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Demo Day: Pitching Competition

A week has passed since our final pitching and as announced, we will be representing the entire computer engineering department. Honestly, the pressure is still looming inside me especially that panel of judges came from different industry and some of which are experts. Taking that aside, it added more pressure to me for I am tasked in our group to answer most of the questions. Though I am the team’s hipster I think I also have the capability of answering the questions for I have already searched on it and have also the general knowledge on the entire project.

During the competition, eight intuitive and innovative ideas were presented. All of them were good, really good that they were able to pitch very well; they were well-rehearsed. When it’s our turn, we managed to answer all the questions very well. Also, we good great feedbacks and insights on how to better improve our system as well as compliments. We didn’t expect much to be part of the winners for the other teams pitched way better than us. However, when the winners were announced, we were surprised for we finished 3rd place or 2nd Runner-up. That was a great experience and an incredible achievement to have. I’m very happy for we pulled it off and on top of that, our team made our department proud.

Win or lose, it doesn’t matter to us. Yes, it would be great to bag the first place but getting third place is not bad also. We know we’re already winners for having the opportunity and experience improvements for development. We’re thankful to be part of the competition and will have the insights from the panel to serve as inputs for our future undertakings. The experience was great and we’re still taking into account whether we’ll continue and grab the opportunity to take part for the offered program for start-up ideas. That’s a wrap for this splendid journey of preparing students like us to be ready for the future.

That’s my Technopreneurship Journey.

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Finals Pitching

After a semester of research and development, this will be out last pitching for the semester. During this time, we’ll be presenting our progress on our system development ranging from the research and innovation to software and hardware development. This pitch will also serve as our ticket for the Demo Day where the best project from every department taking the same subject will compete on each other.

In the duration of the entire semester, this will be our second time pitching. The pressure is still there and it even worsens when we have to make modifications on our assignments for one member of our team has to process another important matter. Luckily, for our team we have two pitchers so the other one take her stead. She pulled it off and we’re happy for the results.

During the deliberation of our pitch, there still a lot of room for improvements and some holes that needs to be filled; mostly of which are for the validation and expert’s opinion on our project. Those feedbacks will be our next inputs and to-be considerations for future development of our project. The finals pitching went well and we’re happy for the results knowing that we have answered most of the questions. Few days before the Demo Day, I received a mail that we are to take part for the Demo Day and that we’ll be representing the computer engineering department. We didn’t expect to be selected but we’re also happy and we’ll do our best during the competition proper. But before all of that, of course, we need to prepare first.

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Final Pitching Preparation

Yo! For this week, we have no lecture but our team had a meeting for preparations for the final pitching next week. We also rehearsed for the final pitching, talking about possible questions that may arise and how we will address such. Additionally, I went over to modify the contents for our presentation while our hacker is also busy on making the video presentation so that we can present or the panel will have the visual on how the process of the system functions. We are hoping for the best results for our pitching next week. Aja!

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Status Update

This week, we checked on each other for our respective tasks and the results of the interviews done by our hustlers. Unfortunately, according to them, the interviewees they’ve message were not that responsive. However, they were able to interview another farmer and it went well. One of interview made by one of our hustlers were about the clarifications on how the process of obtaining cow temperature really is necessary, how it can affect the cow’s health and other matters relevant to our project. On the other hand, I also made further research and read more related literature on monitoring systems and how can it be incorporated in monitoring cow’s body temperature. It was an exhaustive week but we’re able to pull it off. Yippee!

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Prototype Update and Development

Final pitching is fast approaching. Our team decided to develop a working prototype to see possible hindrances that might affect our product and just solely rely on to our product design and concept. However, along the way a lot of challenges affected the team’s decision in developing the prototype.

As we are planning with things to consider in developing the prototype, the challenges just started popping out. One problem that we encountered is the current situation that we have right in which it also affected many aspects of our plan in developing the prototype. We cannot gather personally to develop our product especially the hardware system that needs to be developed by more than one brain. Also some of the materials needed are not available in the local markets and shops it needed to be bought online in which it’ll take too much of our time waiting for our material to be delivered to our hacker who will be developing the system. Therefore, the team decided to just use what are the available resources that can be temporarily used to just get sample data that will be used by our software. As for the materials, luckily, I’ve already purchased the necessary devices to be used and have already shipped it to the hacker of our team since last semester and he just utilized it to prepare the prototype.

