The Problems of Building a Business

Entrepreneurship is hard. I had a feeling this would be the case when my team ExCri and I began exploring our market, but I didn’t know it would be this hard.

Lack of Communication

In the beginning we set rules and norms to follow; one of them particularly being constantly communicating. We thought we were doing a good job communicating our ideas and issues, but in reality we were still hiding things from each other, particularly with what times we were available to work together and what our individual progress was. To alleviate this problem, my teammate Reggie has been setting deadlines for us to send times of when we were available, our weekly progress and our next steps through Google Docs, Doodle and Typeform. I believe this method has helped our team stay on track and continue to progress as a group, even if there are some un discussed issues. At least we all agree we need to keep moving on and create our business together.

Not Being Clear

We chose to explore education. Education is a huge market. We wanted to minimize our scope. Our scope and target audience was unclear and had been unclear for weeks without any of us really doing anything about it. I had a feeling our market was not specific enough and mentioned it a few times, but our team was still focused on validating different ideas, creating a standstill between a concrete idea and specific user. Overall, we were not clear with what we all wanted and haven’t defined a problem or user we all would feel passionate about. BUT…Last weekend has been much better as we met up and all decided that we needed to have one idea and a very specific market to focus one. Because we narrowed down our market, coming up with a product was a little easier now. Of course, we still have to validate our idea with our users and that is another milestone we must overcome.

Overall how is our team and business?

As a team, we have been a little better with getting things done on time and not at the last minute. We also have been communicating our concerns and thoughts about our progress more openly been we had been before.

As a business, there are still a lot of assumptions and questions that we need to answer, such as, who is going to pay for our service and what are the benefits of our service compared to others in the market? But at least we have a narrow market (and we might need to narrow it down more) and a specific product which still has a lot of room for improvement.

I believe we are one step closer to creating a successful business and we are at the midpoint! Before we know it, it will be the day where we will presenting our final pitch to everyone.