Gate 2

GOALS OF GATE 2

Today, we presented our gate 2 presentations to the class, the professors, and our mentors and then proceeded to receive feedback on our presentation. Gate 2 is all about the marketing and sales plan for our companies. Based on the startup ideas we introduced in Gate 1 and the market research and customer interviews done, we should have identified a target market and identified our problem-solution fit. Gate 2 is about taking our ideas a step further, identifying how to bring our product to our target customers and our preliminary ideas for revenue streams and how to grow over time.

A Recap of Our Group’s Journey

There is no road without bumps. Our road from Gate 1 to Gate 2 was bumpy to say the least.

1. Complex ideas are hard to execute, including having a two-sided platform where the customers on both sides seemed to be opposing what they wanted from each other. We were trying to pair distressed businesses with investors who cared about their community. But the investors wanted security in their investments and the distressed businesses were too scared to take on debt from their customers. Based on this, we decided the idea was not going to be the best to go forward with – we needed to pivot.
2. Ideation is not the easiest thing to do in a time crunch. After deciding we had to pivot, we found ourselves in a tight spot, trying to figure out what we could change too. We went through a list of nearly twenty ideas until we landed on one – a closet of high quality common household items placed in every apartment building that can be rented out by anyone living in the building. But before completely getting into the idea, we wanted to run it by our advisor first.
3. Some ideas are better than others. When talking to our advisor about our new idea, he almost immediately shut us down. Within seconds of us finishing our pitch, he responded by telling us that we were on the right track with our first idea, we didn’t need to pivot so far from the original idea. He helped us reform our idea to be closer to a portfolio management service platform.

As a team, we have gone through a lot of hiccups in the road. But I’m glad that we have finally settled down with a viable idea that we all believe in.

A Final Solution

We decided as our final idea we would look into creating a low risk portfolio management service. We want to be able to target people who are risk averse with a low barrier of entry and little knowledge about investing. We want to help the people that don’t normally get help with investing and growing their money in a safe way. 

Because we spent so much time between Gate 1 and Gate 2 working out how we would pivot, we were in a crunch for time trying to get Gate 2 prepared for our new idea. It was interesting to research competitors and similar platforms to see what they do, their business models, and how they grew over time. I learned a lot about how much money was required to build platforms like this. We decided that we wanted to target college students as a starting point and slowly grow to all demographics and market to them to help directly with their needs. For example, we wanted to help college students be able to grow their tuition money, and older adults be able to plan and save for retirement. We even began to write out a preliminary timeline and financial projections too, estimating how we would do and how feasible it would be to gain traction.

Conclusion

What came out of our Gate 2 presentation was an interesting point of view that the professor had. We had originally said that we wanted to start out by helping college students and then expanding to larger demographics as we were able to get a hold on our product. But the professor thought that we meant to help college students invest their money safely so it would grow enough between each semester to be able to pay for tuition. This is an interesting idea, a more narrow target market, that I am looking forward to digging into. Investing in super safe securities often leads to low returns, which may not be enough for some college students who are looking to grow to be enough to pay thousands of dollars of tuition.

#ieor191  #gate2 #entrepreneurship