thoughts, experience, lessons weaved in words

In this subject, everything had just started with the a single idea of creating a solution for a problem found. This idea sprung into another thought, plenty of it actually and it was weaved with hope that this will bring us to success in creating a business. But the real question is, does this idea truly answers the problem or does the problem even exist at all?

From the last two topics that was discussed, I had learn about the importance of testing the hypothesis. We can actually create a lot of problems and can find solutions for it but can still fail in blooming because we were hyped by answering a problem that doesn’t exist or the creating the wrong solution. Zapphos was one of the examples mentioned, Nick the founder had pointed out pain that there was no central online site with great selection of shoes. And to satisfy his vision, he tested his hypothesis by running an experiment; Are their enough demand from customers ready and willing to buy shoes online? With that question he started to built an MVP that led his business to success and Amazon even bought his company. I realized that if Nick didn’t tested his hypothesis and hadn’t started out small, he would have made bigger mistakes and wouldn’t learn the lessons he learned from it. 

The part where Ma’am mentioned about intellectual honesty also imprinted me. Even though if a person would test his hypothesis but doesn’t have the intellectual honesty, every effort might just turn into dust. In my own experience by conducting the market validation sometimes I just wanted my interviewees to favor our product and realized that we would all be deceiving ourselves if we are biased in validating our products. I learned that comments and criticism helped more than those people who love our product. Having the intellectual honesty will make us know if our product works and could save us from a great fall.

I also learned that yes, we can learn from others but experience is still the best teacher. So in starting up a business, planning is one thing but the act of doing, interacting and gathering lessons pays more than just researching. 

In our start up journey, by doing market validation I have learned that our product is not that unique and can be easily chosen over common disinfectant spray. Our strength and edge is its eco-friendly, heat resistant and it’s a reusable product. But this won’t be enough to drag customers, especially when they are not much concern in plastic related problems. What I thought is that we should really have a strong marketing strategy to be able to fulfill the success we are aiming for, a marketing strategy that will inform people and at the same time allure them with our product. This strategy is not to deceive but I have confidence that our product will have an impact in the change that we wanted for the world.  This is a thought worth paying attention to improve our product and a lesson to pursue improvement in the quality that we provide.

This week we interviewed more than two people for the improvement of our product. We chose to interview people who are older and are working to see their perspective about our hypothesis that people are concerned about our environment because of many plastics accumulating around due to the single use of plastics.

My first interviewee is a fresh graduate, 22 years old and an online teacher. She transports through public utility vehicles  and she is very concerned with disinfection, especially in this time of pandemic. She uses zonrox as much more as a disinfectant and buys it at supermarkets. She usually buys a liter of this and it’s in a plastic bottle. In purchasing disinfectant, she considers the ingredients, brand and the solution. Aside from using Zonrox at home, she also uses sanitizers and brings one with her every time she goes out of the house. With regards to the alarming use plastics she suggested that researches should be conducted to recycle or control the problem because she noticed that people are not segregating plastics in her community. She is not well concerned about the accumulating bottles in their house, but is eager enough to attend programs and activities to help in reducing plastics to minimize pollution and abuse of our environment. She thinks that it is necessary to create an eco-friendly disinfectant spray and may purchase one if there is any at P10.00 per 7ml.

My second interviewee is a teacher, 45 years old and thinks that it's very important to observe proper hygiene and disinfection procedure at this time of pandemic. She usually uses isopropyl alcohol and sanitizers bought at grocery stores. She usually buys two 250 ml plastic bottles of alcohol and considers the percentage of the alcohol in the product when purchasing. She carries a spray type disinfectant whenever she goes to work or out of the house. She currently satisfied with the product that she is using and has no say about the danger of exposing alcohol in a high temperature. She prefers plastic bottles as a container because of the lightness of its weight. She said that it is okay to use plastics as long as people are responsible in disposing it and in recycling it. In her household plastics were well managed because they care about proper disposal and is not bothered about accumulating plastics around since in her opinion it’s unavoidable to use plastics in certain products. Still, she is willing to purchase any eco-friendly disinfectant spray at a price ranging from P50.00-P150.00.

