I apologize for the tragically unoriginal title. I could have gone with "Who's Ready to Have Some Fund?" or "Funny Funds" or any other 'fund' pun. Or maybe "Who Wants to be a (funded) Millionaire!" Whatever. When the book comes around, I'll think of something better.
From the outside, one of the coolest things about starting a start-up is boasting of one's accomplishments in fund raising. "I raised X hundreds of thousands of dollars" is more than just a boast- it seems to be an affirmation of your ability to succeed. The more you raise, the most obvious it is that people believe in your idea and, more importantly, in you as an entrepreneur. The number after the dollar sign becomes a confirmed and measurable benchmark of one's ability and reason to stay in- and succeed in- the entrepreneurial world.
Or at the very least, it makes Moms everywhere happy.
But I find there to be certain associated limitations that, if an entrepreneur can find the means to support himself without funding, are better off avoided. Giving up a percentage of your company before really finding out its value is often unnecessary. It's like setting up a T-ball instead of learning how to hit a slow pitch. Sure, you'll hit the ball. But how far?
Other people's influence over your project is an unneeded interjection in the life of what only one person (or two or three, depending on your situation)- the founder- has real passion invested into. I'm a strong believer that an entrepreneur- one who is in the business of starting companies for the long game, and not just for the bragging rights that comes with investment- should be able to have at least one project in his life that they build on their own.
Of course, this doesn't mean avoiding advisers. Anyone willing to give you any amount of guidance is practically a saint, especially in the early stages of your company. But I want to run my company towards my vision, not someone else's. I want my company to be guided by my ideas for its future, not my investor's ideas for how to exit big and fast. I want my company to be a true reflection of my work, my mind, and my ability, not of someone's check book.
There will be a time when, if all goes as planned, funding will be unavoidable. And I eagerly anticipate that moment, because that means that I have maxed out the company's ability to grow organically, and the time has come for a cash injection to take the company to an unprecedented level of growth in remarkably quick period of time. This growth:time ratio can't be recreated anywhere as well as in a start-up that has proven its business model and market, and has been gifted money (and advice, contacts, and support) for major expansion. But now- at the pre-market stage- is not that time.
The next post is going to discuss my "take every meeting" philosophy, and where exactly that got us. Hint: the most exciting pivot we've had to date, and the greatest affirmation of a market and potential for success came only after a lucky happenstance, and a "say yes" mindset.
That's if I manage to stop watching Entourage long enough to concentrate.
Chow,
A
Tuesday, June 2, 2015
Thursday, May 28, 2015
The Business-Technology 1-2 punch
This is going to be the longest post yet. It's my own experience of finding technical talent to build beta Morph, my start up, and it was not an easy journey. Here's how it happened...
You hear it all the time. The perfect combo of entrepreneurs is business savvy linked with the tech genius. Ballmer and Gates, Jobs and Woz, Thiel and Levchin, Adriel and ____. I needed someone, I was convinced, as dedicated as myself, and loads smarter and more talented. Someone I would get along with, someone who would be my friend, someone who would contradict me and be more creative than me, someone who would push me and help me drag this business forward into the success I was confident it can have.
But where do I start looking? What kind of person do I look for? What can I offer them, or do for them, or inspire them with to convince them of Morph's potential value. How do I get someone to build out Morph, and be committed to the project on the same level I was?
I first went to Chris Mumford, my adviser, and someone who has watched Morph develop from pizza delivery app idea to current form. He was excited that we had come this far. He had a simple solution: what I want is to outsource a project like this. Plenty of talent out in India would be capable of building this out quickly and cheaply. All I would need to do is provide wire frames to help guide the project, because they build what I want, to the t. If I want a square but draw a rectangle, I can undoubtedly expect to get someone longer than it is wide, even if it makes no sense.
Prashant, Chris' man in India, and I began speaking right away. Over Skype sessions, we discussed a timeline (we wanted to try to have a beta test in April. Oh, how silly we were), pricing ($10,000? I estimated 50K on my pro forma, so not too bad), and wire frames (what we had would do just fine. Thank you to proto.io and, of course, to May!).
But slowly, problems arose. He wouldn't answer email for 4 days at a time. He would be 20 minutes late to Skype calls. His internet would go out. He would miss calls, and email me 2 days later with an apology. We just weren't on the same page. My primary expectations of having someone dedicated, and someone I can get along with seemed so far removed from reality.This project that was supposed to be a fun, though challenging experience, was becoming little more than a headache.
I had to make a decision between continuing on this path that was recommended to me by an accomplished professor and entrepreneur in his own right, someone who was a dedicated adviser, and pursuing a trickier choice. The choice wasn't a hard one. I'm in this for the fun- the challenges should not, and should never be, personnel. I thanked Prashant for his time, and moved on.
It was about 8 weeks from our first conversation to our last. 8 weeks of lost time. Where do I go from here? What other options are available? I knew I wanted to launch on September, the start of the new school year. This all had to be built out quickly, and I had no idea where to go.
My first step was research through my network. I reached out to Nick Jordan, CEO of Smashing Boxes. Nick is a successful non-technical founder of a very technical company. Almost everyone working at SB is a coder or designer of some sort. Confident he would had something to say, I reached out.
Reaching out to people with a selfish question like "Please help me with all of my problems, and in return I'll send you more emails later when I have bigger problems" can be tricky. My strategy usually revolves around getting an introduction from a mutual contact, and getting right to the point. Important people have matters much more important than reading your non-important email, no matter how important you find your matter to be.
Also, avoid asking for a meeting every time. There is so much that can be done through 1-2 emails that a meeting or a call would just be a waste of everyone's time. Great blog by the Harvard Business Review covers that further for y'all.
He came back with a dozen articles all about what "technology people" expect, where to find them, what to do. Some were positive- saying that showing enough excitement for a scaleable idea can get any CTO on board. Some were action-supportive, telling the business guy to just go learn to code to build it himself and not waste time and energy in a potentially fruitless search. And another straight up said to not bother, because "tech people" hate being called "tech people" and looking for someone to build your idea is just plain rude.
So over all, more questions then answers.
I spoke to other young entrepreneurs who I know had hired tech partners. I read articles, asked professors, and made that one of my biggest questions to any adviser or accomplished entrepreneur or I ever met with. It was on my mind all the time, and I was nervous, all the time. I joined LinkedIn premium to use their Recruiter feature, with no success. Contacting a dozen people with coding skills, under the age of 35 and based in the south-east led to 11 no-answers, and one guy who wrote simply, "You seem to have no idea what you're asking for."
