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[gerongcofrances]

The week before our break.

Christmas, christmas, christmas. What more can I say? It’s my family’s favorite holiday.(I have Halloween as my favorite but we don’t celebrate it that much in the Philippines) This December while troublesome has been going swimmingly well in terms of the preparation for our family’s christmas traditions namely the exchange gifts, wishes and our annual weigh in in which we stand on our weighing scale and see if we lost some weight. Misa de Gallo is also one of the highlights during our christmas outings. Unfortunately I missed a total of 3 days due to sickness. And of course I couldn’t mention this year’s christmas without a single mention of Typhoon Odette. That was a day to wake up to. The start of my morning is to start pushing water away from our kitchen as it already went in by the dawn of that day. From their we just watched the weather, the news and some updates all while freezing our butts off. While we almost had a close call from our river almost overflowing. Thankfully my relatives from Cebu are also safe although we got pretty worried as communication was just not possible for a pretty long time even after the storm has settled. I just hope that this is a christmas where every one can enjoy and feel the spirit of giving. Especially after that scary typhoon. 

[gerongcofrances]

Corporate and Strategic Entrepreneurship

Now during the last week we have started to to inform people about our product as well as sharing our landing page to people. After that we presented our Traction metrics, Bullseye Framework as well as the prototype. From their we took that feedback and started working on how to get more people informed about our product. In that department we are quite lacking as we didn’t do enough to get the word our of our product. From the ones that did take interest and give feedback we are starting to brainstorm possible additions and changes to the product to deliver the most commercial-friendly and smooth product to our consumers. Their feedback is important as the showed us some points that we missed and possible improvements that even we didn’t think about. 

[gerongcofrances]

Entrepreneurial Finance and Venture Capital

Now we getting in to some fancy words now. Let’s first know what these words mean.

Entrepreneurial finance is the study of value and resource allocation, applied to new ventures or startups and new companies while Venture Capital is a form of private equity and a type of financing that investors provide to startup companies and small businesses that are believed to have long-term growth potential.

Now for the progress of our project

Now from last week we already assigned members to what they were doing. We have the page up and I finished editing the video. And my groupmate has created the landing page for us to measure our traction as well as the wireframe which I used in our video. 

[gerongcofrances]

MVP and Traction

During this week I was the person in charge of making our product’s MVP. Now what is an MVP?  MVP stands for Minimum Viable Product. It’s a development technique in which a new product is introduced in the market with basic features, but enough to get the attention of the consumers. Either it can be a wireframe, a prototype, a video or a website explaining how your product works. For our MVP I decided to do a video to translate how important our product is as well as show them how the UI works as well. For the traction it was the brains of our group which handled that. Now what is a traction?

Business traction refers to the progress of a start-up company and the momentum it gains as the business grows. Now for our traction we put together a Facebook page and from their we examined the likes, the follows, comments and the views from the MVP video that I made.

These two work hand in hand together to firstly generate hype to your product as the case of the MVP and to see if enough people are invested and interested enough to your product. You wouldn’t want to waste your efforts on a product that nobody is interested in. So this is a good way of seeing that and ensuring your product’s success

[gerongcofrances]

Business Model Canvas

First things first. What is a Business Model Canvas? According to Wikipedia “ A Business Model Canvas is a strategic management template used for developing new business models and documenting existing ones.” Now why is the BMC an important thing when starting up a business? Why did we also include it in our work during this week? Well quite simple. It’s pretty important for a starting up business. Every business big or small will need to create a BMC as it shows all the important aspects of your business. From  key partners, key activities, key resources, value proposition, customer relationships, channels, revenue streamsm cost structure and customer segments among other things.

It’s from this Canvas where we stand back and see if the preparations that we made are enough, are we biting too much out from this apple, or are we ready to launch our startup. 

