Going into the Entprentice I really had no idea what to expect. I had never taken an entrepreneurship class before and I've had very little practical experience being an entrepreneur. However, I knew that I wanted to get people involved and excited about the venture and that I wanted to make money. I figured if the venture was bringing in a lot of revenue than it had to be going well. It seemed like a pretty simple plan to execute. However, after a few short weeks carrying out the Entprentice, I soon learned that my pre-conceived idea on how to execute a new venture was far more difficult than I ever anticipated or imagined.
When my team met as a group for the first time to discuss various venture ideas it was clear from the beginning that we were way over our head and not prepared. We all showed up to the meeting without any individual brainstorming. I think it would have been very helpful if we all had spent some time beforehand coming up with five or so ideas so that we could have presented them to each other and built around those rather than spending the time collectively thinking. Unfortunately, we did not take the advice from lecture where Professor Wry explained the difference between generating ideas as a group, nominal group, or as a hybrid. We generated ideas as a group which not only lowered our quantity of ideas but its also lowered the quality of our ideas. While I'm not definitively saying that if we had used the hybrid model we would have came up with a record setting venture, but it is definitely possible that if we had utilized the hybrid model we could have came up with a much stronger one.
We initially discussed many different service based ideas such as coffee delivery or grocery delivery type ventures but opted out because we thought that they would require too much work and demand through out the semester. It wasn't that we weren't willing to put in the hours and hard work but we didn't think the reward would be worth it in such a short time. Someone in our group suggested how throughout the semester they are always using different websites to buy school/household items such as textbooks or kitchen appliances. From that, we then came up with the idea of a centralized network for penn students where they can buy and sell everyday goods on an easy to use website. To implement this idea we planned to have some of our more technical savvy friends build the website for us. We believed that after the creation of the website, which we thought would be the relatively easy part of the venture, the hard part would be to get the word out to as many people as we could. In order to start brining in revenue, people needed to know about our venture, Penn MarketPlace.
During the beginning stages of the implementation of Penn Market Place our biggest challenge turned out to to be the creation of the website, something we thought would be quite easy. We originally planed to have a friend create the website during the first week of the Entprentice but due to various other commitments she was delayed and didn't finish until the end of the second week. This created multiple problems. First, it really hurt our group's dynamic and functionality because we were all so worried we wouldn't be able to meet certain deadlines and have a working product. At first we spent way too much time complaining to one another rather than finding a solution to this problem. Second, not only did it delay us in starting to bring in revenue but also hurt our ad campaign. It's tough to advertise when you have no working model to show off. As a result, after realizing there was no point in getting upset over something we had no control over, we decided to use this "downtime" to start testing our hypothesis. We believed that Penn students would prefer to buy and sell household items, clothing, and furniture on a Penn-centralized website. We used the Learn Method of Build, Measure, Learn with services such as QuickMVP to see how many people would be interested in signing up for our venture. We also sent out emails to different listservs to see if we could generate interest. By the time the website was finally finished we have gathered enough data in the interim to know that people were excited by our idea.
Throughout the latter stages of the implementation of Penn MarketPlace we faced difficulty in attracting users. Based on our surveys, people were interested but they weren't actually going to the website and using it. We knew we needed to do a better job of attracting attention. We tried to do this in a few ways: first, we uploaded a lot more pictures to our Facebook page. We thought the more colorful and lively the images were the more people would be drawn to it, just like Pinterest. And second, we decided to do some hardcore and aggressive guerrilla marketing. We went around to all the different GSR's in Huntsman and taped to the whiteboards our logo and website information. In addition, we passed out hundreds of flyers to students on Locust Walk, sometimes even forcing them into hands of uninterested students. While at times the guerrilla marketing was certainly awkward and uncomfortable, I fervently think it was a necessary and crucial step to getting the word out to students. Furthermore, while we certainly had our fair share of difficulties during the implementation, one thing that was a surprise and went particularly well was being featured on Under the Button. Although it wasn't the most positive press, bad press is still press, and shortly after the article was published not only did our number of Facebook likes increase but so did our website's activity.
Looking back on this exercise, if I were to have another go at it I would definitely have chosen a more service oriented venture. While on the surface a service venture didn't seem practical at the inception of this project it actually was much more pragmatic than I originally thought. One of the biggest problems with Penn MarketPlace and being the "middleman" was the very small profit margins. We only got to keep a small percent of the total sale, which in hindsight is practically nothing. On low priced items such as used textbooks we pocketed no substantial amount of money. If we had decided to undertake a venture like a coffee delivery service our profit margins would have been much higher. We would have charged a delivery fee and a markup percentage. I also think a service oriented venture would have worked much better in the middle of the semester rather than our website. We were trying to get students to buy and sell household goods. A lot of these transactions start at the beginning of the school year when everyone is moving into their dorms and apartments. Students are not going to want to buy a microwave in the middle of February, they already have one.
Through this exercise I learned the importance of persistence and risk taking as an entrepreneur and in entrepreneurship. Even in a few short weeks, it became apparent how difficult new ventures are. Students and the general population have a million different things going on in their lives everyday. I quickly learned that in order to get people interested and excited about your venture you have to be persistent in your approach. Sending out a few emails and a couple Facebook notifications will not draw the attention that you want. The most effective marketing tool that I used was guerrilla marketing. When I got into people's faces and really told them about the idea and handed them a flyer, they became genuinely interested. I found that taking some risks and putting yourself in new and uncomfortable territories can be very effective.
In particular, during the course of this exercise I discovered through risk taking that one of my greatest strengths as an entrepreneur is the business development side of it. It became very apparent that only half of the battle is the actual idea generation while the other side to a new venture is the business and marketing side. I think I became much better throughout the duration of the project at getting people to go to the website and becoming interested in our business. No matter how great or brilliant the idea is, the venture will only succeed if people buy into it. As an entrepreneur I believe that I have begun to develop the skills to help make this possible.
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