I joined websites that intended to set up business and technology founders with similar success.
I asked everyone I met with for their advice and experience. "Go to meetups and pitch your idea." "You need a 40 year old manager type." "You won't find anyone on this coast." "No one from the west coast would want this." "Ignore the tech guy, get venture funding first".
All of this advice was thrown at me, and all served to confuse me more. I reached out to dozens of college grads, with no success. Time to focus on getting a younger recruit. I met with a UNC computer science student, Jesse Osiecki, to get his opinion on the project, and some information about the next steps I should take. Per his recommendation, I reached out to 4 professors in the UNC computer science department (Jesse recommended 2, I decided to double it, to be safe), hoping someone would respond. One, Diane Pozefsky, did.
Diane, UNC Director of Undergraduate Research in Computer Science, helped me understand my project better from a technological background, and from a timeline perspective. She told me that the most important thing in any of my candidates is passion. Without passion, they will simmer out. Without passion, they simply won't try. Without passion, you'll get a passionless product. And this was sage advice that I value still in every individual I work with, in any field.
But perhaps most importantly, she told me the words I prayed I would here: "Oh yeah. Any decent college junior can do this for you."
With my lack of any technological knowledge, I had assumed this was going to be tricky. Trickier than Jesse or any of my other CS friends told me it would be. But apparently, the path was clearer than expected. Lesson learned: ask for help from every direction, because everyone has something different to tell you.
Per Professor Pozefsky's advice, I sent out emails to the head of the Undergraduate Computer Science Department of the top 10 schools around the country, asking them to forward a little blurb about Morph, and our search for technical talent over the summer. I put out fliers all over campus with (what I thought were) funny and eye catching messages, asking for applicants who love "breakfast, beer, and also coding".
I received responses from students from MIT, Georgia Tech, Duke, and UNC. Each response, resume attached and with a paragraph describing their excitement about and interest in working on Morph, was highly reminiscent of my own (failed) applications to companies, and an exciting validation of how real this whole process was becoming. It felt good.
I interviewed every individual who applied, no matter how strong or weak the application. Why not? On my part, all it cost was time. And this time invested could have an enormous return if I find the right partner.
A few were excited, though seemingly faking some of it. Some seemed nervous about the prospect of doing it all on their own. One never showed up. I guess she changed her mind.
But one guy came to me with a plan. Oscar Wang arrived at The Looking Glass cafe, one of my favorite work cafes in Chapel Hill, and sat down. He was smiling from the beginning. He told me that he wants to work on a start-up for the excitement of having so much (often too much) responsibility and pressure. The kicker came when he told me he and his best friend David Zhang (who I would be interviewing a few days later) have already thought through some basic elements of what the app would require.
He took out three sheets of paper with drawings, arrows, diagrams, and descriptions on them- a very basic wireframe that he and David had drawn up about what Morph might look like. In truth, it could have all been senseless scribbles. They could have tacked on some pictures from Wired magazine and made a collage. They could have had anything on those papers, but coming to me with enough excitement, forethought and initiative to have put some ideas together before even meeting with me- that was the passion I was looking for. I dragged them on for a bit and had another meeting with the two of them together to chat a little more, but they were hired the second they showed me those papers. About that, I had no doubt.
Did I make the right choice? Are David and Oscar able to build out Morph in the creative, fluid way a west coast start-up with west coast money might be able to? The jury is still out, but I believe in them. I'll keep you updated on how that goes. My next post will be about the reason I decided to forgo any funding, and why I'm happy with that decision.
Techie techie yeahhh
-A
You hear it all the time. The perfect combo of entrepreneurs is business savvy linked with the tech genius. Ballmer and Gates, Jobs and Woz, Thiel and Levchin, Adriel and ____. I needed someone, I was convinced, as dedicated as myself, and loads smarter and more talented. Someone I would get along with, someone who would be my friend, someone who would contradict me and be more creative than me, someone who would push me and help me drag this business forward into the success I was confident it can have.
But where do I start looking? What kind of person do I look for? What can I offer them, or do for them, or inspire them with to convince them of Morph's potential value. How do I get someone to build out Morph, and be committed to the project on the same level I was?
I first went to Chris Mumford, my adviser, and someone who has watched Morph develop from pizza delivery app idea to current form. He was excited that we had come this far. He had a simple solution: what I want is to outsource a project like this. Plenty of talent out in India would be capable of building this out quickly and cheaply. All I would need to do is provide wire frames to help guide the project, because they build what I want, to the t. If I want a square but draw a rectangle, I can undoubtedly expect to get someone longer than it is wide, even if it makes no sense.
Prashant, Chris' man in India, and I began speaking right away. Over Skype sessions, we discussed a timeline (we wanted to try to have a beta test in April. Oh, how silly we were), pricing ($10,000? I estimated 50K on my pro forma, so not too bad), and wire frames (what we had would do just fine. Thank you to proto.io and, of course, to May!).
But slowly, problems arose. He wouldn't answer email for 4 days at a time. He would be 20 minutes late to Skype calls. His internet would go out. He would miss calls, and email me 2 days later with an apology. We just weren't on the same page. My primary expectations of having someone dedicated, and someone I can get along with seemed so far removed from reality.This project that was supposed to be a fun, though challenging experience, was becoming little more than a headache.
I had to make a decision between continuing on this path that was recommended to me by an accomplished professor and entrepreneur in his own right, someone who was a dedicated adviser, and pursuing a trickier choice. The choice wasn't a hard one. I'm in this for the fun- the challenges should not, and should never be, personnel. I thanked Prashant for his time, and moved on.
It was about 8 weeks from our first conversation to our last. 8 weeks of lost time. Where do I go from here? What other options are available? I knew I wanted to launch on September, the start of the new school year. This all had to be built out quickly, and I had no idea where to go.
My first step was research through my network. I reached out to Nick Jordan, CEO of Smashing Boxes. Nick is a successful non-technical founder of a very technical company. Almost everyone working at SB is a coder or designer of some sort. Confident he would had something to say, I reached out.
Reaching out to people with a selfish question like "Please help me with all of my problems, and in return I'll send you more emails later when I have bigger problems" can be tricky. My strategy usually revolves around getting an introduction from a mutual contact, and getting right to the point. Important people have matters much more important than reading your non-important email, no matter how important you find your matter to be.
Also, avoid asking for a meeting every time. There is so much that can be done through 1-2 emails that a meeting or a call would just be a waste of everyone's time. Great blog by the Harvard Business Review covers that further for y'all.
