TooThLESS VLOG (Jezam L. Zamora)

Last week’s activity was fine to us because we were not included as the finalist for the demo day with many panels and investors. Also, during their pitch presentations, many aspects or points i learned that should be avoided, maintained or improve.

Many groups presented their pitch deck amazingly and all of them deserve to be at the finals. The synchronization and team coordination is very useful and catchy in every part of the presentation.

As I was imagining if we where there as the finalist, i can see we need more improvements and there are also many points in our team that are lacking and absent. Coordination and lack of confidence is our weakest part  of our team.

Last week, we presented our pitch deck  with the other groups, the purpose of this is to choose the groups that will go for final pitching, elimination was held at ICT AVR with the panel of judges. It was a very nervous and exiting day because it was the moment that our final proposal from scratch has been shape. Unfortunately, not all the team was able to present their pitch deck due to unexpected time duration of each team.

In my team, we are able to present our revised pitch deck and a demo of unfinished website. One of judges suggested that we should not just focus in online tutoring because Philippines is well known of having a slow internet connection which is very essential and a requirement in online. In addition, many of Filipino parents used to or prefer to have their children be tutored in meet-up process. They advise us that the team should consider the meet-up tutoring as well on how can we profit every session of the tutor and tutee. Another judge recommended that we should also target Overseas Filipino Workers (OFW) parents since they are far from the children..

With all the suggestions and recommendations by the panel of judges, the team have gain a lot of knowledge about the things needed to consider first before establishing a business. The team has no experience in the world of business but by the new information we acquired there is a great possibility that we can make it to reality. In addition to all of this experience, business is not just selling something, its all about learning new fields and ideas from the people whom you are trying to sell.

Choosing the right services can significantly impact the financial status of the business. Charge too little and you won’t cover your operating costs. Charge too much and your customers will decrease. There is no fix way or science to pricing and there often isn’t a single formula you can use in every case, but it is very essential to evaluate the way you price your product or services and determine whether the strategy and tactics you’re using is really the best one for your business.

In our presentation this week, we showed our possible target subscribers every month and how much can we spend to gather or acquire them to subscribe to our site. However, our adviser pointed out that if we charge the same price with our rivals how can we attract clients when we offer similar services at exactly the same price? Customers might choose to go with our competitor since they are already known in the industry. And our challenge is, how can we get customers? So, we emphasize the difference from us to our competitors and details are being set as agenda in our consultation.

During our consultation, we presented our BMC and Wireframe, we made specific changes in our BMC and a huge additional feature in our site. The concern of our instructor is that how can we keep the customers busy in our website when they are signed aside from checking their notifications.

     This week we attended a seminar to have some backgrounds or knowledge in cash acquisition cost and costumer lifetime value and how to handle customers in order maintain their loyalty to us. We have also learned basic concepts on owning in the field of business and will be discussed further for the upcoming seminar. The team is now continuing to finish the system prototype or the back-end of the website, we focus in the back-end so that there will be less code yet and after that we will finish the front-end.

      Our team is now preparing to apply for a competition to introduce to the world our startup. We also seek advice from Sir Paul Lido since we have the opportunity to talk to him during ICPeP days. Sir Paul also pointed out that in order to get customers the team should make our services free for about a year. In this way we can get a lot of clients but the fact that we cannot make profit out of this for a long period of time, the team is still undecided but very grateful to Sir Paul for his willingness to help.

As our classes started subjecting to finances, we also planned our finances. Like, all the possible expenses, and realization of money going in and going out. As we imagine our company surviving for the first 3 years, many possible expenses we consider.

As we talk about advertisements, to minimize our expenses for advertisement we planned to have partnerships with universities/ schools and tutoring companies to maximize their advertisements that focuses teaching. By this, we may expand our advertisement area which may also expand the people may visit in our site.

As we presented our idea last week with four panels, it made us nervous and exited. Exited because for our idea and Nervous because there are many possible things may happen that we miss.

I our question and answer, after our presentation, as I expected, there are points that we miss to think abut for our site. Also, during the presentation there are some slide removed in our presentation that made some confusions in our idea on how we can profit from it.

Unfortunately, some of our panels is unconvinced with the idea because we lock of plans for our online tutoring. They add that, there should be always a connection of our site and the tutor and tutee during their tutoring session to avoid scams and so that the time be balance.

As the finals approaching, we also prepare many things for our pitch specially we will have our second pitching which is spectated by our instructor to be more clear to our goals and the budgets and money details we needed to reach for our business to survive.

