HydrationRight 2016 Reflection

Hello All! As 2016 comes to a close, we were tasked to reflect on the semester and the progress we have made with our businesses. Roughly 13 weeks ago HydrationRight was just an idea I had written on a yellow post-it. After lots of time and research, I've created a logo, a business plan, published a Facebook page, and worked on a website. The business plan was very informative for me because I was able to see the holes in the company and do more research to fix them. Although I still have things to work on before our final pitch, I am happy with where HydrationRight currently is. In the coming weeks, I would like to advertise my business on Facebook, but before hand, I need to publish my website and begin drafting a couple blog posts. I'm very impressed by the development of the company over the last couple weeks and am excited for the pitch in January! 

HydrationRight Continues to Develop

Since my last blog post, I have made a lot of progress with my business MVP. I have been working hard on finishing my website (see home page below) and drafting blog posts that I will publish in the next couple of weeks. I have also spend a lot of time reviewing my business and trying to answer all the hard questions I might be asked during my pitch. This next week I'd like to focus on finishing my logo so that I can open my Facebook page to the public. I would also like to work on my marketing strategy and the technology behind my product.

Midway

We are now half way through the semester and I have learned so much about what it takes to start a business. My group and I really do work on majority of the work together because we find that we come up with the best ideas and accomplish things better that way. We came up with a potential company name which is "Mama's Meals". We have created two separate survey's, one for college students and one for parents, to gather feedback on how much they would pay for our product and how much interest they have in our product. I have personally sent the surveys to the people I know and have asked them to send it to as many people they know as well. We will continue to gather feedback because we think it is important to hear from our potential buyers. This past week we created sketches for our logo and will continue to work on and perfect them in these next few weeks. I downloaded adobe photoshop and adobe illustrator on to my computer and have begun a few electronic sketches. In the next week, we wish to put together our prototype and send it to a college student so we can see what changes will need to be made to perfect our product. We have to purchase a box to ship, containers to hold the food products, the food itself, and an ice pack if the food needs to be kept refrigerated. We will see what works and what doesn't and adjust things if needed.

Small Business Midpoint Reflection

It is now officially the half-way point in the semester and I am very happy about the progress I've made with developing my business. I've not only learned so much about starting a business, but about myself. Before the year started if you had told me that I'd come up with a product idea that I would actually enjoy working on and other people would consider buying I would not believe you. In the last couple of weeks I've come up with HydrationSmart as a tentative name for my business and have come up with an idea on how to make the technology of the SmartBottle work. I've also started designing my minimal viable product (MVP), which is a website and blog. The website will present information about all the HydrationSmart products as well as allow people to subscribe to an email list, so they can keep up to date with the SmartBottle's progress. This next week I'd like to continue developing my website and contact the alumni office at Flint Hill as well as my mother's alma mater and the school I attended for my first two years of high school, Emma Willard to get into contact with some engineers. Since I have an idea for how I'd like the SmartBottle to track individuals water intake, I'd like to see if my idea is feasible and cost efficient. In a perfect world I'd also love to come up with a basic 3D printed version of the SmartBottle before our final pitch.  

Smart Bottle Week Three

This week I've had some successes and some set backs. I now have the support of over 800 people, but have yet to receive any emails back from my competition. I recently re-emailed the companies who did not have phone numbers online asking for their customer service numbers so that I could reach them that way, but have not heard back. This week I'm hoping to call the numbers I do have as well as order another one of the competitors bottles so that I can show it to my future customers and start researching how much it would cost to make one of my smart bottles. I am also still trying to come up with a name and a logo, so I'd like to make progress on that. Below is the link to another one of my competitors, comment what you like and dislike about it.

https://www.h2opal.com/products/h2o-pal

The Smart Bottle Week Two

This week has been very successful in the development of my business idea. I've emailed all of the competition I know of and have heard from two, but am still waiting to hear their responses. Unfortunately the two companies that responded didn't quite give me the answers I was looking for. The first company told me they could not give me any information and the second one emailed me back to tell me to email someone else (waste of an email if you ask me). But on the bright side I've received the support of nearly 150 people and my goal for next week is to have the support of 100 more. I would also like to come up with an idea for a company name and a product name, but for the mean time I'll continue to refer to it as the Smart Bottle. Below is a picture of two of my competition's bottles, comment what you like and dislike about them and I'll try to change/add those things to my product!

Everyday is a Challenge in the World of Business

Over the last three weeks the biggest thing I have learned is starting a business is not easy. It takes creativity, passion, hard work, and dedication. Going into this class I was convinced that I'd be able to find an idea that I loved and really wanted to turn into a business I could keep up once the class was over. But after spending weeks going over the challenges of starting a business and countless ideas I am far less confident in my ability to start a successful business and my ability to come up with an idea. That being said I have definitely learned a lot being in this class and am still hopeful and excited for what is to come.  

Almost...