He came back with a dozen articles all about what "technology people" expect, where to find them, what to do. Some were positive- saying that showing enough excitement for a scaleable idea can get any CTO on board. Some were action-supportive, telling the business guy to just go learn to code to build it himself and not waste time and energy in a potentially fruitless search. And another straight up said to not bother, because "tech people" hate being called "tech people" and looking for someone to build your idea is just plain rude.
So over all, more questions then answers.
I spoke to other young entrepreneurs who I know had hired tech partners. I read articles, asked professors, and made that one of my biggest questions to any adviser or accomplished entrepreneur or I ever met with. It was on my mind all the time, and I was nervous, all the time. I joined LinkedIn premium to use their Recruiter feature, with no success. Contacting a dozen people with coding skills, under the age of 35 and based in the south-east led to 11 no-answers, and one guy who wrote simply, "You seem to have no idea what you're asking for."
I joined websites that intended to set up business and technology founders with similar success.
I asked everyone I met with for their advice and experience. "Go to meetups and pitch your idea." "You need a 40 year old manager type." "You won't find anyone on this coast." "No one from the west coast would want this." "Ignore the tech guy, get venture funding first".
All of this advice was thrown at me, and all served to confuse me more. I reached out to dozens of college grads, with no success. Time to focus on getting a younger recruit. I met with a UNC computer science student, Jesse Osiecki, to get his opinion on the project, and some information about the next steps I should take. Per his recommendation, I reached out to 4 professors in the UNC computer science department (Jesse recommended 2, I decided to double it, to be safe), hoping someone would respond. One, Diane Pozefsky, did.
Diane, UNC Director of Undergraduate Research in Computer Science, helped me understand my project better from a technological background, and from a timeline perspective. She told me that the most important thing in any of my candidates is passion. Without passion, they will simmer out. Without passion, they simply won't try. Without passion, you'll get a passionless product. And this was sage advice that I value still in every individual I work with, in any field.
But perhaps most importantly, she told me the words I prayed I would here: "Oh yeah. Any decent college junior can do this for you."
With my lack of any technological knowledge, I had assumed this was going to be tricky. Trickier than Jesse or any of my other CS friends told me it would be. But apparently, the path was clearer than expected. Lesson learned: ask for help from every direction, because everyone has something different to tell you.
Per Professor Pozefsky's advice, I sent out emails to the head of the Undergraduate Computer Science Department of the top 10 schools around the country, asking them to forward a little blurb about Morph, and our search for technical talent over the summer. I put out fliers all over campus with (what I thought were) funny and eye catching messages, asking for applicants who love "breakfast, beer, and also coding".
I received responses from students from MIT, Georgia Tech, Duke, and UNC. Each response, resume attached and with a paragraph describing their excitement about and interest in working on Morph, was highly reminiscent of my own (failed) applications to companies, and an exciting validation of how real this whole process was becoming. It felt good.
I interviewed every individual who applied, no matter how strong or weak the application. Why not? On my part, all it cost was time. And this time invested could have an enormous return if I find the right partner.
A few were excited, though seemingly faking some of it. Some seemed nervous about the prospect of doing it all on their own. One never showed up. I guess she changed her mind.
But one guy came to me with a plan. Oscar Wang arrived at The Looking Glass cafe, one of my favorite work cafes in Chapel Hill, and sat down. He was smiling from the beginning. He told me that he wants to work on a start-up for the excitement of having so much (often too much) responsibility and pressure. The kicker came when he told me he and his best friend David Zhang (who I would be interviewing a few days later) have already thought through some basic elements of what the app would require.
He took out three sheets of paper with drawings, arrows, diagrams, and descriptions on them- a very basic wireframe that he and David had drawn up about what Morph might look like. In truth, it could have all been senseless scribbles. They could have tacked on some pictures from Wired magazine and made a collage. They could have had anything on those papers, but coming to me with enough excitement, forethought and initiative to have put some ideas together before even meeting with me- that was the passion I was looking for. I dragged them on for a bit and had another meeting with the two of them together to chat a little more, but they were hired the second they showed me those papers. About that, I had no doubt.
Did I make the right choice? Are David and Oscar able to build out Morph in the creative, fluid way a west coast start-up with west coast money might be able to? The jury is still out, but I believe in them. I'll keep you updated on how that goes. My next post will be about the reason I decided to forgo any funding, and why I'm happy with that decision.
Techie techie yeahhh
-A
Tuesday, May 26, 2015
The Name
Yeah yeah, I know I said that this post would be about finding techies to build out Morph. But its my blog, and I'm the only one who reads it, so hop off.
I noticed that I ended the last post signing off as "Morph", and with a picture of a check being given to "Morphood". A typo, perhaps? Maybe we stole someone else's check, out of spite?
While not an inconceivable thing, you're wrong. Morphood and Morph are- wait for it, drum roll please- one and the same. Way back in November, when we were preparing for the Pitch Party, we had to think of a name. I was put in charge, and put it off day after day, thinking that it wouldn't be too hard. I was certainly not correct.
I brought out the whiteboard and, as I do with most tough decisions, just started writing and talking aloud. (My housemate Dan was in the room, but I doubt he, the musician that he is, cared much for my silly business rants.) I wrote and said every adjective I could think of associated with the idea we had. "Fast, fun, seamless, efficient, Uber, quick, food, delivery, different, change, rapid, quality, excellence, drivers, cheese burgers." Anything that had any relevance, I wrote.
What I really liked about the idea, and what I wanted to come across in the name, was that it seemed like a vastly different way of doing business in this industry. No one really took good care of the restaurant. Very few companies had elite technology. Many were slow and disgruntled. But we were different. We did food differently than the rest. We changed food. We morphed it. We morphed food.
So, we became Morphood.
And we loved it! It flowed, it mentioned our line of work, it made people want to order "more food". It was great! As the idea developed, however, we learned that we should not constrict ourselves to just delivering food. We can deliver flowers, or books, or groceries. Literally anything that you want delivered, we can do. And so, we were still a change in the system, still an upgrade, a transformation from the status quo. But we were no longer just 'food'.
We followed Justin Timberlake's advice from The Social Network (because I'd probably follow JT in anything he says, ever) and 'dropped the ood'. And so we became simply, Morph.
Or perhaps not so simply. Either way, I promise that the next post will be about techies. I know that, because I'm going to write it right now.
Much love,
Morphood
I noticed that I ended the last post signing off as "Morph", and with a picture of a check being given to "Morphood". A typo, perhaps? Maybe we stole someone else's check, out of spite?
