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.

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.

Tundra Update #4: Logistics Work & Lean Startup Progress

This week we have been continuing to plan out our Lean Startup and working on the logistics of The Tundra. Sadly, we realized there is not currently enough money for us to buy a machine to dispense our supplies, but we hope that can become a possibility further down the road. We took a survey and found out that many potential customers are interested in our business/products, so we are on the right track. Right now, we are in the process of communicating with Mrs. Giuliani to work out if/how we will sell apparel. So far, our testing is successful and we are finishing up our Lean Startup Plan. Next week, we will hopefully continue to work out more details of our business.

Here is a picture of some of our data:

The survey was very helpful because it helped us to focus our efforts on what our customers will really be interested in.