My third interviewee is a Marine Cargo Surveyor, 26 years old and just like the previous interviewees, thinks that it's very important to observe proper hygiene and disinfection procedure at this time of pandemic. He uses 350 ml of plastic bottled alcohol or hand sanitizer that is bought from the mall. In purchasing disinfectants, he considers the brand of the product.  Outside home, he uses 150ml alcohol spray and is satisfied with the current product that he is using. He’s not bothered about the accumulation of plastic bottles at home, but still is eager to reduce plastics in the environment by telling people to buy refillable disinfectants instead because according to him plastics won’t decompose and are a major problem in the environment. He said that he will purchase an eco-friendly disinfectant spray if its price is affordable, ranging from P50.00-P100.00 depending on the size.

My last interviewee is a 47 year old mother and a business woman. Among all my interviewees she doesn’t feel much necessity of disinfection during this time of pandemic. She uses alcohol and Lysol as a disinfectant product. Because of her business she usually purchases 12 gallons of plastic bottled of disinfectant from IPI company. In purchasing disinfectants, she considers the benefits of the products. She always carries around a 60ml of alcohol spray in her bag and had said that the plastic bottles brought by the pandemic situation must have consideration since it’s part of the safety protocol. She’s not all bothered about the accumulating plastic bottles of disinfectants at home, but still is very eager in helping to reduce plastic wastes. She said that she is willing to buy an eco-friendly disinfectant spray at P300.00 for safety purposes.

After all these interviews, we concluded that generally whether from teens or working moms, everyone is using disinfectants for mostly think that it is very important. And mostly are also concerned about the disinfectant bottle accumulation and are very willing to purchase an eco-friendly disinfectant spray to help reduce the problem of plastics in the environment.

2 weeks ago, the group have been very busy for the video presentation about our product and we realized that we haven’t had any name for the product that we are rooting for. So the team collaborated in thinking for a unique catchy name appropriate for the product. We have thought about different names; EcoFectant, EcoMist.ph and Hin.lo were the choices that we considered. And we have decided to choose Hin.lo, because it means clean in our own bisaya dialect weighs more impact than the others.

“Hin.lo, The Eco-friendly and Portable Mist Sprayer”

Personally, from the interviews conducted, I have learned that our product is not that unique and can be easily chosen over common disinfectant spray. Our strength and edge is its eco-friendly, heat resistant and it’s a reusable product. But this won’t be enough to drag customers, especially when they are not much concern in plastic related problems. What I thought is that we should really have a strong marketing strategy to be able to fulfill the success we are aiming for, a marketing strategy that will inform people and at the same time allure them with our product. This is a thought worth paying attention to improve our product and a lesson to pursue improvement in the quality that we provide.

I have heard about start up back when we were in senior high school because my friends attended into one of the seminars. But I don’t really know what it is and all its whereabouts, not until I watched two lectures about it.

From the lecture, a start up is defined as an early stage of businesses, a product that immediately solves a known problem through new ways. Start up businesses has usually 2-3 persons as founders. These businesses are disruptive in nature which means its way of solving a problem is not usual, it’s different from a traditional way of business. These are the things our instructor told us about, thinking beyond the shell, thinking about a disruptive way. Since start up is a disruptive and not usual it has a high chance of failing, it costs too much and it will less likely sustain itself in an ignorant place.

Aside from learning the definition, the when and hows, I learned a lot from the second lecture where the founders of Ehatod talked about their journey. I realized that the business proposals, the ideas that we created as a group in our entrepreneurial mind subject can be the first step of starting something real. The things that we did in the subject somehow makes sense; why we should interview people every week, why we should narrow down our target market, market validations and truly honesty in doing our task is very important to extract the right answer in improving our product and services. 

The Ehatod journey was tough and never easy as the founder had said, they started from scratch and had learned from many of their experiences that brought them to where they are at the moment. I learned from the phrase that Kit mentioned, “the essence of wisdom is knowing what to neglect”.  So far in my experience, whether it’s in business or just life itself we tend to do all things at once and bite more than what we can chew and end up doing nothing at all or failing. We can’t truly do it all but we can do our best. The Ehatod journey was trying to provide and widen their services and realized that it’s hard and not sustainable for them. This is my take away, in the future whether it’s business or in life I should focus on one thing and do my best in it, instead of exhausting myself into nothing, especially when it’s not sustainable for me.

