Adrian's Personal Blog #2

The past few weeks have been pretty crazy, with all the stuff due in this class as well as mid-terms in other classes, things have been pretty hectic. To be honest most of my time has been spent studying and blogs postings for this class has been pushed to the side for the time being. But now that things are settling down again and mid-terms are almost done, I'm able to focus on this class again and catch up on missed posts.

A couple weeks ago we had our first Advisor meeting with 2 of our advisors being able to show up, and they gave us some really good feedback. The biggest debate we had was whether or not the company was better going niche market or going general. We we're very adamant on staying niche while the advisors both recommended going general. Personally I completely understand where our advisors are coming from, because even for me the biggest question I had/have is revenue and how we will actually keep the company afloat. By going general we are able to have a bigger database of people that will potentially use our service. The only issue with that is that by going "general market" we are no different than groupon or livingsocial or any other coupon site, we're just a microscopic version of them. So after much discussion we decided to stick to our plans and go niche market, we feel that it'll have a better up-side long-term because we'll be able to cater to our users needs and also offer our retailers/suppliers return-customers, which is something that current deal sites can't say the same.

The week after our first advisor meeting we came up with a plan to launch a quick test site that will basically do what our real site will, just at a more juvenile stage. We want to do this so we can test our MVP and see what the response is from users. When i went out and asked people what they thought if the idea, the number one thing that kept coming up was that these people wanted to physically see what we were offering, not just me trying to explain it to them. We decided just earlier this week to incorporate only 3 deal sites instead of the 11 we'll have on the actual site, by narrowing it down to 3, Peter'll have less coding to do and make it easier on him to get the test-site up and running. Hopefully we can have this test-site up and ready within the next few weeks so that we can send it out and see what people really have to say.

The week after our first advisor meeting, we had an informal meeting with my advisor, Andrew, who gave us some pretty good insight on marketing and among other things presenting our idea. It's still not for sure but Evan was saying that our Final Pitch is worth 10% of our overall mark and all the advisors are going to be judges. I like this cause it makes this class a little bit more competitive and to be honest more exciting. We have a couple really good ideas that we're hoping to execute that in my opinion will put us over the top during the final presentation. But these ideas are going to be a surprise, so you'll just have to wait and see what happens during the finals.

-Adrian