Paul Vincent Dusaran

Hi! This is Paul Vincent Felecio Dusaran, a 3rd year civil engineering student from University of Science & Technology of Southern Philippines (USTP). Welcome to my blog!

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WEEK 12 - MAKING IT HAPPEN

‘It’s not about ideas. It’s about making ideas happen.’

– Scott Belsky, author and early-stage investor

The project's all done and now as we look back from where we've started, it feels awesome to recollect the times and lessons that we have learned from this course. All the efforts we gave for this project as a team starting from brainstorming to polishing has really paid off. This course has not only taught me the fundamentals of entrepreneurship, but also the value of teamwork, patience and perseverance. And now I feel like I could push forward towards achieving success with a renewed outlook of my future career that says, a job isn’t just about the paycheck, it’s an opportunity to express ourselves and make something better.

To make something happen.

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WEEK 11 - FINALIZATION

The primary motivation for friendly business is to provide social incentive for the general public, even though the company concentrates on completing productive tasks that result in private gain. It will serve as a source of learning and inspiration for us future businesspeople as we go into new business ventures and refined methodologies. As we go through the final weeks of this course, we have prepared and added final touches for our product and video presentation. We did some revisions on our pitch deck and product demo, and tweaked some adjustments with our accounting. I, personally am in charge with the product demo so I have added some improvements with our product samples and tested some few color variations. It feels great and fulfilling to see our proposed concept finally come together through our team’s collaboration and several weeks worth of consolidated efforts in order to make this little start-up idea of ours to happen.

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WEEK 10 - MARKET VALIDATION

Market validation is the process of establishing whether or not your product will appeal to a specific target market. This entails a series of consumer interviews with people in your target market, done before making a significant investment with the product. So for this week, our team has conducted interviews for our selected target market participants to test the viability of our paint in the market. Most, if not all, of the feedbacks that we gathered were positive and we are glad that our product concept was welcomed well by potential market consumers as a better, cheaper and non-toxic alternative for the usual commercial paints.

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WEEK 9 - PREPARATIONS

For this week, we have focused more on finding ways to improve our product and organizing our finances. Our idea is to experiment and create more color variations for our paint samples using pigments from various all-natural materials. Meanwhile, we have also worked and edited our calculations and accounting. To stay organized, boost productivity, acquire funding, control expenditures, and identify potential dangers and possibilities for the firm, it is critical for startups to have a strong accounting foundation. Accounting/polishing those things that assist a firm in developing a business plan that includes predicted monthly expenditures, economic forecasts, and the Startup's predicted pace of growth. At the same time, we are also preparing some questions that we will use to interview people in order to gather valuable insight that we may apply to improve our product in the succeeding weeks.

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WEEK 8 - PITCHING

Scheduled for this week is the presentation of our pitch and product demonstration. Our company's name is D2GL, which is a combination of our surnames, and our proposed product is clay soil paint. The problem that we sought to address is about the toxicity of most commercial paints in the markets today that may cause respiratory diseases and complications. The solution that we have proposed is to introduce clay soil paint as a better alternative. The target market we selected was 6000 among 1,120,000 households in Region 10 that has an income of under 40,000 Php. The economics consists of direct sales and partnership to other hardware stores. In traction, according to Philippine Statistic Authority (PSA), in region 10 there was a 182 million pesos expenditure and 2.4% of the total expenditure was used in household maintenance. That 2.4% expenditure is our target of profit. The possible competitors we have are Pacific Paints (Boysen) Philippines Inc., Davis Paints Philippines Inc., and Jotun Philippines Inc. We have a monthly quota of 1000 liters of clay paint, this comes with the expenditure of 60,000 - 80,000 Php. With this plan, we are asking for 300,000 Php investment from the investors. Following the video pitching presentation, the potential investors then asked us questions regarding the team's start-up business product, and we were also advised and given recommendations so that the team could improve on the product.