I have also picked up the lesson of mistakes and how sometimes it is necessary for improvement and growth. Mistakes are expensive to have but sometimes it is necessary.  We tend to make mistakes in business or even in planning, I can recall my small buy and sell business and also in doing our proposals in this subject. We have made mistakes and realized what’s wrong and corrected it. In reality in can be very expensive and discouraging but I believe that we should keep on moving forward and learn. But we can also avoid this expensive mistakes by learning from others. “Wise men learn from their mistakes but wiser men learn from the mistakes of others.”

We have gathered information about how to improve our proposed product by asking people questions that will make us understand what it’s like to be in their shoes. These question were formulated through the guidance of the customer empathy map, where we ask people about what they see, hear, do, think and feel related to the problems that we are trying to solve by our proposed products. I have collected information from 2 persons this week using google form.

The first participant is a student, 20 years old. He observed varying sizes of disinfectants, a spray and bottled type containers sold around his vicinity. He said that the disinfectant that he is using today is just a typical ethyl alcohol, the usual germ killing product. And he wants to try something new that is much effective and at the same time not that very costly. He was not sure about the safety of the product that he is using and he is concern about the side effect of using alcohol in his skin because according to him, alcohol-based hand sanitizers can wash away the skin's natural oils, which can cause drying and cracking of the skin. He usually purchase ethyl alcohol and said that he buys disinfectant products and usually go to safe, recommended by professionals, price worthy, soothing smell, and effective. With regards to plastic management, he said that he finds no trouble about it, especially that in his place they were disciplined to manage their waste and had usually recycled bottles. He was very eager to help reduce waste and said that it was important to him to have a portable, safe and environmental friendly disinfectant. He is willing to pay from P50.00 to P300.00 for a disinfectant product.

The second participant is a government employee, 22 years old. She also observed varying sizes of disinfectants, a spray and bottled type containers sold in supermarkets and stores. She noted that her disinfectant product are not environmental friendly. She’s not sure about the safety of this product especially when exposed to high temperatures. Her disinfectant products are usually provided by their office and they were using alcohols and chlorine. In the community that she is in, she said that the pollution has gone worse. Plastics thrown at drainage systems caused floods in the streets and the weather seemed to be disrupted due to burning of plastic wastes. She was concern about the pollution that was brought by unmanaged plastic wastes. She is very eager to help reduce the usage of plastic bottles and it is important to her to have a portable, safe and environmental friendly disinfectant. She shared that she will surely invest in buying expensive disinfectant if it can be recycled and can be used a lot of times.

In our class, we were taught about how important market validation is and we were assigned to do the customer empathy map that became our guide in gathering information to validate our product. As a group we considered 3 options, one is to chat our interviewees just like before, to call them through video chat or to let them answer our question through google form and since we have many questions to ask for us to be able to understand them, we decided that we’ll create a google form to gather our information.

As we were consolidating the lessons that we learned, we realized that it is really hard to create questions that will give us the right answer to improve our product. We have learned that the team should work as one to lighten up the burden. With regards to the lesson that we learned from the answers that we gathered this week, we have learned that most of our participants are really concern about the environment and are eager to reduce the usage of plastics. By this, our product has an edge and we are solving the problem for them, this answers to our hypothesis that if customers will keep on buying plastic bottled disinfectants then it will add to the accumulation of plastic wastes; and if they carelessly misplace it in high temperature areas then it will cause them harm.

Because one of our respondents mentioned about the effect of alcohol disinfectant spray in his skin and other two also mentioned considering the factor of the smell of the disinfectant, we have also discussed in our group how we’ll be able to solve this concern.

Last week, we were looking for problems that most people are in and we were trying to find solutions from it. Since we need to look for a common problem of the many, we asked some people about the major problems or complains that they were struggling in to find an alternative way to ease their pain. This is how each one of us came up with different ideas; a member of the group thought about solving the issue of wastes and thought about a trash can that will automatically segregate, another member came up with an idea of creating a power bank charged with solar energy. I also thought about solving the problem of having backache and thought to create a chair that brings comfort and a study table in one. Another member also thought about a disinfectant portable mists for the purpose of disinfection, suited in the pandemic problem that we are in.