Trough utilizing the available resources we have, we were able to make the prototype. Though it is not yet perfect, it is already enough to realize the general idea of our project. There will always be circumstances in every business and one must always remember how to be resourceful and be wise enough to consider product utilization.

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Tasks Update

We still don’t have lecture week so we continued on working with our individual tasks. We also had a short meeting through Google Meet to update where in our timeline are we. Our hacker is still developing the software needed for the system and our hustlers are also busy interviewing again for information needed to further validate our system. I on the other hand checks on them and answers their queries while also further looking for studies related to our project to get a hint of idea(s) on how we can perform it better. Onwards!

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Partition of Tasks

We don’t have lecture this week and some of my classmates are busy on complying their requirements due, needed for calculations for the midterm’s grade. Our team also proceeded with our individual tasks and assignments for the development of our system. We also take into account advised by the panel during the midterms pitching where validation is really the key to better understand and have a strong analysis on our system. In order to do that, we divided our tasks where our hustlers are assigned for interviewing more farmers, our hacker on developing the software and making sure that the hardware-software integration will be done, and I also focused on researching. I hope we’ll have great progress for the following weeks before the final pitching will come. Beyond!

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Further Developments

It’s been a week since our midterms pitching ended and there is still a lot of work to be done. We must look not only into further research but also in customer validation. We also noted the things that were mentioned and suggested by the panel in order to implement those ideas and see if it’ll work.

Taking suggestions and comments from others will greatly contribute to the betterment of one’s product and this idea is always applicable to any type of business or start-ups. Taking other’s perspectives not only let you realize which part of the system are there any problem but also through their perspectives that we can see the differences of the level of experiences accomplished by every people and their feedbacks can greatly affect out development in a good way. They will help your team look into possible improvements and even errors that your team committed. As the creator of your product there’s a big chance that you’ll be biased in your work, therefore having someone to look into your product will be a great opportunity to improve it. The panels’ suggestions from last week were very helpful and we’ll take those into consideration to further develop the system and to present a better pitch.

From this week onwards, I’ll not be updating every week for we need to work on our prototype development. There are still a lot of researching to be done and validations and I hope we can develop the product right on time before the final pitching will come.

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Pitching

There’s not much that happened this week. However, this week is one of the most important weeks in the entire semester of this subject. We have our pitching done which serves as our midterm examination. I and Kenny planned to meet at school so that we can have a stable internet connection (I also brought my WiFi router) and it’d be easier to answer the questions the panel would provide. One of the lessons I learned in this week is that preparedness really brings you confidence during presentation. This is the product of our mock pitching which we’ve also done during the past weekend. Also, concise and detail precision is really a plus point. In all my presentation and pitches I’ve done in the past, I always try to practice and emphasize these two.

When it’s our turn, Kenny kickstarted the pitch with a poise presentation, tackling every detail of the presentation prepared by yours truly. Our project or start-up idea should we say is a cow body temperature monitoring system and we call it MOOnitor. An onomatopoeic resemblance of a cattle and coinciding with the word monitor. I haven’t spoken during the entire duration of the presentation but my part comes during when the panel starts asking the query. I’m not quite sure if one of the panels did understand what Kenny has presented which opt him to ask question on how the entire system works. So, what I did is I presented or discussed again in detail the logical process of the system (see photo of the system below). I’ve answered most of the questions and Handy also answered the part with regards to costs and revenue. The pitch was a successful one.

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Pitching Preparation

Creating an ideal pitch is a necessity for your product to be marketed or for your success in having a deal with potential investors. This week’s discussion focuses on this as well as the significance of startups and fundraising operations. In emerging businesses like start-ups, fundraising is one of the fundamental keys needed for the support of the business. In here, entrepreneurs must have a knowledge on how to convince and attract investors thus a good pitch would greatly influence for the investor’s deal in sustaining your product. Depending on forms of pitches, be it elevator pitches and short or long form pitches, a strict compliance with the regulations must be observed. Preparing for the pitching is never an easy one or at least not that we know. I’d like to share this quote from Alexander Graham-Bell, a Scottish-born inventor, scientist, and engineer who is credited with inventing and patenting the first practical telephone:

“Before anything else, preparation is the key to success.”

