Assignment 19-Idea Napkin No. 2

1. Me



a. I am currently an Undergraduate student at the University of Florida on the pre-legal track pursuing my bachelor’s degree in Finance. Outside of the classroom I am involved in a group called the Florida Cicerones, which is directly involved with the alumni association on campus as well as gives tours to prospective UF students. This has increased my confidence as a public speaker, as well as increased my public speaking skills overall. As a finance major, I understand how investing money and putting aside money works, which is a skill that many people lack that will ultimately help with my business. My talents are my ability to connect and have conversations with stranger as well as my creativity. I aspire help the University of Florida become as efficient as it can be. I see this business as being something I could potentially focus my law career around, I would be able to do contracting in regard to finances and ownership of the software myself.







2. What I am offering to consumers?



a. I will be offering an app that has a map of the tables/seats in Library West and will allows students to self-check in at the library turning occupied seats red on the app and leaving available seats green so that students don’t have to waste time walking around the library searching for seats and will know ahead of time where empty seats are.







3. Who I am offering the service to?



I aim to sell this application to undergraduate students at the University of Florida or any UF student who uses Library West to study. It will be sold for $0.99 in the app store and additional profit will be made from local advertisements within the app. Those who use the app the most will be current students “on campus” UF. Ideally the user will live in a close range to campus so that they actually utilize the library. The age group of this consumer is roughly between 18-23 years old (including a few outliers). Because college students don’t have much discretionary income, I chose for it to be inexpensive to download. The one commonality between all of my consumers is they are students on campus who take their time very seriously and want to use it as wisely as they can.







4. Why do they care?



a. My consumers care because as I mentioned, their time is of the utmost importance to them. If an app is able to alleviate their issue, I believe they will take advantage of it. The app is of value to them because it is literally creating more free time in their day by helping them to stop wasting their time. I don’t know about other students here, but personally I’d rather have 20 extra minutes at night to relax than to spend those 20 minutes on the hunt for a seat in Library West.







5. What are my core competencies?



a. There is one thing that sets me apart from a lot of business owners in that I am only 19 years old, so I feel as though students would be able to relate to me more than they would a 50-year-old business owner which gives me a slight advantage on customer loyalty. Other than that, I am not sure there is much that would set me apart from anyone else in terms of the software that I would be creating.







Evaluation







I think that these elements are able to fit nicely together. Being in Gainesville will allow me to connect with users and take advantage of the assistance that I could get from fellow students in regard to my business. There is one aspect I am a bit iffy about which is getting the library to use funds to buy into the software/ how much to charge for the software. I plan to have several back up plans in the case that Library West is uninterested such as selling it for a small price to students and creating an incentive to make them want to buy, or try marketing it to a smaller private university facing the same issues. Other than that, from the interviews I have conducted prior to this assignment it is evident that more than a few students have this need and I believe my app would be a success.



FEEDBACK MEMO:

For my feedback from the previous idea napkin assignment, I didn’t get too much constructive based feedback. Instead, I got a lot of positive feedback which was nice to read but in hindsight it would have made editing my assignment easier with some ways to improve the overall assignment. One point that I took away from my comments were the idea of having a free app would be great for students. However, upon some investigation I realized how long of a process it would be to have the library buy my software and THEN get the app on the market for students. It would be more effective to get the app on the market right away and charging a small fee vs. having students wait for it. I kept the fee low since my peers thought low cost would be the best way to implement the product. Another point I got from the comments was that my post was well organized. I attempted to keep that same organizational structure in this post while changing around a couple of things content wise.