30A - Final Reflection

1. While going back through my posts from the semester, I remembered thinking how much work and how stressful I thought this class would be. But now, looking back on all of it, I realize that it was extremely helpful and has taught me many life lessons that I will continue to use. Even though I was very uncomfortable interviewing people in the beginning, by the end I was much more comfortable and the questions and conversations came much more naturally than they initially did. I think the assignment that was the most fun was creating the customer avatar because I loved creating a whole story for my customer. I think that the elevator pitches were my least favorite because there was so many things going on all at once. You had to write the pitch, memorize it, dress up, and then record yourself and make sure it looked good enough to post before your peers.
2. Although the elevator pitches were my least favorite assignment, I do believe that they are the assignment that will stay with me the longest. By doing it over and over again and constantly modifying it to be better and better based on the comments I received, I was able to see what an elevator pitch truly entailed and how to do one even better in the future. I think that the elevator pitches would be my answer to all 4 of the questions for this sections. By doing them multiple times and rewatching them now, I can see my confidence in front of the camera improve a little more each time and the pitch become more dynamic.
3. I do not know if I see myself as an entrepreneur, but I do have more of an entrepreneurial mindset for sure.
4. My one recommendation for incoming students of this class would be to work ahead, work ahead, work ahead! Even though there are no tests and you do not need to study, 3 assignments a week quickly piles up! I did most of the assignments within the first month of the class and had the assignments drafted on my blog. In doing so, each Monday all I had to do was click post and check one more assignment off my list for the week. 

29A - Venture Concept No. 2

Opportunity

My idea is tailored to fit the needs of UF students and could later be adopted by other universities for their students as well. The market is defined demographically as students ages 17-24 who pay tuition. Gender, ethnicity, and marital status are not determining factors in the demographics of my target market.

The nature of the need has to do with convenience, entertainment, and money. The forces in the environment that are creating this opportunity are the high tuition costs, high living expenses, food expenses, and accumulation of monthly subscription fees for other streaming services. Currently, customers are satisfying their need of entertainment with Netflix, Hulu, Showtime, HBO Max, Amazon Prime, and many more. I believe that customers are very loyal to Netflix, but the other platforms are easier to sway people away from. 

I believe there is a big opportunity for this. I have never heard of a streaming service like this that the university itself would be in charge of or offer through the college, and I think it would be extremely successful and bring in extra money for the school as well as new opportunities for the students to interact with the university. I believe the window of opportunity will be open for a long time because new students come in each year to subscribe which will offset the seniors that have graduated and unsubscribe. It would be a cyclical flow of money.

Innovation

My idea is to create a streaming platform that partners with the University of Florida for their students. This platform would include movies and tv shows as well as Gator sports. This new platform would allow students to save money on entertainment by combining all of their subscriptions into just one monthly subscription. The ultimate goal is that students will change their current subscriptions to my new platform and will save money that they can turn around and use for other things they need as a college student. 

So, what I am selling is subscriptions to a new streaming service. Right now, I am thinking that the subscription fee could be around $12 a month. If customers cancelled their other services and switched to this one only, this should save them at least $5 a month. I do not know how much my fixed or variable costs will be yet, so this is only an estimate of what the price could be.

Venture Concept

The reasons I think customers will switch to this new service is money savings, variety, and UF sports. The price of just one streaming service compared to the 4 that the average American has, will greatly reduce the monthly cost that customers are paying each month for television entertainment. This new service will also provide a large variety of tv shows and movies and will have monthly surveys to see what movies people want added each month. And lastly, UF sports will be a large influencer because no other service provides access to all of the Gator sports for this low of a price. I think it might be a little hard for customers to switch in the beginning, but if the service is successful its reputation should speak for itself and convince people to switch over.

The competitors would be other streaming services such as Netflix, Hulu, HBO Max, Amazon Prime, Showtime, etc. Their possible weaknesses would be their high prices and inability to satisfy the need for variety of tv shows and movies for their customers. 

Customer experience and price points play a large role in this business concept because customers need to be satisfied to create positive word of mouth about the service. If the price point is too high, nobody will give the service a chance in the first place. Packaging, distribution, and customer support do not need to be defined at this point.

To support the ongoing production of this new service, I would have multiple employees who can be reachable 24/7, for customers to show how much we care about each individual. These employees would be able to answer any and all questions that are asked about the platform and would be able to recommend things to watch to indecisive customers.

The Three Minor Elements

The most important resource will be our monthly surveys that take each of our customer's opinions into account. By conducting these surveys, our customers are given a voice and they can help us choose which new movies and tv shows will be added to the platform each month.

Next for the venture would be expanding into other universities in Florida and ultimately throughout the country.

Next for me would be to become financially stable from this venture, sell the company to the individual universities or another company, and be able to invest money into other opportunities that I believe will be successful in the future.

Summary of Feedback

The feedback I received on my first post was all very positive. Many of the people who commented said that this is a great and affordable alternative to the streaming services that they have now. They also were very surprised that this opportunity had not already been exploited at the university level. 

How I Changed My Venture Concept

I did not have any suggestions for changes to my overall venture concept, so I made some changes myself as I read through it. In the beginning I originally had that my service would be offered directly through the university, and I modified it to now say "partners with" the university in order to allow my company to make some money while running this new venture. I also fixed a lot of grammatical errors because it was like a word vomit the first time I wrote this venture concept.

This is the logo that I created for my new company!