Even though it wasn’t me that presented in front of the panels, I greatly felt nervous and anxious for the presenters. Even when the screen monitors drew a boundary between the pitcher, the panels, and us the audience I still felt their nervousness through the screen as I heard their lowkey shaky voices. Compared to us though, it was more of a general sense pitching since it included offline products and even the trendy ones and easy to gain customer ones - food.

Throughout the presentation I’ve heard different positive criticisms and advices from the panelists, ranging from their data to their customer gain traction. What caught my attention the most though is how particular they are about the investment that the pitchers ask from the investors. There were times were the price was too small, or the price was too big. It really depends on the scale of the product that you want to release... that wouldn’t have been a problem though if you had a good grasp and research on the real prices of the labor and materials that you need when starting a business - which again makes me realize how the education on accountancy takes a very huge role when taking on this class.

For our meeting here, we didn’t have formal classes but we were allowed to attend the opening (days 1 and 2) for a pitching competition event held in USTP - CDO. There, we learnt a lot from the opening speakers.

What stood out to me is the idea of Social Entrepreneurship. What I’m aiming for in a different subject actually kind of leans towards this subject more. It’s the idea of promoting donation to even the less privileged ones... I’ve had this notion that my idea was kinda bad since it doesn’t necessarily require payment and can’t gain much income with how it’s designed, but after being enlightened by last time’s session, I became motivated to get more geared towards what I was thinking of doing.

What followed then after was a memorable sharing of experience by a speaker of her experience as someone who worked for Amazon and Google. It was inspiring and a fun talk to listen to. I’ve been really demotivated for the past few weeks, especially that I’ve begun to lack the resources needed to finish my activities. Although I can’t say I’ve been totally encouraged and inspired to work harder, listening to her experience made me hopeful at least... and it did help me slightly. She actually did a game afterwards and rewarded the winners with either a google mini or an echo dot, which the winners can choose from. Unfortunately for me, I transferred to the FB live since my phone’s storage was full and lagging so I wasn’t able to answer in the Zoom session.

For this meeting we had an example given by our instructor to give us a brief view and importance of testing our assumptions. It was really encouraging ud to put out our idea to the open as fast as possible - basically formulating hypotheses and testing them out via what we call a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). I already previously searched about this one and was encaptured by the thought of doing MVP that involved making a video and gauging out random people's reactions and responses as to whether they'd be interested enough to check it out and sign up for a registration. But after the breakout session I figured out to do it much later when our initial ideas have already been tested out.

What's assigned to us for now is to have people try out our prototype (which should be as minimal as possible and only showcases the most important parts of our system). Our group member has already started on the prototype via Adobe XD and it's just a matter of a hurdle how to make the random respondents try it out without having to go through so much hassle. I guess we can search for an online tester that caters to Adobe XD's file type.

A discussion that is very much important in the world of start-ups. I’ve always known about copyrights, patents, and such and have very much tackled on such topics in my prior years. That doesn’t mean though that continual lectures of the same topics are useless - having refreshed my mind on the topic is very helpful and of course obviously timely since we’re trying to achieve a business mindset.

It’s my first to see an emphasis on how important it is to universities though. Knowing that the following are incentives we can achieve through claiming Intellectual Properties for ourselves, although partly common sense, is very assuring: being able to publicly finance your project, commercialize results, accelerate the transformation of your product, and other economic and societal impacts it brings as well.

I’ve always had trouble distinguishing among the different terms in this topic - from copyright to trademark to patent and such. After lecture, it has enlightened me and strengthened my knowledge foundation on the idea. How I see it, what’s most talked about in businesses are copyrights, trademarks, and trade secrets and it’s most likely what we’d have to focus on on our product too. It actually depends on what the company does but for us who’d develop mobile applications and is mainly a service company, trademarks and copyrights would be the main focus.

If I may digress, it’s actually my first time hearing of trade secret - I just knew that that was the term to use when referring to recipes or formulation made by popular food chains or brands. It’s really interesting that I get to apply what I learned about company rules in this context too - where you promise to not disclose anything secret outside necessary even if you’ve stopped working for them already (which is known as a non-disclosure agreement).