While not an inconceivable thing, you're wrong. Morphood and Morph are- wait for it, drum roll please- one and the same. Way back in November, when we were preparing for the Pitch Party, we had to think of a name. I was put in charge, and put it off day after day, thinking that it wouldn't be too hard. I was certainly not correct.
I brought out the whiteboard and, as I do with most tough decisions, just started writing and talking aloud. (My housemate Dan was in the room, but I doubt he, the musician that he is, cared much for my silly business rants.) I wrote and said every adjective I could think of associated with the idea we had. "Fast, fun, seamless, efficient, Uber, quick, food, delivery, different, change, rapid, quality, excellence, drivers, cheese burgers." Anything that had any relevance, I wrote.
What I really liked about the idea, and what I wanted to come across in the name, was that it seemed like a vastly different way of doing business in this industry. No one really took good care of the restaurant. Very few companies had elite technology. Many were slow and disgruntled. But we were different. We did food differently than the rest. We changed food. We morphed it. We morphed food.
So, we became Morphood.
And we loved it! It flowed, it mentioned our line of work, it made people want to order "more food". It was great! As the idea developed, however, we learned that we should not constrict ourselves to just delivering food. We can deliver flowers, or books, or groceries. Literally anything that you want delivered, we can do. And so, we were still a change in the system, still an upgrade, a transformation from the status quo. But we were no longer just 'food'.
We followed Justin Timberlake's advice from The Social Network (because I'd probably follow JT in anything he says, ever) and 'dropped the ood'. And so we became simply, Morph.
Or perhaps not so simply. Either way, I promise that the next post will be about techies. I know that, because I'm going to write it right now.
Much love,
Morphood
Monday, May 18, 2015
The Carolina Challenge
The beginning of anything is a fun, but incredibly amorphous time (pun intended). If you start learning to play an instrument, your first months are a painful cacophony of squeals and discord. Taking your first tennis lessons is essentially subjecting yourself to the embarrassment of hard, missed swings and 0-6 shutouts. And working through an idea for a company is no different in its ambiguity and often, its pains.
What it takes to move forward in any of these tricky ventures is perseverance. And a mom who drives you to all of these lessons as you complain in the back seat, only to thank her for her patience and sacrifice years later. What Mom does is to give you structure. She guarantees that every Wednesday, from 3-4, you'll have to sit in Mrs. Welsher's living room, banging on piano keys. She also gives a benchmark for progress, because when she compliments your C scale 8 weeks after you first started practicing, she really means it.
Unfortunately, when working on a start up, Mom isn't around. Not only is she not there to help, but her reminders about her friend Marge's kid getting a cushy job at BlackRock ($80,000 salary and full benefits), or Cousin Tommy starting his second year of medical school don't really help inspire much of a self-confidence. What we really needed to give us structure and mark our progress was a competition. And we got that, in the form of the Carolina Challenge.
This annual competition receives a hundred applications a year for its cumulative $50,000 in prize money. Entrepreneurs from around the state of North Carolina, and at all levels of their venture from idea to cash flow positive, compete in a series of pitches to prove to judges, themselves, and their mothers that their idea is validated and their work worth it.
As this was my second time competing in the Challenge, my first coming two years past in a disappointing ending in the semi final round, I had some insight into what the judges did and did not want. ((My first idea was for a drinking glass that lit up when any common "date rape drug" was dropped into a drink was stolen by students out of NC State and raised 100K, by the way. Clearly, I'm totally over it.) May and I worked hard to produce certain results that I knew the judges looked for.
The first round, however, was just a two minute pitch without any slides, and one minute for questions. I love this stuff. Pitching is exhilarating to me. You have an idea, or a strategy, or a concept, or a whatever that you worked really hard on and believe in. You've spent countless hours researching, preparing, and structuring your pitch. You've got a cute opening line that you're proud of and- my favorite part- a zinger to close on. And now, you've got X minutes of silence for a couple (4 in this case) of very accomplished men and women to listen in on your idea. Its show time.
This part of the pitch went spectacularly. I give them the spiel about the problems in delivery. No competitor is serving the market correctly, because they are all using a business model developed in the 90s. To be clear, that's the 1990s. Restaurants are unhappy, and are begging for a change. We've done 20 interviews and have 5 committed restaurants and we are the right people to make this company happen.
"Morph. May we take your order?" I conclude, whipping out a fancy black napkin from my back pocket and flourishing it over my left forearm with a deep, waiter-esque bow.
The judges came at me with a few questions about scalability, pricing, and the market, all of which we were overly prepared for. 3 minutes after I started, I was out the door, overflowing with confidence. And rightfully so, as a few days later, we get the email confirming that we moved on to the second round.
Now we have a 5 minutes presentation, 4 minutes of questioning, and some serious competition. We get to work on preparing a slideshow of everything we might need (typical business, and not something I've ever enjoyed or been particularly good at). This is where the Challenge provided us the structure we needed. We knew that we needed to show our pro forma financials. The judges would expect a market size (as I learned from the Pitch Party), an explanation of the idea, a competitive landscape, and a few other things. These expectations were the same (in a parallel discipline) as Mrs. Welsher's when she was teaching me piano a decade ago. Learn the major scales, then the minor scales, then show that you can play this song. These requirements gave us something to work towards, and dammit we worked hard.
The day of the second round came, and we couldn't be more ready. Our deck was beautiful (thank you, May) our pitch practiced and perfected to the point of seeming impromptu (the pinnacle performance goal of a good pitch), and our appendix slides so extensive that we couldn't imagine a single question that we wouldn't be able to answer with prepared statistics and well thought out reasoning.
As we were scheduled towards the end of the order, we got to watch almost all of our competition pitch before it was our turn. Waterless Buddy's was in our room and, as usual, crushed it. A few others went up with huge ideas and little execution or lots of execution on a little idea. It seemed like we had a niche right in between where our very scalable idea and our wonderfully designed, very explanatory wireframes and progress with customers would help propel us into the finals. If we felt good before the pitch, then damn did we feel amazing afterwards.
We did our 5 minutes so perfectly, the judges seemed like they weren't sure what to ask! One came at us with a question about keeping drivers on the road, and we answered with a bucket of data about student employment, and a fully developed strategy about incentive structures. Then silence. Another judge asked about the restaurants we had committed. An easy question, and a superb way to prove our past work and success. Then silence. The third had nothing to ask, even when prodded. And this comes after every team- even the best ones- were absolutely drilled on their business models, financials, or some other part of their pitch.
