For my venture
concept, I tried to find a need that was prevalent in my local community. For
my community, I realized that there have been many unmet needs within the
university of Florida itself. My primary concern while searching was with the
high degree of costs associated within the university itself and looking for
student needs and wants that are being either unmet or exploited in some way. For
me, one of the most renewing “bugs” of which I discovered is the high cost of
textbooks that I get each semester. This was the need I chose to explore in my
venture concept to try and find a possible profitable solution.
For many students,
the cost of purchasing a textbook can be one of the priciest pieces of the
semester. You can restrict yourself to renting but then you miss out on
highlighting and annotating important sections. At the end of the semester you
can get further shortchanged by selling the book back for significantly less
than you purchased it for. This need was created because the university
bookstore claimed an upcharge on every book that it sold and purchased. This
need is located within every college town and in any university with an
official bookstore, but in order to utilize this need, my venture concept will
be localized to the Gainesville community.
As of now, this
need is being satisfied through either simply ignoring the cost of buying and
selling, renting the book, using craigslist to find other books, and the use of
unofficial forums to locate other students with textbooks. Overall, students
are not loyal to what they use and will easily switch over to anything that
could offer a better service at a cheaper price. This opportunity is relatively
large as it can be expanded to any and all books worldwide however, it is
mostly focused on bookstores within college areas and is slightly smaller with
that in mind. This opportunity’s “window” is also very large as it exists as
long as universities and colleges exist worldwide, so there is no rush to
deploy my venture as quickly as possible.
In order to
exploit this opportunity, I want to innovate by creating a website that would
connect students who have just taken classes to ones who are scheduled to take
the same classes. This would connect students with books available for sale
directly to those who wish to purchase books for their upcoming semester. The
website would generate revenue exclusively through advertisements allowing
students to buy and sell books with no middle man allowing students to easily
obtain books without having to pay any extra cost. So for this instance, I am
selling connections in exchange for advertisement revenue. Even as the company
expanded, instead of relying on other means of revenue, I would simply expand
the advertisement to be more prevalent and the revenue per click to increase.
This revenue would be small averaging around 25 cents every time someone clicks
on an advertisement. This small revenue would be counterbalanced by the minimal
cost to run at around 10 dollars a year. This maximizes profit as I would only
need someone to click on an advertisement 40 times a year to break even. Any
other additional click would be additional income. This would also mean that I
could easily expand at little to no cost to other areas.
Finally, this
opportunity and innovation would culminate into a fully-fledged venture
concept. Customers would switch over to my website for price savings from
traditional methods. Getting them to switch would be rather difficult however
as news of the website would have to travel over time and spread and rapid
expansion would be unlikely at the start of the website. The competitors to my
venture would be the official university bookstore, amazon, and any other local
bookstores as well as services like craigslist that also help connect students
to other booksellers. Packaging, price points, distribution, and business
location are all inapplicable to this particular venture concept. Customer
support and customer experience do play an important role in my business
concept however. Customer support would be maintained through a support email
address in a contact us page within the website. As the business expands,
customer service could be outsourced to a secondary business that would control
the objective for several different geographical locations at once furthering
the minimization of costs overall. Finally, as the business expands further to
many different geographical locations around the united states, I would
organize a complete business to support the ongoing production of my service. I
would employee one or two web developers to continually update and expand the
websites to further accommodate students around the United States. As the
website develops further, roles would begin to emerge such as an expansion
department, a customer service department, and a design department.
Overall, the
venture concept would culminate in eventual expansion internationally. I
definitely think that the most valuable asset to my business venture will be
the very maintainable costs to run the website and incredibly low breakeven
point. This aspect alone makes the venture worth pursuing as the risk is almost
none at startup. After I hand my business off, the venture will hopefully grow
and spread to many different geographical regions, possibly even expanding its
services provided beyond simply connecting students to now acting as a buying
and selling service with minimal markup. Finally, when I feel ready, most
likely after five years, I would sell the business to whoever I believed would
continue to expand and grow the business. After doing this, I would maintain a
small share in the company allowing it to expand and still maintaining some of
the revenue. As I pass off the venture, I will move on to one of many different
ventures that I could further develop into fully fledged businesses. By passing
it on, I would have made my first step into becoming an entrepreneur. Also, by
using this venture, I would have already developed many of the skills that I
would need to further my future entrepreneurial concepts. It would also provide
a perfect project to put on my resume should I chose to retire from the
entrepreneurial lifestyle at any point in time.
Feedback Summary:
For my first
venture concept, I received mostly positive feedback within the comments I received.
While I tried to maintain all of the aspects these feedbacks reflected, I also received
several negative comments on which I know I had to change. I needed to clear up
on how exactly I would maintain and expand revenue as my company grows. To do
this, I included a section explaining on how I would still rely on
advertisement even as my company expanded. Another one of my complaints was in
the lack of explanation for my exit strategy. I added an explanation for when
and what I would sell my business for. Finally, I smoothed out the wording and
tried to increase the flow of all of the description of my venture concept.
