Risk

In the short amount of time I have been in this class there have not been many opportunities to put my ideas out there. None the less, there was one risk that I had to take when I wrote down my ideas not knowing if they would be successful or not. It was possible my ideas could already have been created or that there would not be a large enough group of people that would buy it. In the future, I think there are going to be many situations where in order to be successful taking a chance will be necessary.

The struggles of choosing a business idea

      This class was a lot harder than I thought I would be. In our daily life, we will always encounter something troublesome or inconvenient, and we might come up with ideas like "Wouldn't it be great if there is something that helps you do this..."; however, having an idea is entirely different from actually making it happen in real life due to various difficulties such as technological incapability and repeating ideas... It is kind of frustrating when you come up with an idea that you personally are confident with, and this idea turned out to be impractical or impossible to design.

      I believe that our next step is to narrow down and come up with several practical and achievable ideas, and progressively increase the possibility to make them happen.

http://www.executivefranchises.com/blog/great-business-ideas/#.V-HcdZMrKqA

Sean Zhou

Business Start Up

My group and I are in the midst of finalizing our idea. Our current business idea is to create a subscription for college students that offers them a box of a variety of snacks and meals. We have not started the research process just yet but once we do, we will have more of an idea of how our business will be run. As long as this business is not already in existence and if all research goes well, we think this idea could be a success. We see the potential in this idea because we have family members and close friends in college who would benefit from a product like this.

Harrison Stuart - Introductory Blog Post

My name is Harrison Stuart - I'm a senior at Flint Hill school. At the moment, I'm not entirely sure where I'm going in taking this Small Business Startup class. So far, we've gone through various activities, thinking of business ideas, encouraging us to think creatively, and come up with ideas as a class, which have been added to a padlet. (A number of joking ideas, like "skateboarding grandpa" and "uber for clowns" were added, and then removed) That said, out of the ideas we've currently come up with, none draw me in heavily. I'm very interested in english and computer science, and I want to try and find a way I can tie one or both of those into my startup. Having some familiarity programming, I feel like that could also be a hugely useful tool in this affair. Although I currently don't have a set direction, I'm openminded and still producing new ideas, in hopes that I can find something that engages my interests so I can get excited and produce a quality product. I'm excited for what the year might hold!

Failed Idea

At the beginning of this class, I did not imagine it would be this difficult to come up with an idea that has never been created before.  A failure that I have encountered in the short weeks of this class is coming up with ideas that have not been created and that would be popular to others. I learned that coming up with a possible business idea takes a lot of research to make sure it would be in high demand. Researching to make sure my groups business is not already a business will be the next step for us.

Start-up Brandon Lessard

For the first blog post of the start-up business class, I want to talk about what my goals are. For the most part I don't have any raging fear that my business will fail or any uncontrollable emotions about building a start up. I feel confident enough that (my team and) I will be able to work out all the problems that our business runs into. What I'm really looking for during this process is to expand my outlook on things. I am not just talking about business ideas though. Today in class we listened to a podcast interview of Sara Blakely, the owner and founder of Spanx. What struck me about what she talked about is that she went from manufacturer to manufacturer in order to push her product. She made in-person business trips and was hands on during the entire initial phases. She figured everything out herself: the how, the where, the who, and the what, she didn't ask for a step-by-step guide to starting up your own business. That is what I want to figure out for myself through this process. I don't want to confine myself to thinking that a process has to be done in a particular way. I want to explore how I can get the job done by myself.



http://tinyurl.com/johfwck

Optimistic Ambitions

As a 17 year old senior in high school, creating a start-up business is no simple task. Even though I have no previous experience, I firmly believe that I will achieve successful results. More specifically, I want to learn the stressful and arduous intricacies of creating my own business. While I am unsure if  entrepreneurship is in my future, I hope that this experience can provide insight to the processes that occur everyday in the American capitalist economy.

 As seen in the graph above, most startups fail due to lack of a market. My overarching and primary goal, at the moment, is to create a business that has a solid and sufficient clientele. With a large consumer population, there is a higher chance of a business succeeding.

Image: Griffiths, Erin. Top 20 Reasons Startups Fail. Digital image. Fortune. Time Inc., 24 Sept. 2014. Web. 20 Sept. 2016. 

Business Idea

Right now, I am at the very beginning phases in developing a business. I have ideas but my group and  I are having trouble determining if we could actually do the ideas. For example, we have an idea that involves developing an app which I do not have knowledge in. In order to get this idea going, we would have to contact multiple app developers to try to get it going. Another idea we have is a fridge for a car, but the technology would be tough to keep in cold. What would it plug into? Would the car have to be running in order for it to work? These are a few of the many questions and potential problems we are facing, but we will work these issues out in order to find the right idea and make a business out of it.

Third Time's a Charm

Welcome to the third iteration of Small Business Startup.  I am thrilled to be teaching this class again with a new batch of students--some of whom dream of being entrepreneurs and some who only took the class to fill an elective space in their schedule.  No matter--we will all embark on this "journey" into entrepreneurship with enthusiasm, curiosity, and fearlessness.  Since this is my third time teaching the class, I have a more refined sense of what we can accomplish in a semester.  I have a different sense of where we will end in mid-January.  This year students may NOT propose and start school-based businesses.  They WILL spend most of their time selecting, vetting, refining, and pivoting their ideas. This year, for the first time, my students will pitch real-world business ideas at a real incubator:  Bunker Labs in Old Town, Alexandria.  I am thrilled about this partnership and grateful to Harry Alford for welcoming my students and to Emily McMahan for opening the door in the first place.

Please read along as this new set of students venture into entrepreneurship, creativity, and innovation.

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