May and I felt so good, we high fived before even retaking our seats.
Unfortunately, we must have been missing something. Later that week, we get an email notifying us that we placed in the Top 10, but will not be competing in the finals. 'Disappointed' wouldn't get close to describing how I felt. All of our work, all of our confidence, popped like a balloon. Sure, we placed. But to not even pitch in the finals? Who could have possible beat us? Was their something about us, the founders, that the judges didn't like? Where did we fall short?
When the day of the finals came, we were invited to hear the other pitches, and receive our checks. Lisa Li, my GLOBE entrepreneurship buddy and cofounder of the amazing idea that will soon become Open Oceans, delivered a remarkable pitch that earned her first place in the entire Challenge.
But as May and I sat and watched the teams that had beat us out, I needed every bit of encouragement from May to keep me happy. We were better than those guys, I told myself. We worked harder, or our idea was better, or our pitch style was loads better then the people up on stage right now.
What I learned is- it doesn't matter. Its all a game, and the best players are not the ones that win the first time they play, or even those that win the most. The best ones are those who find the fortitude to roll the dice again, no matter the past results.
Sure, I was disappointed we weren't higher ranked. And it definitely took some of the confidence out of me, and forced me to question my abilities, the idea, and my own willingness to continue. But that feeling of self-pity was short lived. We won $1000! And 7th place in this huge competition. We did well. Now, lets see if we can do great.
After the Challenge ended, it became time to get serious. I had committed to Morph as my full time career. This was my baby, and my future, and it was going to die as a $1000 Happy Gilmore check unless I started pushing. The next step surrounded technology. It was time to start building. Next time, on Orange is the New Morph.
Much love,
A
What it takes to move forward in any of these tricky ventures is perseverance. And a mom who drives you to all of these lessons as you complain in the back seat, only to thank her for her patience and sacrifice years later. What Mom does is to give you structure. She guarantees that every Wednesday, from 3-4, you'll have to sit in Mrs. Welsher's living room, banging on piano keys. She also gives a benchmark for progress, because when she compliments your C scale 8 weeks after you first started practicing, she really means it.
Unfortunately, when working on a start up, Mom isn't around. Not only is she not there to help, but her reminders about her friend Marge's kid getting a cushy job at BlackRock ($80,000 salary and full benefits), or Cousin Tommy starting his second year of medical school don't really help inspire much of a self-confidence. What we really needed to give us structure and mark our progress was a competition. And we got that, in the form of the Carolina Challenge.
This annual competition receives a hundred applications a year for its cumulative $50,000 in prize money. Entrepreneurs from around the state of North Carolina, and at all levels of their venture from idea to cash flow positive, compete in a series of pitches to prove to judges, themselves, and their mothers that their idea is validated and their work worth it.
As this was my second time competing in the Challenge, my first coming two years past in a disappointing ending in the semi final round, I had some insight into what the judges did and did not want. ((My first idea was for a drinking glass that lit up when any common "date rape drug" was dropped into a drink was stolen by students out of NC State and raised 100K, by the way. Clearly, I'm totally over it.) May and I worked hard to produce certain results that I knew the judges looked for.
The first round, however, was just a two minute pitch without any slides, and one minute for questions. I love this stuff. Pitching is exhilarating to me. You have an idea, or a strategy, or a concept, or a whatever that you worked really hard on and believe in. You've spent countless hours researching, preparing, and structuring your pitch. You've got a cute opening line that you're proud of and- my favorite part- a zinger to close on. And now, you've got X minutes of silence for a couple (4 in this case) of very accomplished men and women to listen in on your idea. Its show time.
This part of the pitch went spectacularly. I give them the spiel about the problems in delivery. No competitor is serving the market correctly, because they are all using a business model developed in the 90s. To be clear, that's the 1990s. Restaurants are unhappy, and are begging for a change. We've done 20 interviews and have 5 committed restaurants and we are the right people to make this company happen.
"Morph. May we take your order?" I conclude, whipping out a fancy black napkin from my back pocket and flourishing it over my left forearm with a deep, waiter-esque bow.
The judges came at me with a few questions about scalability, pricing, and the market, all of which we were overly prepared for. 3 minutes after I started, I was out the door, overflowing with confidence. And rightfully so, as a few days later, we get the email confirming that we moved on to the second round.
Now we have a 5 minutes presentation, 4 minutes of questioning, and some serious competition. We get to work on preparing a slideshow of everything we might need (typical business, and not something I've ever enjoyed or been particularly good at). This is where the Challenge provided us the structure we needed. We knew that we needed to show our pro forma financials. The judges would expect a market size (as I learned from the Pitch Party), an explanation of the idea, a competitive landscape, and a few other things. These expectations were the same (in a parallel discipline) as Mrs. Welsher's when she was teaching me piano a decade ago. Learn the major scales, then the minor scales, then show that you can play this song. These requirements gave us something to work towards, and dammit we worked hard.
The day of the second round came, and we couldn't be more ready. Our deck was beautiful (thank you, May) our pitch practiced and perfected to the point of seeming impromptu (the pinnacle performance goal of a good pitch), and our appendix slides so extensive that we couldn't imagine a single question that we wouldn't be able to answer with prepared statistics and well thought out reasoning.
As we were scheduled towards the end of the order, we got to watch almost all of our competition pitch before it was our turn. Waterless Buddy's was in our room and, as usual, crushed it. A few others went up with huge ideas and little execution or lots of execution on a little idea. It seemed like we had a niche right in between where our very scalable idea and our wonderfully designed, very explanatory wireframes and progress with customers would help propel us into the finals. If we felt good before the pitch, then damn did we feel amazing afterwards.
We did our 5 minutes so perfectly, the judges seemed like they weren't sure what to ask! One came at us with a question about keeping drivers on the road, and we answered with a bucket of data about student employment, and a fully developed strategy about incentive structures. Then silence. Another judge asked about the restaurants we had committed. An easy question, and a superb way to prove our past work and success. Then silence. The third had nothing to ask, even when prodded. And this comes after every team- even the best ones- were absolutely drilled on their business models, financials, or some other part of their pitch.
May and I felt so good, we high fived before even retaking our seats.
Unfortunately, we must have been missing something. Later that week, we get an email notifying us that we placed in the Top 10, but will not be competing in the finals. 'Disappointed' wouldn't get close to describing how I felt. All of our work, all of our confidence, popped like a balloon. Sure, we placed. But to not even pitch in the finals? Who could have possible beat us? Was their something about us, the founders, that the judges didn't like? Where did we fall short?
