Over the past five months, we have gone through a lot of ups and downs in terms of our group formation, idea generation, prototyping, promotions, and sales.
Winning Concepts aimed to capture a market of college students who all deal with a common problem, tangled earbuds. We set out to solve this problem using resources here at JMU and the local community. The result was three prototypes being created over a four week period. We then started promoting our product and brand around campus in the form of tables in Showker, Festival, on foot, and online (via Facebook). The end result of our efforts was 17 sales to family, friends, and Kyle Houser from Apple.
These results were not what we expected when we began this journey back in August. We were confident that we had found a common problem that we could solve. We also thought we had access to the perfect market to sell our solution (JMU).
However, we have learned a lot throughout the process. We have learned the importance of prototyping, iterations, and the lean start-up method. The difference between what we expected and what actually happened can be attributed to a lack of product-market fit and our price points. We focused a great deal of time and energy on the JMU student population even though we were not seeing any results. We could have pivoted to a new customer segment earlier and gotten different feedback. The price points were linked to the customer segment we were pursuing. We offered the Bud Hub for $10 to JMU students and faculty and $15 to non-JMU customers. If we had pivoted to a new customer segWhile we did not see financial success, we can each take these lessons with us into our next start-up venture and have faith that they will lead to a entrepreneurial winner in the future.
Winning Concepts aimed to capture a market of college students who all deal with a common problem, tangled earbuds. We set out to solve this problem using resources here at JMU and the local community. The result was three prototypes being created over a four week period. We then started promoting our product and brand around campus in the form of tables in Showker, Festival, on foot, and online (via Facebook). The end result of our efforts was 17 sales to family, friends, and Kyle Houser from Apple.
These results were not what we expected when we began this journey back in August. We were confident that we had found a common problem that we could solve. We also thought we had access to the perfect market to sell our solution (JMU).
However, we have learned a lot throughout the process. We have learned the importance of prototyping, iterations, and the lean start-up method. The difference between what we expected and what actually happened can be attributed to a lack of product-market fit and our price points. We focused a great deal of time and energy on the JMU student population even though we were not seeing any results. We could have pivoted to a new customer segment earlier and gotten different feedback. The price points were linked to the customer segment we were pursuing. We offered the Bud Hub for $10 to JMU students and faculty and $15 to non-JMU customers. If we had pivoted to a new customer segWhile we did not see financial success, we can each take these lessons with us into our next start-up venture and have faith that they will lead to a entrepreneurial winner in the future.
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