As well as we prepare our presentation, we also continued to code for our site, we started coding in back-end for our site so that if there are things we needed to change we can change fast because we didn't include front end yet.

Since last week is the continuation of midterms for some of our subjects we didn’t have much activity for our product. Instead we are just having a short meeting regarding in our codes, what are the problems and are those services we offer can be easily coded that wont compromise the performance of our site.

As we prepare our pitch deck last week, we analyze things more detailed way, because to complete the image or perspective of our site we need a detailed inputs,functions and display for our site. Because also in our preparation for our pitch deck we analyze and provide other services that we may also use to get profit from it.

We also solve other problems for our service like where are they going to pay etc.,  so we provide a solution for other payment method in case they don’t have credit card or other online payment method.

Last week we focus on searching of our best estimated size of market and we analyze things that our costumers may encounter i our site. We also planned in services we may provide for free and for premium tutors signed in.

The results provide us relief in the fact that fees maybe an issue to our sites. So our solution we provide free but only limited functions they may only acquire. Those features may be explained in our weekly report for better picturing of our site.

Last week we manage to design some features or initial features of our site to be presented to our users, the tutors searchers and and the tutor itself. Unfortunately we are not able to present our wire frames to them, so we need to double our time for it to be presented because we cant start to codes without the waiting customers because their opinions on what we should put in our sites matters very much.

Last week, we conduct survey again. Our main target and goals is to prove our assumptions on who are our costumers and what are their personalities or  persona.

So far we prove our assumptions that are main customers in tutor searchers are families that are middle and high class. In our surveys, we can already see who are our costumers and who are not. And since we already know them we can easily find people that we need to interview so because of this we interviewed 10 people last week.

According to our survey, we didn’t find a tutor that uses any website or online services that help them find tutee. In this case, we also need to consider the fact that some of the tutors are just college students and they may not like the idea of subscription fee but in the other tutors who are teachers/professional they are fine with it.

Our new chosen path for the team received commendation to our guess listener in the pitching of our idea. So far we are in a good path but who knows what will happen in our journey?

Many things needed to be done, few questions needed to be answer and many issues needed to be solve to make our idea stable. In our first week, we interviewed to the people who has the potential to be our costumers. We gathered many information in order to make our idea useful and successful.

After we pitch our proposal, the Job Searching site. There are many points our instructor expose to us.

First, about our competitors, there are many job searching sites in our country today and what can we offer to our costumers that are not the same with the leading sites?

Second, about the size of our market, Cagayan de Oro alone is not a wide range of area to have your business since the available jobs here in CDO is not that much.

This are the main points/holes we cant cover for our star-up project. So our team decided to make a new path, path on who will be our target costumers and our scope or coverage for our startup.   

Before I start, our planned project for this activity has been change again. Instead of having the smart lock, we change our idea due to many factors. So we went back again to our initial idea the Job Hunting Website for CDO.

 After making our Business Model Canvas (BMC), we named our website “Trabangita” since it is a Job Hunting Website for CDO area and the small businesses can also avail or post their wanted jobs in our website.

Last week activity is a blast for us, since we manage to interview business owners and a job hunter. We interviewed 4 business owners and 4 job hunters, we also included job searchers since they are the one who will use for our idea.

The interview results suggest that the price for posting the job advertisement should be base in the business income per month. Our propose payment for posting is Php 100.00 per month after that, the advertisement will not be posted. And they also like the idea since they said for small business its very hard to search for applicants since the only website they advertise is Facebook.

The given time for us every members to think and to prove our idea has ended. Many of us reveled their true potentials in making ideas for the group. As the meeting ended, we ended up on idea in making a website.

This website is a job searching site exclusive only for CDO area. The difference of this site from the other is that it also allow small shops/store to post their available/wanted jobs.

That was our idea after the class dismisses but, when the second subject (Microcomputer) announces to also have a project that must have software and hardware, since our group in “Techno” is also the same in “Microcomputer” we decided to make a project that has software and hardware that can also be sold in the market. For a short period of time we ended-up in an initial project, a Smart Exclusive Lock, this devise is a smart lock that can be unlock through internet that can be use for the Private rooms and other Secured Rooms. 

Making decisions as a group is very crucial, it requires deep analyzations in terms of members capability, weakness, strength and interest. At this part of our group we give each of us some time to think more about our partial individual proposal for our Start-up project.

Listening to every members idea give’s the group more trust and it also give us confidence to say our feelings and opinions on our point of view for their proposal.