Weeks 01/05 - 01/18

Weeks 01/05 - 01/18: Since I didn’t make a post last week, it would probably be more practical to make this post twice as long to cover our general progress this month.

In general, our group very much struggled to work to the same level as other groups for a variety of reasons. However at least we made progress in some things.

The good news is that we had progress on the $200 project. We decided to start selling a second product in addition to our refurbished violin, which is a bunch of iphone 5 cases we made. David and Chris designed these phone cases last thursday and started creating them by using a 3D printer available in the basement of the UA building. Rizheng stated that he found potential buyers for these cases (who expressed specific interest) in addition to the violin. These buyers looked promising, although I’m not certain that the transaction has gone through yet.

The bad news is that, although we have made basic progress on the storefront project, we have a lot of work to do for it and, to be honest, I don’t think our group can bring the presentation up to the same level that other groups will have by the time the presentation is due. I partially think this is a result of how well our group works together, but also due to how little time we have left until our presentation, in addition to midyear exams. We still have extremely important decisions to make, such as our value proposition and what major roles people will take during the presentation.

Thoughts and other things:

For the storefront project, I really liked the idea of it but I didn’t like how we basically jumped right in without much knowledge or experience of how to use our available space (aside from the short home lesson and quiz on finance and income statements). I could tell that some of us were surprised by how costly our project was overall when we started working on parts four through six. It seemed very difficult to make any profit with how many expenses we had, which resulted in an initially very unrealistic value proposition (basically $200 per month for something you can get very cheap otherwise).

Additionally, having to work on both the $200 project and the storefront project made us (and probably most groups) much less focused on the $200 project. For example, my initial idea for the $200 project was to purchase computer parts in order to build a computer. However, nobody else in our group had any tech experience, so we didn’t go through with it. Since we ran short on time, we decided to go with fixing something basic like a violin and tried to put it on craigslist while we worked on the storefront project. We ran into trouble when we couldn’t find any buyers, but we didn’t realize this until almost the end of the project since we were preoccupied with getting caught up on the storefront. At practically the last minute we decided to create phone cases using a 3D printer and tried to sell those. Overall I was disappointed that we didn’t really get to spend as much time with the $200 project as I thought we would since we focused so much on the storefront. For both projects, I wish we had more direction than we started with, which I think would have led to our group being more productive with both projects.