[gerongcofrances]

Customer and Market Validation

From the last blog I wrote I kinda gave an idea towards Customer and Market Validation. In fact most of it might relate more to Customer and Market Validation rather than the VPC. Customers and Market Validation is a process in where you validate if your product is needed in today’s market or if there is a customer for your product.

What is a product without a market to sell it in as well as users to use it right? You’ll take everything from your project, surveys, interviews and other factors to have a smooth and successful project. You could also learn from here what your competitors lack and potentially build off new ideas from their shortcomings

[gerongcofrances]

Value Proposition Canvas

This is going to be quite short as I personally didn’t handle much on our VPC but I did see the final output and it was quite surprising. See this is why you should do interviews/surveys to your project as things that you would expect from your customers will at times not align with what they actually say. That’s why having a VPC is great. It tells them what Their Pains are, What your projects Gains will be and other things such as Pain Relievers. 

Having a VPC will make you relate more to your users and will make you ask yourself if your project benefits your users or would it not accommodate them. The latter is really really a thing to look out for. You want your users to actually use your app, Not make them switch over to your competitors

[gerongcofrances]

Interviews, Surveys and Validating your Ideas.

To know more about your project, you can’t always just rely on your and your team’s instinct. You have to do several interviews to your users and send out surveys for more feedback to your project. Survey is the easier one, not easy as in easy to do. But the easier of the bunch. Coming up with questions without giving your users an idea towards your project is quite the Herculean task.

Not as Herculean as to find users related to your project who are willing to give you a few minutes of their own free time and answer your questions truthfully and seriously. Especially on a Global Pandemic where if you sneeze or cough then your interviewee will be way more cautious around you while spraying the place with Sanitizer.

Personal questions first, Project questions afterwards. That’s how you make your interviewee more comfortable to you. It’s important to have your interviewee comfortable so that they can speak their mind out and not be conscious on what they would say. 

After that. You’re one step into making your project a reality. Take those feedback and use it to make your project more reliable and more user-friendly. All of the things I said here. Is exactly what happened to us during our Survey... Well except for the survey part. We prefer interviews anyways.

[gerongcofrances]

Team formation... Online?

What is a project with out a team that will build upon it? Absolutely nothing. Having a team that gets the job done is not that common. It’s much less common when you create an amazing project while forming an incredible bond to one another. One without any bad bloods, commotions or any of the sort. 

After getting a team, you would have to talk to each other and plan all sorts of stuff. Maybe a few jokes here and there but sticking to the plan and original purpose is always the target here. But then isn’t it better if you plan in person? Well. Yes of course. But then again we have a global pandemic going on around us where breathing in the wrong direction will guarantee a Quarantine status, a visit to the hospital and maybe some side effects. So online is the way to go.

While that seems to be easy in an actual working space where your project is your only worry it becomes complicated when you are still students with multiple things going on in your life. Finding the adequate time where everyone will be available is our number one issue. Second being time itself. But we do get the job done, plan ahead and even if there isn’t a meet or time that we can allocate on that day, frequent chats and updates always do the trick.

Now going through the 3 Start-up team skills (Hustler, Hacker, Hipster) which one would be more fitting for me? Well. Seeing how I wrote this blog I’m pretty sure a Hustler might fit the bill for me. I couldn’t code for my life but I do speak english quite fluently and slip in some accents here and there. I am bad at art and just absolutely can’t make things to look pleasing. But I can surely come up with answers if I’m being asked on the spot or do some impromptu speech there. Hustler it is then.

[gerongcofrances]

Starting up... Like for real this time.

