people who are concerned about the environment and their lives go. How it works follows along these lines: a person in some way or some fashion comes across the service I am offering and downloads an app that allows them to call in my service to their area and clean animal carcasses that they've recorded and notified us about. The payment is consistent system, involving a flat rate and a bare minimum depending on the damage done to the corpse or the nature of the corpse.

The innovation mentioned in the last paragraph was developed for the situation described in the beginning, and I shall continue my discussion of these concepts with understanding how they shall come together to create a successful business. I believe that the people of Gainesville will turn to my product instead of relying on their old ways because the way of automation and innovation reigns supreme in the automated society. The need to leave the house diminishes at a yearly rate, and the ideal view of nature becomes more a distant ideal that is better maintained through a television screen rather than an actual view. It is not only a safe bet that my innovation will succeed; it is destiny. It won't be easy to get people to make the switch, but it is inevitable. The only competition in this field is the people's own will to maintain individual order over their lives. As for the biggest factor of our success, it would have to be on customer service. The package of the app is rather self-explanatory along with the other aspects of our business; what can truly make us stand out is developing monetary relationships with the community in order to standardize a profit flow between the neighborhoods and our business. The organizational aspect of the business is something I personally look forward to. To be frank, it'd be a small ship. The initial plan of working out of the home with the business doesn't have any flaws in it, in my opinion, and generally the number of employees shouldn't have to go past the double digits until the business is truly ready for expansion into a separate building.

There exists a secret poison to my business, one that gives me a particular edge against any possible competition. That secret is my personal connection and contacts in the local neighborhoods; relationships with people that ultimately aren't repeatable by people who would wish to edge in on my business territory. Relationships take time to develop, and require just the right context in order to maintain. The business that I'm running does have plans beyond Gainesville, but a rather linear expansion path if I must confess. The next big step for the business would be to move out of the house and establish operations in the larger area of Gainesville, and hopefully even to operate on UF. That I feel would be excellent for the business. As for me, personally, well in the following years I'd like to give this idea to someone just as passionate as I was when I first came up with this idea. I'm not a single track dude who can be tied down to just one concept; I, like all people, must be free.