This meeting has helped me a lot to reflect on the things that we have been doing pre-pitching this Midterm. We might’ve known these facts already but it’s a good feel to review, reflect, and be reminded of the important and basic aspects of how the process of developing a start-up should go. All these pre-planning, interview practices, analysis, and post-analysis are an important reminder for us on which to focus on.

The day of the lecture meeting, I learnt a lot of new and familiar technical terms in the field of Technopreneurship. I have had a grasp on these things but I can’t say I’m all too confident about explaining them. Having gone through it during the lecture, I can say I have a better understanding about them now - though I still might have to do a bit more self-study to properly understand each of the things I learnt.

Before, I used to wonder if a business model structured exactly in a canvas is necessary. I pondered on it a lot since when I searched for topics relating to our product, business model canvases always showed up in my feed. I mulled over it as I wanted to do it for the sake of more clarity for our product and start-up mechanics but I didn’t know where to start. I definitely agree that as a start-up team, a concrete plan is a must - so that in case what may happen, we would have a blueprint of what must be done no matter what. It lays out the fundamentals of the would-be company for the team too. As it is only a guide, it is ensured not to be static that it would be unable to be flexible in case an issue arises or our product scope scales up.

What stuck to me the most in this meeting is the discussion about keeping customers. It is said that keeping them is less costly than getting them - and that’s exactly why we must work hard on the keeping aspect as to prevent from having customers leaving and having to waste more money to get more customers to compensate.

A minor thing I wanted to share that I was glad about is the fact that we kept demographics when we did surveys and interviews. It definitely serves a lot of purpose during analysis to pin down exactly what our customers need.

This was a problem that I have personally experienced. I’m sure it’s not only me but every student researcher out there too, or just anyone needing data but aren’t professionals yet. This lecture gave us a run-through of product ideation and the tools to use for each step of the phase. I only remember a few of the tools like Microsoft Team, Slack, and Monday - I’ve heard of these from lists and YouTube ads too! Slack is something we’ve experienced using because of the subject also. They seem really efficient to use especially now that we can’t meet face to face, but it’s a disadvantage to be a yet-earning person as we can’t pay for a monthly subscription on our own just yet. I’m glad we have the free-to-use ones. Though limited in features, it’s able to make do for our team. But if I have to be honest, those other tools really work differently and more efficiently as I’ve witnessed in the demo advertisements. For meetings we use Discord; for casual updates we use Messenger; and for surveys we use Google Docs. I was hoping there’d be some kind of tool or platform for finding and searching for the right target audience too since it’s the hardest thing to grasp as of the moment. I do remember coming across those surveying platforms that returns money to the survey-takers. It seems really good to get data from, but again we’re still students so we still don’t earn much for ourselves.

Everything I learned today has resonated within me so much as well. In this 3rd week of validation, we did some online forms for survey again to gauge out how many from the population experiences the problem we have pinpointed. The problem is... contacts. It was mentioned in the lecture that it is a very important aspect when doing a start-up and I can say it really really is even from the initial brainstorming phase.

To hit the target audience that you plan to cover, you need connections - connections to interview these people and then add more ideas to your product. Personally, we are very lacking in that aspect. We need to be more outgoing for this to work yet another problem I’ve been concerned about is the distribution of personality among our team. Basing from the 16personalities test alone, 3 out of 4 of us are introverts. Although not hugely, it does affect our work. And even if it’s just a minimal one, it can pile up and be a huge hindrance in the future... we do our best to reach out to everyone as much as we can though!

The good thing about our team is that everyone is collaborating, everyone is active, and everyone is motivated towards the same goal. I, personally, am also comfortable working with them. It really helps too that one of our members is really well-versed on the idea that we decided to pursue. Every time we talk, there are new ideas born. We suggest, we question, and we suggest again.

But I think, despite that, we still need more ‘help’. Help in the sense of knowledge - knowledge on the aspects that we are not an expert of. Some I can think of are government involvement, hardware set-ups, and business consultants. This made me realize, again, that we are just the developer side of this start-up. We need connections, and we need more help. We need more people that will compliment us. But for now, we’ll do what we can, and I know my team is doing our best :)