Emily's Entrepreneurship Blog

The experience that sticks out the most to me in this class was the "What's your secret sauce?" assignment because it was really interesting to hear what the people closest to you think your biggest strengths and best qualities are. The most joyous experience for me in this class was figuring out more details about my app idea through these exercises and getting a better idea of what steps need to be taken if I actually want to create this app. I am most proud of myself for completing the elevator pitches effectively and stepping outside my comfort zone because that's not normally something I would enjoy doing. I think I have definitely developed somewhat of an entrepreneurial mindset by taking this class. This class has taught me the thought process that an entrepreneur goes through in order to develop a solid idea and execute it well. There are many components that come with thinking up an idea and actually making it feasible. To future students taking this cour...

The book I decided to read is Inbound Marketing by Brian Halligan. 1. The general idea of this book the evolution of marketing businesses with the evolving times. The author, Brian Halligan, is the CEO and founder of HubSpot and has a lot of experience with successfully marketing his business which he shared in this book. Most of his advice has to do with social media marketing in the modern world, and how if you're not doing this you're basically not marketing at all. 2. I think the advice given in this book is extremely relevant to what we're doing in this class. Besides the fact that we literally use a social media to make our posts in this class, many of our posts revolve around networking in the social media world and marketing to a specific segment via social media. 3. The exercise I would design for this class based on this book would be creating a social media post to market your product. You would need to include a picture and describe which social media plat...

In my Equity and Capital Markets class this semester, my teacher told us the first week that we will have pop quizzes during class once in awhile and the highest 4 of those will each count for 5% of our grade. 5% sounded like nothing, so I did close to nothing to prepare for these quizzes. On the first one, I got a 3/10. I thought we would have many more since only the highest 4 would count and I would have plenty of time to redeem myself. About a month later, the second quiz rolled around and again, I got a 3/10. This time, I calculated my grade and figured out that these quizzes would count for 20% of my final grade, so I started to worry. The class was about half over and we had only had 2 quizzes, so I worried that my teacher's statement about the "highest 4" counting was misleading, and we would only have 4 quizzes total! She addressed us soon after that and told us that we would have 6 quizzes, so I began to prepare before each class and I made sure I knew the infor...

Existing Market: I think the next step is to first and foremost, get the app developed. I need to make sure the technology can work and it can be used in the way I picture it. I think there could potentially be more features to the app that I haven't thought of so I would like to expose the idea to more people, particularly more people who are either in the industry or who are experienced in app development. From the three interviews I conducted, I got some useful and positive information. I had interviewed all three of these people before from a previous assignment, so they were familiar with the app idea already. One of them had an idea I really liked: she said it might be a good idea to set up a program where I can collaborate with restaurants so I can get my app out there and they can easily advertise. Also, someone suggested that I could set up a reservation component, where people could easily make reservations at restaurants right from my app. I thought this was a particu...

A reflection on the feedback you received from your last pitch:  The feedback I got on the first one was basically to have more emotion and create a hook in the beginning to get people interested. I didn't get much feedback on the second one but I definitely took the feedback from the first one into account while doing this one. What did you change, based on the feedback?  When I recorded the first and second ones I was reading from a rough script so I could easily remember what I wanted to say. I also had to stop and rerecord a few times because I messed up. But this time, I had it mostly memorized and I didn't need a script at all. I also only needed to record it once, unlike the other times. Also, I added an opening hook which neither of my previous ones had and I, again, tried to show some more emotion to keep the audience interested and sell them on my idea. Overall, I was definitely more comfortable doing this one than I was doing the first two.

1. Experience in the food blogging field Valuable: This is valuable because I already know the trends of what foods and restaurants people tend to like. Rare: Even though there are many food blogs, it is relatively rare that someone has experience in running one and can apply that in creating a potential app. Inimitable: This could be imitated but it takes time and effort. Non-substitutable: Other food bloggers have experience, but they may not have learned the same things I have from doing it.  2. Connections with entrepreneurs Valuable: This is valuable because learning from other entrepreneurs experience will help me be successful. Also they have the resources to assist me in getting where I want to be. Rare: My father and grandfather are both successful entrepreneurs and not many other people have that close to them. Inimitable: I could reach out to other entrepreneurs, but the experience that my family members have learned from their ventures are different than ot...