When the day of the finals came, we were invited to hear the other pitches, and receive our checks. Lisa Li, my GLOBE entrepreneurship buddy and cofounder of the amazing idea that will soon become Open Oceans, delivered a remarkable pitch that earned her first place in the entire Challenge.
But as May and I sat and watched the teams that had beat us out, I needed every bit of encouragement from May to keep me happy. We were better than those guys, I told myself. We worked harder, or our idea was better, or our pitch style was loads better then the people up on stage right now.
What I learned is- it doesn't matter. Its all a game, and the best players are not the ones that win the first time they play, or even those that win the most. The best ones are those who find the fortitude to roll the dice again, no matter the past results.
Sure, I was disappointed we weren't higher ranked. And it definitely took some of the confidence out of me, and forced me to question my abilities, the idea, and my own willingness to continue. But that feeling of self-pity was short lived. We won $1000! And 7th place in this huge competition. We did well. Now, lets see if we can do great.
After the Challenge ended, it became time to get serious. I had committed to Morph as my full time career. This was my baby, and my future, and it was going to die as a $1000 Happy Gilmore check unless I started pushing. The next step surrounded technology. It was time to start building. Next time, on Orange is the New Morph.
Much love,
A
Monday, May 11, 2015
Structuring Meetings
Sorry for the delay. Graduated college yesterday, so been a bit busy. But we back!
So, starting January 2015, our last semester of college, May and I decided to get to work and see what we can make of our idea of a better run food ordering and delivery platform. Think GrubHub meets Uber, and you have what would eventually become Morph.
We decided to commit to one meeting a week. Setting it up as a constant in our calender, every Monday at 11am in Cafe McColl, helped make it a real responsibility that we could not take loosely.
We first divided our roles based on our skills and interests. I would do all the 'business stuff'. We need to continue talking to customers, learning about the market, answering the problems we faced in the Pitch Party, gathering data, learning about competitors, etc. And May would take care of the designs. All of our PowerPoint decks, the logo, and- most importantly- our wire frames for the app we were going to build. This worked out great for me, as my design skills (clearly not inspired by my many years of art classes) are at a sore minimum, while May did not have the time to devote to all that needed to be done on the business end.
At the end of each meeting, we would make a list of goals for the week. We wrote these down- each of us recorded what the other would need to do- to keep ourselves accountable. We would spend the week working hard on getting our parts done, believing in each others' commitment enough to feel responsible to ourselves, the company, and each other to get our own work done to a level of excellence.
The start of each meeting was a checklist of all we had accomplished. We went over May's designs and discussed what needed to be developed or fixed. We discussed my progress, and assessed holes in our business plan and research. We were honest, candid, and critiqued fully. Because if we are not honest with our business partner, how can we ever expect to actually improve?
These meetings were superb, because they kept us moving. We set goals for the next week, the next month, and the next half-year. We worked towards these goals as well as we could, and adjusted them as needed. We helped each other in our tasks, were honest with mistakes, and celebratory of our successes. We helped each other move forward every day, and transitioned Morph from a cute idea to a true high-potential concept. I am very proud of what May and I were able to accomplish. No matter how Morph ends up, we worked our hardest, and I confidently say that we were supremely dedicated, and had an absolute blast working on Morph.
These meetings were also instrumental in helping to prepare our team for the Carolina Challenge, UNC's premier entrepreneurship competition. Once we applied and were accepted, our goals began to tailor themselves to the needs of the competition. My next post will be about how we prepared for the Challenge, and how we progressed through the competition for a (fairly) successful ending.
Adios and much love,
A
So, starting January 2015, our last semester of college, May and I decided to get to work and see what we can make of our idea of a better run food ordering and delivery platform. Think GrubHub meets Uber, and you have what would eventually become Morph.
We decided to commit to one meeting a week. Setting it up as a constant in our calender, every Monday at 11am in Cafe McColl, helped make it a real responsibility that we could not take loosely.
We first divided our roles based on our skills and interests. I would do all the 'business stuff'. We need to continue talking to customers, learning about the market, answering the problems we faced in the Pitch Party, gathering data, learning about competitors, etc. And May would take care of the designs. All of our PowerPoint decks, the logo, and- most importantly- our wire frames for the app we were going to build. This worked out great for me, as my design skills (clearly not inspired by my many years of art classes) are at a sore minimum, while May did not have the time to devote to all that needed to be done on the business end.
At the end of each meeting, we would make a list of goals for the week. We wrote these down- each of us recorded what the other would need to do- to keep ourselves accountable. We would spend the week working hard on getting our parts done, believing in each others' commitment enough to feel responsible to ourselves, the company, and each other to get our own work done to a level of excellence.
The start of each meeting was a checklist of all we had accomplished. We went over May's designs and discussed what needed to be developed or fixed. We discussed my progress, and assessed holes in our business plan and research. We were honest, candid, and critiqued fully. Because if we are not honest with our business partner, how can we ever expect to actually improve?
These meetings were superb, because they kept us moving. We set goals for the next week, the next month, and the next half-year. We worked towards these goals as well as we could, and adjusted them as needed. We helped each other in our tasks, were honest with mistakes, and celebratory of our successes. We helped each other move forward every day, and transitioned Morph from a cute idea to a true high-potential concept. I am very proud of what May and I were able to accomplish. No matter how Morph ends up, we worked our hardest, and I confidently say that we were supremely dedicated, and had an absolute blast working on Morph.
These meetings were also instrumental in helping to prepare our team for the Carolina Challenge, UNC's premier entrepreneurship competition. Once we applied and were accepted, our goals began to tailor themselves to the needs of the competition. My next post will be about how we prepared for the Challenge, and how we progressed through the competition for a (fairly) successful ending.
Adios and much love,
A
Sunday, April 26, 2015
The Pitch Party
We have our customer validated idea. We have our awesome PowerPoint deck. We've got our pro forma income statement, our marketing plan, and our advisers. We've been working on our pitch. Now, its time to get in front of complete strangers- strangers with some credibility in this field, be they investors, entrepreneurs, or other impressive business folk- and see what they think about Morph- the Uber of food-delivery.
At the pitch party, a hundred booths are set up, with teams representing different ideas behind them. There were foods like pecan milk, apps to get your car washed, apps to help diet and cook, products to never need to tie shoelaces again, and what seemed like a million more. Judges walk around and talk to as many of these companies as they could, learning, asking questions, and probing further into the business model to decide how feasible and scalable the idea really was. To the ideas they liked, they awarded a million dollar bill. To others, they gave advice. I was looking for the former, and thought that we were far too smart and prepared to bother listening to the latter. That, right there, was my biggest mistake, and one of my greatest learnings of this whole year.