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WEEK 7 - Start-up Business Preparation

In preparation for the next pitching event, the team was focused and committed on strengthening product development for our business idea this week. Identifying and finalizing those target markets, as well as funding and marketing, as well as competitions leading up to the launch of our business concept. Those profound reflections necessitate further change on someone's behalf, which, given everything, means the pitch should be more careful or your technique should be extremely striking. Furthermore, this week's introduction provides us with further opportunity to improve our business thinking into something with greater impact and benefits. Because this isn't just about how we can go on an item adventure by ourselves, but also about how we can be adaptive from various perspectives.

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WEEK 6 -  Business Model Canvas

In this week, our group presented our own Business Model Canvas (BMC) to our instructor. We completed our BMC by selecting appropriate choices to be included on each category that needed to be filled. In Key partners, we selected the Hardware stores and Painting service businesses. These partners can help us disseminate and distribute our product to the market. The key activities requires orientation, training, and product development. These activities help our partners and customers in knowing the product. The key resources needed are physical laborers and manufacturers that creates our products. The value preposition that makes our product ahead to other competitors are being non-toxic, eco-friendly, and lower cost. The channels we acquired are direct selling and online platform like blogs. These channels will further help our product in the market. The customer segments that we chose are the middle income earner households in Region 10. Our instructor commented that we should select an income range where we decided as under 40,000 pesos income monthly since households with this income mostly live in a concrete houses that clearly in need of our clay paint product. The cost structure includes the worker's salary, ingredient costs, and production costs. By excluding these factors, we can compute for our profit. The revenue streams included usage fee and product sales. But all-in-all our presentation seemed to be in order and our instructor has finally approved our project.

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Week 5 – Business Model Canvas

This week’s activity is to create a Business Model Canvas (BMC). This business model canvas can further define the proper targets of our final product. To create the BMC we need to recognize the key partners, the key activities, the key resources, the value prepositions, about customer relationships, the available channels, the customer segments, the cost structure, and revenue streams. These are just example of each categories and by the end of the week, we are going to accomplish the format and present it to our instructor.

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WEEK 4 – Start-up Idea Finalization

Since we have already selected a product, we are then tasked to create a start-up idea. Our team will now be focusing on our product idea, "Non-toxic Eco-friendly Clay Paint". Our team will gather more data on how to develop and produce this product, as well as our strategy in introducing our product to the market. In conjunction to this, we also had to identify the type and the size of our target market, as well as the key resources. 

The number of our target market was still uncertain because we still had to determine the appropriate number of middle-income households. Our product's primary resources are physical labor and financial resources for manufacturing.

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WEEK 2 : BRAINSTORMING

In this week, our group collectively came up with three product ideas that relates to civil engineering discipline and these are the Clay Soil Paint, Plastic blocks and Ground Scanner.

·       Our first idea, Clay Soil Paint is our proposal for a cheaper, more eco-friendly alternative for the usual commercial synthetic paints.

·       For our second idea, Plastic Blocks, we have proposed to create blocks that are made with cheaper materials, more eco-friendly and more durable than the concrete blocks.

·       And lastly, the Ground Scanner is a device that will effectively lessen the time in locating the right type of soil for the foundation and construction.

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16 PERSONALITIES : Test Result

A personality test is a method of assessing human personality constructs. These tests will provide us with a way to categorized different characteristics or traits that we might otherwise not be aware of. These test can be used for self-reflection and understanding, for job placement, and for learning how to better interact with others in a team or work group.

After taking the personality test, I found out that I am an INTJ-T type which, I think it is quite an accurate assessment of my personality. An INTJ-T Personality is an introverted, intuitive, thinking, and judging personality. People with this personality type are introverted and spend a lot of time in their own mind. INTJs work best by themselves and strongly prefer solitary work to group work. While they tend not to be particularly interested in other people's thoughts and feelings, they do care about the emotions of the select group of people to whom they are close.

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WEEK 3 – PRESENTATION OF IDEAS

So for this week, our group has presented the ideas that we came up from last week’s brainstorming. Our instructor judged and deliberated the feasibility of our proposed ideas to help us pick a product to push through with our project. The plastic blocks were achievable, but quite difficult to produce so we had to lay it off from our product options. The ground scanner was also not feasible as we obviously don’t have the resources and technical skills to produce such a high-tech device. We ultimately went with the Clay Soil Paint as our final product as it is cheap and easy to produce, eco-friendly and innovative.