During the pandemic, there are a lot of times where I don’t do a whole lot of things and my mind just wanders into somewhere entirely. Usually it’s what to eat for later, what to play today, what things are needed to be done. Now I don’t have that luxury now because of how busy I am nowadays but the thought occurred to my while passing around ideas. I had a few ideas passed around my mind and to my friends that could potentially help people. Now I didn’t think any of it back then because I was a mere stupid that only has a handful of things to give to this to this world but now talking about start up, I start to slowly think how would one start up his innovation or project. Talking in a really broad manner now. Starting up applies to a whole slew of things. Projects, ideas, business endeavor and what not. So I’ll be talking about this from what I understood from all the things that I have learned so far while trying to survive this current life. This might lean more on a business stand point since my father loves talking about this kind of stuff and he’s essentially a teacher to me when it comes to this stuff from how he talks to me about this. First up. The idea. A lot of ideas can be used as a positive thing for either a business or a project. That being said not all ideas will fly. Some will flop and some will succeed. It depends on how solid and concrete your idea is and also going to step number two. Step two. Finding your target audience. You have to know who is your target audience. You wouldn’t want to create a project that involves basic understanding in technology but present it to people that doesn’t quite grasp the concept of using a phone yet. Locate your target audience and you can then move on to step three. Step three. Do a survey. You want to know if your target audience will be interested in your project by asking open-minded questions. Don’t pull your audience into liking your product or asking questions that becomes too personal. Make it as friendly as possible. Once you get the survey questions and all goes well into plan. After that prototyping and giving it a dry run is next. That I would not include for now because I feel that’s already late into development and not a part of a startup. That’s all I absorbed from my father and teachings from the internet. Starting up really isn’t an easy phase to do. I would say your startup doesn’t turn out the way it does your project will be dead in the waters. So you really want to do the early stages well and of course get your desired result to continue on with your project. 

[gerongcofrances]

Now for this one I took the 16personalities test and seeing the results I was pretty shocked since I took this test multiple times but this is the first time that the result has changed. Other than the fact the introvert is still the same. I feel like all the other things increased. More intuitive, I think less, and more turbulent. I still have no idea when and how these changes happened. But I think I need to work on some aspects on my personality. No idea why I have the need to work on it seems it seems to be pretty fine. 

[gerongcofrances]

Sooooo. I took the Berkeley Innovation Index Test and... Wow. Read me like a book. A lot of those things are actually pretty true about who I am as a person. I really am not a solo kind of guy. I’m more of a collab person. I do have high trust but trust me (pun intended) it’s pretty darn easy to break that kind of trust. All in all. This test read me like a book. And even though I supplied the answers yes I was expecting something new or something that I never knew about myself from these answers. It also shows that I’ve changed from my past years. I was not like this before. 2020 totally changed me as a person

[gerongcofrances]

Self-Assessment

Hello there. Let me introduce myself. My name is Frances, Frances C. Gerongco. I am 20 years old and I have a pretty normal set of hobbies. One I like playing games. Like a whole lot of Video Games, maybe an unhealthy amount to some. I’ve been playing video games since I was a child all on our old school Windows XP computer and probably that’s the main reason for my love and interest for computers. I also sing a lot, I have no particular music taste. It usually boils down to what I am feeling at the moment. K-pop, Heavy Metal, Pop, Hip-Hop, Japanese Emo, I can listen to a lot of genres. And recently I have been working out. Not just to improve my physique but to improve my mental health. Speaking of mental health. Anxiety is probably my number one enemy in doing anything. As a young lad I never had any of these slow me down. But when Senior High rolled on that’s where all the anxiety kicked in. In my Grade 11 and 12 it was probably near my roughest moment in my life but I have two other chaps with me that helps me crack a smile whenever we are together. My lowest point would be in 2020. We can all agree 2020 is such a devastating year for a lot of people. College and life altogether was not really kind to me. From working at a store and deliveries while at the same time doing some tech stuff. It was such a stressful experience where I almost wanted to drop school during finals. I persevered thankfully and after that horrible year and summer started I slowly was working on everything that I had lost or destroyed during that year. And here we are now. Onto the present and I am a third year student. My progress on getting my life back? It’s slow but it’s there. And I am glad I have people to speak with when I needed them. You really cannot go solo for the most part in life. Sometimes you need people to help you out.