The time we have had in this class has been a rollercoaster of emotions. Peter and I were stuck at one point, and we thought we would be failures, but you know what, we proved ourselves wrong. In a sense, we failed to create a very successful business. We were given a budget for our idea of $250 from the school in hopes that we would make all of the money back. We spent $227.10 in grand total on the domain for our website, the website provider, and our first order of shirts. We made back only $140 of the nearly $170 that we spent on ordering the actual t-shirts, which was slightly a let down because we had the capability to earn $360 in total from our first order. It was not that there was a lack of interest, we just had problems distributing the t-shirts to our customers, and that is what really hurt us. The fact that we created a business with an actual interesting product though is quite exciting. From starting our own business, we have learned what it really takes to be successful in this clothing industry, and that can success in this field can be summed down to basically time, money, and a good idea that will sell. We failed to meet some of those things, which ultimately lead to us being not as successful as we planned to be. My advice to future entrepreneurs is to never give up on your idea. We gave up on our original idea, which was to create a clothing company, but we decided to put in the time and effort, and we made one. Successful entrepreneurs are ones who know their idea is good and will never give up on it until they are successful in doing so. Through this class, I as well as Peter have learned that concept of determination in the field of business, and we will use what we have learned in whatever we decide to do with our future careers. We are very grateful that this school has given us the opportunity to open our eyes to what it is really like being an entrepreneur. It has been a great run.

-Duncan and Peter of The Northern Virginia Clothing Company

www.novaclothingcompany.com

N O V A

The past two weeks for us have been very exciting ones. We have officially launched our clothing line, the NOVA Clothing Company. Our first item that we have been selling are our DMV t-shirts, which incorporate the American, Maryland, and Virginia flags representing the DMV letters, and it looks great on the shirts. For our first shipment, we ordered about 18 shirts, and I believe we only have 1 left for sale. Since it is exam week, we have not been focused much on our company, but as soon as exams are over we will get right back to it. There is still a whole lot that Peter and I need to figure out if we are going to continue our business, like what other products we can sell right now, how and if we should copyright our designs, and whether or not we should continue our business outside of the class considering all of the things we would have to do to make it an official business outside of Flint Hill. Nonetheless, I am very proud that we have even been able to make it this far, considering that only a couple weeks ago we had absolutely no idea what to do, and now we have the potential to create something big. For us it has been a huge success, and I am glad it has turned out the way it has so far. I want to try to get at least one more order in before the end of the semester, and to do that we have to promote ourselves even farther so that people might become more interested. If anyone is interested in buying or even giving us a look, visit www.novaclothingcompany.com

-Duncan and Peter

Problems for the Huskies

In an attempt to launch Hungry Huskies, we have come across quite a few problems. Since our last post, Robert and Conner were able to go to Costco and buy the inventory we needed to launch. The first problem we came across was on the issue of storage. Since we were denied access to the lockers, we decided to temporally store our inventory in Mrs. Starnes's cubicle. However, this plan failed because they saw us bringing in the snacks and told us food wasn't allowed to be stored anywhere but the Igloo. In a final attempt to store our snacks, Mrs. Starnes reached out to the Parent's Association to ask for access to the Igloo. Thankfully, they quickly approved our request and we were able to secure room in the Igloo to store our goods. We tried to make an announcement so we could launch sales but the student announcements at town meeting this week were both canceled for other speakers. Below is a picture of one of the flyers that we put around the school to make everyone aware that Hungry Huskies will be launching soon! Since we weren't able to launch sales this week, a goal our team has is to launch sales the week following our Thanksgiving break. I think although we have been faced with a lot of problems, we have worked hard to overcome them and should aim to continue to improve our efficiency and work ethic through lots of effort.

Tundra Tools Update #10: Final Updates & The Future

Yesterday, Tundra Tools had our final class and presented our Kickstarter project and reflection of the semester. It was a good way to wrap up all of our hard work. After our initial trial, we were only able to open for one more day, but we hope that our business continue to run and sell supplies (and maybe even spirit wear!) next year. Overall, we made about $55; we were not as successful as some other groups, but we worked hard to start a business we were proud of. We hope that Tundra Tools can continue to be a part of the Flint Hill community in the future!

Above is our Kickstarter Pitch video

The Grind

Last Friday, May 1st was the last day of our 10 day trial, however, we were only open for 8 days do to our key problem that inhibits us from opening in the morning on some days. This week we have been working on creating a presentation to present to Mrs. Sanderson who will approve the rest of our trial for the year. We had the meeting with her during our small business class this Wednesday. The conversation went really well and she was very impressed with our profit and total sales. We are currently waiting for her to get approval from a few other administrators so that The Grind can open back up. At the end of our 10 day trial we have made $560.40 and $332.07 of that was profit. While we are waiting for approval, we are taking this time to start our final projects, which is our crowd funding campaign. For this campaign we are trying to raise money to create a cafe area around The Grind with comfortable, inviting seating and music.