As the event wore on, our stack of money did not increase nearly as much as I expected. I was feeling down and slightly desperate, and began walking far from our booth, poaching judges. I'd come up to anyone who would listen, and begin my spiel about Morph. I'd tell them about the problems we learned about, how our solution is better than all others, how easily and well we can scale. And then I'd expect the money, because I was so confident that we deserved it.
But alas, little came. The advice, however, was essential, and it took a tap on the shoulder and a private talk with Ollie, one of my GLOBE class team members, to set me straight. "Listen," he said. "Listen, write down their issues, and come back to them. Learn what you don't know, and figure that out."
And so I finally did. I stopped trying to pitch our idea for some monopoly dollars, and instead took the whole event as a chance to gather as many critiques as I could and, hopefully, find some insights we hadn't thought of. I was asked legal questions about how we would handle charges like those faced by Uber. While previously I would try to deflect it and tell them about how quickly we would serve customers, I now would nod and tell them that its an important subject to learn into.
When asked about the market size before, I would reply with our revenue projections, hoping that would be enough. Now, I admitted it was an important piece of missing information, and replied with a question: "How would you go about sizing this market? Do you have any suggestions?"
This whole experience was- and should have been- an opportunity to learn. Financially, the best case scenario was $1000. Not a make it or break it amount by any means, but I had seen it as validation of our hard work and, more personally, my credibility and ability to be an entrepreneur. But with so many smart judges around, all who came to donate their time and ears to our idea, it was the advice that I should have recognized as the most valuable part of this whole event, not some fake money that would tell me I'm good enough to do this.
So there you have it. Look for advice when its offered to you for free. Admit the gaps in knowledge, and fill them as immediately and completely as you can. Asking questions is more than fine- its encouraged. And do all this to prepare yourself to fight another day.
We're finishing up 2014 with this post. The last weeks of the year were spent researching the issues that came up at the Pitch Party. Just before school let out, I came up to May, the one American on my GLOBE team, and talked to her about Morph. I told her that it's been an awesome experience working with her on this, but I don't think we should be quite finished yet. There is a lot we can do, and I want this to be much more than a class project. Is she willing to get to work, and see where we can take this? Does she want to join me, and try to turn this idea- an idea that began as a pizza app- into something real, tangible, and potentially huge?
Luckily for me, she did. Because there is no way I could have done this alone, without her. In my next post, I'll talk a bit about how we structured meetings, what we did, and how we set goals for ourselves. This is all leading up to the Carolina Challenge, which, soon, should get us to the present day.
Much love,
A
At the pitch party, a hundred booths are set up, with teams representing different ideas behind them. There were foods like pecan milk, apps to get your car washed, apps to help diet and cook, products to never need to tie shoelaces again, and what seemed like a million more. Judges walk around and talk to as many of these companies as they could, learning, asking questions, and probing further into the business model to decide how feasible and scalable the idea really was. To the ideas they liked, they awarded a million dollar bill. To others, they gave advice. I was looking for the former, and thought that we were far too smart and prepared to bother listening to the latter. That, right there, was my biggest mistake, and one of my greatest learnings of this whole year.
As the event wore on, our stack of money did not increase nearly as much as I expected. I was feeling down and slightly desperate, and began walking far from our booth, poaching judges. I'd come up to anyone who would listen, and begin my spiel about Morph. I'd tell them about the problems we learned about, how our solution is better than all others, how easily and well we can scale. And then I'd expect the money, because I was so confident that we deserved it.
But alas, little came. The advice, however, was essential, and it took a tap on the shoulder and a private talk with Ollie, one of my GLOBE class team members, to set me straight. "Listen," he said. "Listen, write down their issues, and come back to them. Learn what you don't know, and figure that out."
And so I finally did. I stopped trying to pitch our idea for some monopoly dollars, and instead took the whole event as a chance to gather as many critiques as I could and, hopefully, find some insights we hadn't thought of. I was asked legal questions about how we would handle charges like those faced by Uber. While previously I would try to deflect it and tell them about how quickly we would serve customers, I now would nod and tell them that its an important subject to learn into.
When asked about the market size before, I would reply with our revenue projections, hoping that would be enough. Now, I admitted it was an important piece of missing information, and replied with a question: "How would you go about sizing this market? Do you have any suggestions?"
This whole experience was- and should have been- an opportunity to learn. Financially, the best case scenario was $1000. Not a make it or break it amount by any means, but I had seen it as validation of our hard work and, more personally, my credibility and ability to be an entrepreneur. But with so many smart judges around, all who came to donate their time and ears to our idea, it was the advice that I should have recognized as the most valuable part of this whole event, not some fake money that would tell me I'm good enough to do this.
So there you have it. Look for advice when its offered to you for free. Admit the gaps in knowledge, and fill them as immediately and completely as you can. Asking questions is more than fine- its encouraged. And do all this to prepare yourself to fight another day.
We're finishing up 2014 with this post. The last weeks of the year were spent researching the issues that came up at the Pitch Party. Just before school let out, I came up to May, the one American on my GLOBE team, and talked to her about Morph. I told her that it's been an awesome experience working with her on this, but I don't think we should be quite finished yet. There is a lot we can do, and I want this to be much more than a class project. Is she willing to get to work, and see where we can take this? Does she want to join me, and try to turn this idea- an idea that began as a pizza app- into something real, tangible, and potentially huge?
Luckily for me, she did. Because there is no way I could have done this alone, without her. In my next post, I'll talk a bit about how we structured meetings, what we did, and how we set goals for ourselves. This is all leading up to the Carolina Challenge, which, soon, should get us to the present day.
Much love,
A
Saturday, April 25, 2015
The Second Idea
So, I'm learning more about the needs of the customer. Per Jim Kitchen's emphasis on "lean" methodology, per Diana Kander's emphasis on "All In", customer interviews- open ended questions learning about customers' biggest problems (or 'migraine problems', as Kander calls it)- has led the idea through some twists and turns.
I understand that restaurants want to deliver, but this desire is surrounded by problems. Price, customer service, efficiency, labor, insurance- all of these variables, and a dozen more, make it a headache. In what way would we be able to come up with a solution to help solve the problems?