In our group, we choose Kenny, one of our hustlers, to lead the pitch the idea. Though she was assigned to do the talking, the rest of us also prepared and help her in formulating the sequence of the ideas to be presented. We held an online meeting through Google Meet where we practice the pitch flow and I also helped on structuring the contents of the pitch. As the hipster of the group, I made the Powerpoint Presentation for our project. To save time and to have uniformity in our design, I used the same motif as our project proposal presentation. As I was making the graphics, I was quite having a difficulty managing my remaining time as I have to conceptualize the design before making such. Luckily, I was able to cross that and the finished the presentation before the pitching proper. To note, this pitching will serve as our midterm examination for this subject. Truly, I learned that time management is really one of the things a person must have especially in the actual workplace. Sometimes, unexpected problems may arise causing barrage to your laid-out schedule. Finishing the task before the deadline lets you allot that time to solving on-the-spot problems if there is any. With regards to our project, finally, we were able to interview two farm managers, one of which owns a small ranch the other manages a medium to large ranch. This will not be possible without the efforts of my teammates. So, I’d like to take this opportunity to thank them.

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Business Model Canvas

Every company, big or small, always have a strategy on how to expand their business. They conduct studies on how to make the most out of their resources considering what type of customer they are targeting. Business Model Canvas (BMC), created by Alexander Osterwalder of Strategyzer, is a tool to help you understand a business model in a straightforward, structured way. Using this canvas will lead to insights about the customers you serve, what value propositions are offered through what channels, and how your company makes money. You can also use the business model canvas to understand your own business model or that of a competitor. It is also a shared language for describing, visualizing, assessing and changing business models. It describes the rationale of how an organization creates, delivers and captures value. Strategic planning greatly benefits a company and help things run smoothly. Using BMC would help a company have a clearer feature by narrowing down their goals through iterative process of validating their decisions considering the customers’ needs and wants.

This week, we have a Student Bootcamp for making Business Model Canvas. The lecture was very insightful and I have known that the beginning of a startup is not as easy as I believe it is. There are small necessary steps to begin to have a strong foundation and better understanding on how businesses revolve around the market via entrepreneur-client relationship. Start-ups may only be a single step but magnifying inside the objective and structure of how it runs is pretty much neater now that I have a grasp of knowledge on making a business model. After the bootcamp, to freshly apply our understanding, my team and I conducted an online meeting and drafted our own BMC. After hours of analysis – adding and dropping ideas – we were able to complete ours. The canvas below is our final output.

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Intellectual Property Awareness

The use of intellectual property bears a social function. As part of a team that will be entering into the market of innovation, we must learn about this. Not only to be educated but also to avoid future problem with regards to the product we will be making. Innovations have gone far from what it has been and this calls for a protection to avoid redundancy of patents and to properly credit the innovator or inventor themselves. Innovations are subject to theft, infringement, and any other unlawful acts which negates and possibly plunder not just the idea but also the product from its rightful owners. To Dean Kamen, an American engineer, inventor, and businessman, known for his invention of the Segway and iBOT:

“Every once in a while, a new technology, an old problem, and a big idea turn into an innovation.”

This calls to a need to protect such innovation.

Here in the Philippines, IP is protected by the Republic Act No. 8293. The act is subdivided into three governing laws – the protection for patents, trademarks, and copyright; enabling people to earn recognition or financial benefit from what they invent or create. By striking the right balance between the interests of innovators and the wider public interest, the IP system aims to foster an environment in which creativity and innovation can flourish. The salient provisions under Law on Patents stipulate the patentable inventions and the right of a patent. The salient provisions under Law on Trademarks stipulate the rights to acquire a mark through registration made validly in accordance with the law. The salient provision under Law on Copyright stipulates the rights and legal protection of creators to their original work. These works may be referred to as either in artistic, literary, and scientific domain.

We have consultation with Prof. Mabulay handing over our proposals. Unfortunately, we were not able to interview farm owners and dairy farmers for there were no replies from the messages I’ve sent to some of the farms I know at our place. So during our consultation, we just assumed imaginary data and all of our discussions were merely assumptions. Though we have initial background in the scientific side of the project yet it is not sufficient enough to be presented as data during the consultation.