Puckerup Update

We are moving along in our business, but we are hitting a hard time with sales.  We are changing our marketing strategy in order to attract more prospective buyers.  The Google Form was not successful at all (only 2 orders), so we printed out order forms and put them in students boxes. It has been one day since the forms were placed and we have sold 3 units because of this method. 
The Grind has also sold a small number of units, so our partnership is working well. 

Our new project in our business is to make a video and written pitch for Kickstarter.  We are in the mitts of writing our written pitch then after that has been completed we will write the script of the video and film.   Our written pitch includes our pivot from the backpack company, our hurdles, what the funding would go to, our benefits, and our tagline.  We still need to come up with our tagline and plan to do that during this class period.  

Since our last post we have sold a total of 56 units making $112.  In order to meet our success goal we need to sell 24 more units.  We have added labels to our tubes so that look more professional.  

The Grind

We have officially opened and we are on a 10 day trial run. We are day 3 into our trial and have made around $90 in profit. However, we have broken even and have gotten new supplies, which cost around $70. We have been opening before school, during break, and on certain days during our free periods. The problems that we have run into are: not producing coffee fast enough, clean up takes a long time when we have to put the other business's supplies back where we found them (The Igloo's), and trying to keep up with the demand of certain bars. Our solutions have been to make a pot of coffee and not just have the Keurig, saving enough time to clean up during our last period open, and we have not exactly found a solution for our bar demand because our storage is minimal. We have added more to our menu based on feed back that we have been given, for example: Vitamin Waters, Whip Cream, and other bars. We are the most successful group so far out of our class mainly because of the demand for food at school is high. Overall, we hope to keep our spot longer than 10 days in that location and hope to expand our business's inventory. We are now working on a Crowd-funding Campaign for our final project (it will not actually go live because we are not 18) and and we are "raising money" to buy seating for in front of our bushiness. We are trying to make the space around The Grind a more inviting space with comfortable seating with a cafe-like feel. Overall we are in good shape and are making a good profit and have a steady cash flow.

Husky BuyPass - Presentation & Launch Date

During class today we presented our business plan and felt like we were on the right track. We will make a few minor edits that were suggested from the class such as detailing how we pivoted our business in our Powerpoint.

We are planning on launching our business officially the first week when we get back from Spring Break. Our website is well underway and development should not be too time-intensive.

Food? Food.

Today was a very important day for our group because we discussed everything that needs to be done by our launch date. We have planned to be ready to launch the day we leave for spring break and then actually launch when we return from Spring Break. Annie informed us about another way to fill the Keurig machines, tea bags that are designed to fit in the spot, and would cost 31 cents a cup instead of 61 cents a cup. We are talking about what we need to order, there needs to be machines, food, drinks, location and other supplies by our planned launch date. We are nervous to buy anything until we have heard back from people about what we are aloud to use and do on campus. Another major thing we discussed was an opening and closing check list. We need to create a set of rules that are for the person who is in charge of getting everything ready and putting everything away when we are opening and closing the shop. We also visited the igloo to see where possible places that we could store our supplies. We discovered several large cabinets that are empty that would be an ideal place to store out stuff, we also found some empty racks that would be suitable for us to place the igloo supplies while our store is open. We are also discussing the name for our company, Food?Food. is no longer ideal for us. We also found out there are warmers in the igloo that would be great for our bagels. Today was really good for our group because we started to really work and started to comprehend what needs to be done in the next week and a half.

Where we plan to store our supplies 

Heaters and Warmers we could use

Another possible storage place 

Where we could place Igloo's supplies 

Overall look of storage we could use 

Pucker Up

Over the last week and a half Pucker Up has been establishing what we need to do as a company in order to start the creation of our product. The most important part of this week was when we bought the ingredients needed to make our product, this of course is essential to our process. We also began to work on the pricing of the product, and have established that in order to make a profit we must sell the lip balm at around three dollars a piece. This of course would have to be tested, because if no one buys the product because it costs too much, then we wouldn't make a profit anyway. We still have a lot of questions that we need to answer; for example, when will we produce the product? We also need to know where we are going to sell the product and how to effectively market it around us. One of our major obstacles as a group was that we were almost over our budget. To fix this we researched more suppliers and eventually found websites where the materials cost less. This week we also finished and presented our lean canvas, which lays out the foundation of our business. We hope that in the following weeks we are able to create our product and then the sell the first round.

Flint Hill's Affiliate Marketing Business

Today during the class time, we had a meeting regarding the future of the business.  We have finished up our Lean Canvas business model and we feel confident that our business is ready to be developed. Next steps include creation of friendly and usable website that students and parents can access easily. This will hopefully help the Flint Hill Community as a whole.

AcademicConnect is now an Affiliate Marketing Website

We have decided that due to a lack of interest from the student body, we are now leaving the idea of a student helpline and are now creating an affiliate marketing website customized for the Flint Hill population.

Currently we are going with Ebay and Amazon as our partners and are working on how we will build the website.

Food? Food.

Today we learned about project management and designated roles. Also, the importance of project management and how staying on task and designated roles makes the most efficient working space for our business to prosper.