Well, let's look at how they are currently solving it. Companies like Takeout Central, Crunchbutton, and hundreds of others around the country, some with heavy VC backing like Door Dash, and some with regional market power like Delivery Now in New Jersey, are doing their best. They have a set number of drivers under contract, divide up the shifts, and serve as many restaurants in a region as they can. This way, in exchange for a cut of the profits that varies by company, a restaurant can deliver without the headache of managing drivers. A whole new market opens up to them, they have their menu on line, and they can grow their business enormously.
But obviously, as I learned from interviewing restaurant managers, many are still unhappy with these options. Additionally, personal experience coupled with a survey of the UNC student population told us that end customers- the hungry people who order delivery and drive the whole industry- are also unhappy. High delivery costs, limited options, and, most importantly, slow delivery times make customers annoyed with their options, but resigned to use them, as they don't have any alternatives. How can we create a better model to this existing system?
Well, what do we need to do? Get food to customers faster than anyone, in a way that costs restaurants less. We also need to do all the little things- better customer service, smoother ordering interface, access via mobile and web. But if we can deliver food faster and cheaper, we can win.
I drew pictures, made tables, and wrote whole pages of notes by hand discussing the problem, trying to figure out how to solve it. The problem with current third party delivery services is that they don't have enough drivers. Often they might have just 8 drivers on a weekend dinner shift for 60 restaurants, leading to delivery times of over an hour and a half. So we need more drivers. But managing all their shifts, telling them to work certain times- all of that seems like a headache.
So what do we do to have more drivers on the road, with less pain of managing them? How about an Uber model? If drivers can come in and out whenever they want, as long as we have enough drivers in the system, then only a small percentage of them needs to be working at any time, and we'd already have more people on the road than our competitors. We can serve any number of restaurants, because the more restaurants, the more orders. The more orders, the more business for drivers. The more business, the more drivers want to apply to work. The more drivers in our system, the more restaurants we can serve. And as long as we always have a surplus of drivers, customers will always get their food faster from us, than any alternative.
So we finally had something. An idea very different then our first, inspired by customer interviews, and solving a serious customer 'migraine problem'. We're ecstatic.
We continue to interview, asking more about statistics and metrics than before. How many orders do you do a day? How many drivers do you employee (if you do). We use all of this information, begin coming up with our financials, our marketing plans, our pitch deck. This is a validated idea worth working on. Our amazing team put in hours of work and effort, and beat out the work until we had something to be proud of.
As the semester finished up, our idea was getting better. We though of incentives to make sure we've always had drivers on the road. We had marketing strategies, and recruitment tactics. We had estimates for our revenue streams our our profit projections. Basically, out of an initial idea came a target customer, and out of interviews came a problem, and from the problem a solution. We've got something here, now its time to get validation from others.
All of this work prepared us for the Pitch Party, an annual UNC entrepreneurship pitch competition. Over 100 teams pitch their ideas to judges who walk around the room, giving us monopoly money to reward an idea that they thought deserved backing, culminating in a final "pitch off" of the top 10 teams. We were looking forward to this for a long time, and we were ready! I'll tell you how that went next time, on the Dr. Oz Show with your host- Adriel Oz.
Much love,
A
I understand that restaurants want to deliver, but this desire is surrounded by problems. Price, customer service, efficiency, labor, insurance- all of these variables, and a dozen more, make it a headache. In what way would we be able to come up with a solution to help solve the problems?
Well, let's look at how they are currently solving it. Companies like Takeout Central, Crunchbutton, and hundreds of others around the country, some with heavy VC backing like Door Dash, and some with regional market power like Delivery Now in New Jersey, are doing their best. They have a set number of drivers under contract, divide up the shifts, and serve as many restaurants in a region as they can. This way, in exchange for a cut of the profits that varies by company, a restaurant can deliver without the headache of managing drivers. A whole new market opens up to them, they have their menu on line, and they can grow their business enormously.
But obviously, as I learned from interviewing restaurant managers, many are still unhappy with these options. Additionally, personal experience coupled with a survey of the UNC student population told us that end customers- the hungry people who order delivery and drive the whole industry- are also unhappy. High delivery costs, limited options, and, most importantly, slow delivery times make customers annoyed with their options, but resigned to use them, as they don't have any alternatives. How can we create a better model to this existing system?
Well, what do we need to do? Get food to customers faster than anyone, in a way that costs restaurants less. We also need to do all the little things- better customer service, smoother ordering interface, access via mobile and web. But if we can deliver food faster and cheaper, we can win.
I drew pictures, made tables, and wrote whole pages of notes by hand discussing the problem, trying to figure out how to solve it. The problem with current third party delivery services is that they don't have enough drivers. Often they might have just 8 drivers on a weekend dinner shift for 60 restaurants, leading to delivery times of over an hour and a half. So we need more drivers. But managing all their shifts, telling them to work certain times- all of that seems like a headache.
So what do we do to have more drivers on the road, with less pain of managing them? How about an Uber model? If drivers can come in and out whenever they want, as long as we have enough drivers in the system, then only a small percentage of them needs to be working at any time, and we'd already have more people on the road than our competitors. We can serve any number of restaurants, because the more restaurants, the more orders. The more orders, the more business for drivers. The more business, the more drivers want to apply to work. The more drivers in our system, the more restaurants we can serve. And as long as we always have a surplus of drivers, customers will always get their food faster from us, than any alternative.
So we finally had something. An idea very different then our first, inspired by customer interviews, and solving a serious customer 'migraine problem'. We're ecstatic.
We continue to interview, asking more about statistics and metrics than before. How many orders do you do a day? How many drivers do you employee (if you do). We use all of this information, begin coming up with our financials, our marketing plans, our pitch deck. This is a validated idea worth working on. Our amazing team put in hours of work and effort, and beat out the work until we had something to be proud of.
As the semester finished up, our idea was getting better. We though of incentives to make sure we've always had drivers on the road. We had marketing strategies, and recruitment tactics. We had estimates for our revenue streams our our profit projections. Basically, out of an initial idea came a target customer, and out of interviews came a problem, and from the problem a solution. We've got something here, now its time to get validation from others.
All of this work prepared us for the Pitch Party, an annual UNC entrepreneurship pitch competition. Over 100 teams pitch their ideas to judges who walk around the room, giving us monopoly money to reward an idea that they thought deserved backing, culminating in a final "pitch off" of the top 10 teams. We were looking forward to this for a long time, and we were ready! I'll tell you how that went next time, on the Dr. Oz Show with your host- Adriel Oz.
Much love,
A
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