             With all of these options, we have carefully weighed each and came up to push the plan of creating the portable disinfectant spray. This is because we are in a pandemic situation and this product could give a great help in our safety. We also thought about introducing this to the government, sounds dreamy but we should think big and we did thought big. We are expecting much to be successful in this proposed product.

             After pushing through the proposal we moved further to the next step of interviewing potential customers. Since we are required to interview 8 people, we divided the job and interviewed 2 each. We asked the following questions:

1. Para sa imo, importante ba nga ikaw ug ang imong mga gamit layo sa kagaw? Unsa imong pamaagi sa pag disinfect sa imo kaugalingon ug sa imong mga gamit?

2. Unsa kadako nga disinfectant ang imong ginapalit/ginagamit?

3. Kabalo naba ka ani nga balita ug sa risk nga dala sa alcohol na maexpose sa init nga lugar? Unsa imong maistorya about ani nga panghitabo?

4. Willing baka mupalit if naay disinfectant spray nga portable, sensored, safe and environmental friendly?

We came up with this questions to test our hypothesis that if customers will keep on buying plastic bottled disinfectants then it will add to the accumulation of plastic wastes; and if they carelessly misplace it in high temperature areas then it will cause them harm. 

Interviwee 1 and 2 said that they are concerned about the importance of disinfecting things and even themselves. They are concern about getting infected by the corona virus. Both of them were using varying size of disinfectant bottles and said that they preferred the portable ones. With regards to the headline of the news about explosion of alcohol in a car that we sent them,  they were alarmed about it and said that this could just be prevented with precautionary measures and our product didn’t brought much impact with regards to this problem since not everyone has a car also.

So the group came up with an idea that we should create a product that has the same price as the common disinfectant spray so that we will have an edge since our proposed product is safer and environmental friendly. Also, we came up with the decision to interview different age levels of people per week so that we can narrow down our target market.

Testing our hypothesis with the questions above proved that yes, disinfection is very important to all and our proposed product has a chance with this situation but we learned that we should think more of an edge of our proposed product so that it will be preferred than the common ones. We also need to think about ways to make it cheaper and also improve our questions in the interviews to come up with the right information to improve our proposed product. 

We are still learning, and is taking this journey step by step. I pray that we get to improve more in the following weeks.

 The picture bellow are screenshots of the interviews that I conducted.

              It’s been almost a month since we started our online classes and I am still trying to adjust in this new way of learning. As I was looking at the outline of our Entrepreneurship class, I had an honest thought that this will be actually hard since we’re supposed to interview 8 people a week through the virtual platform and I also thought that this would be like the Entrepreneurship class that we had back in high school but actually it’s the next level of it, where we get to experience many new things.

             I learned that in this class that we will train ourselves to seek opportunities and pave our own way to seize the opportunity that we found. It’s not going to be selling munchkins or maja blanca but this is going out of our shells and try to experience the world of business. With the help of science and technology we will seek for problems to be solved.

             I tried to venture out in this platform when quarantine started. My friend and I started a business online and it’s true that we really should take a risk and to never be afraid to fail. We must not fear to be wrong because this is how we’re going to know how to make things right. All of these lessons were mentioned in our class. We are the disruptors, we will try to disrupt normal ways of doing things, just like most of the successful businesses that we have nowadays.

             We have been taught about idea generation process and this could be a great help for us since we are having a challenging time thinking about where we should start to develop a product.  It is our first step to identify the point of pain. I learned that the problem that we will be solving must be a problem that concerns to all so that it would be of great success. Next to this idea is to innovate the product, test the business model and explore how to acquire customers.

            Aside from being fearless, I learned that an entrepreneur must have a good pattern of behavior. Some of the things I learned is that it is important to never hesitate to ask for help when needed and also to give help to others. An entrepreneur must be a good communicator, a person who trusts without expecting anything in return, who is always just and will seek fairness.