Student Shark Tank
2014 Autism AppJam Day 2
Yesterday, was Celebrate UCI, an event on campus where the campus was alive with cars, booths, delicious foods, and tons of UCI students, alumni, and prospective students coming to check out the beautiful campus and Aldrich Park, which the school was built around. While the event was going on, our team was getting ready to pitch our idea to random people and compete in the school’s version of popular show, “Shark Tank.”
The event was hosted by UCI’s new Blackstone Launchpad, which opened only last quarter. The Blackstone Launchpad is a place on campus run by David Ochi, and Ryan Foland where students on campus who want to be entrepreneurs, have a business idea, or want to network profesionally can go to get venture assesments or advice. I’ve personally gone, and had a blast idea jamming with Ryan.
It’s really hard to pitch an idea that you’ve only started officially working on for one day, but it’s really good practice and you get really good information from people. It’s important to get information from customers and potential users, not only when the product is done, but during the design and build process as well, it’s an integral part of the agile process.
We got real life advice from random people, and we asked them about our idea. We got great practice pitching and listening to the questions people had about or idea. We didn’t have an official anything to demo, so we brought the Arduino and taught people how to program a blinking LED, we brought teddy bears for Free Bear Hugs, photoshopped a low-fidelity mockup, and created a google form to get emails for interested attendees.
Our pitches wasn’t perfect, but just being there with people showing people our idea, was enough to get a ton of information about what we need to focus on. Not only that, but all the people who visited were given Voting Forms.
As we pitched we got a variety of responses from it’s one of the best ideas I’ve heard, to being extremely confused what the idea was, which told us, that we need to be able to focus on our pitch, which ran a little long. I haven’t fully said our idea just yet, but imagine you thought of an idea, and had one day to make something and pitch and ask people what they thought about it. That’s what we did. This is something called Market Validation, a lot of businesses fail, because no one wanted it in the first place. A great way is just to ask a bunch of people. We don’t know how far our idea can go in terms of a business, but there is something here, we just need to do a lot more work and research.
One thing on the voting ballot that was important was people got to choose whether or not they would invest in the idea.
We’re actually planning on going to a Lunchtime Launchpad event at the Antrepreneur Center Tomorrow, so I’m hoping to see how many yeses our group got. Other than that we’ve got about ten emails of people who are interested. It may not seem like a lot, but it is, if you can’t get one person to buy, to like your idea, how do you expect to get 10 people or 100 people.
Not only that, but we were able to get to practice our pitches and see exactly what people need to hear to get as excited as us.
In the end our team didn’t win, but the information we got was extremely valuable for the big event two weeks from now.So now’s the time for the big reveal
Our idea: A “Smart” Teddy bear that can detect if a child has Autism Spectrum Disorder. More info to come.
After the event we had a few moments for reflection, and found our weaknesses and strengths. Our strongest trait is our why/cause, and our potential to make something truly great and creative. Our weaknesses were our branding(my fault), and our explanation needed more polishing(our what).
Some other metrics:
- People who saw our idea, and we pitched: around 30-50
- People who gave us their emails for more info: 7
- Cookies Ate: 3
- Value: A lot
A great start, today everyone had a rest day, and tomorrow we’ll meet to discuss our plans going forward.
Erick