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Team Formation

In big companies, a hierarchical structure of people is present to distinguish those who are in higher authority from the normal worker. This holds true for most, but in a start-up, though the roles differ yet the amount of work is almost equal to everyone. So, categorization is not really that important. The goal is here is to help each other in terms of work to realize the team’s vision. There is no such thing as complex problem in a team working together to solve it.

In our team, we have Kenny and Afril as our Hustlers, Handy as our Hacker, and ma as our Hipster. Though I am still comfortable to be the team hacker, but Handy is way better and I am also more comfortable when it comes to designs. I may not be best in it but I can say I can make one that’s good enough to be presented. After identifying our respective roles, we continue to brainstorm on what specifics the project will be useful. Out from the six, we identified the projects that will be most likely to be realistic and can be completed given the time constraint for the entire semester. Some of the projects we’ve come up were already existing but we’ve introduced some features or modifications to make it better than the reference projects. However, I am not quite confident on the process maybe due to the fact that I’ve already known the gist of those products and it doesn’t seem appealing and marketable to me. Most ideas that we’ve presented to our instructor were good. The team then decides to choose which of those good ones were feasible enough to be implemented. Our team then decided to choose the Cow Body Temperature Monitoring System. We see it as feasible and is also one of the problems that the dairy farms are trying to address.

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Talking to Users

Empathizing with your potential customer will open ideas on what are the problems or any conundrum they are currently facing and what solutions they’d like to have. This will then narrow to problem priority and feasibility ranking. From here, we can then extract possible ideas on what processes and realistic solution we can offer for their efficiency and convenience. In relation to Design Thinking Process, this step comes first, whereby the team will connect with their potential respondent(s) for interview, ready for definition of the problem which comes as second step in the process.

Rob Fitzpatrick wrote an entire book focusing on classifying the progressive responses whether it falls into honest or doubtful – The Mom Test. This book also is a practical guide to intuitively host a useful customer conversation. The measure of usefulness of an early customer conversation is whether it gives you concrete facts about the customers’ lives and world views. These facts, in turn, help you improve your business. I’ve learned that this strategic approach greatly helps in solving the puzzles between you and your customer. It serves as a decoding machine to identify which from your ideas were compatible with the customer’s problems thereby drawing you closer to a more suitable solution.

On our end, we are having a hard time finding our potential customer. So instead, we prepared our interview questions beforehand so that we can have a strategic approach in questioning our respondent during the interview proper. This way is also one of the provisions of the Mom Test. I hope we can find a respondent sooner.

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Idea Generation and Opportunity Recognition

Inventors and innovators all over the globe don’t just jump directly into making or upgrading something without the process of idea generation. It always took them time to figure what needs to be done, what benefits the project will do, and how can it help the community be it in micro or macro scale. The pandemic left us ungeared, like a soldier going to the battlefield with no weapon. There are countless problems in different sectors here and there; there may be technological solutions for some but it is not feasible to accommodate majority of these problems. This week, the lesson revolves around idea generation, how we can turn ideas into something useful and categorizing ideas based on their worth.

As per requisite by the course, we are tasked to form a group of four. I’ve teamed up with Kenny, Afril, and Handy. They were my close friends and it’s also better that way so that I can be confident in approaching them and also working with them. I do believe that working with people you know is more efficient than working with strangers. This week, we’ve had a meeting for the future plans of our start-up through Google Meet. After a series of discussion and brainstorming possible ideas, we’ve come up with six ideal ideas that may be beneficial to both focused and general community alike, these are:

CROWD MONITORING APP: This app will help consumers to decide best place to go where there no such large crowds. Keeping their errand hassle-free. For the business owners this will help them to monitor their establishments’ crowd, to avoid inconvenience to their customers. This app is also helpful in crowd controlling to prevent further transmission of any transmissible disease

ZPD: This is an all-in-one file compressor app which can cater different kinds of file compression. It can compress images, videos, Microsoft Office files, pdfs. It compresses files to the least possible space while maintaining quality of the file. An example would be applying SVD truncation to an image.

GORELA: A mobile application that will serve as E-terminal for tricycles.

FARMER-VENDOR APP: This app will directly connect farmer and crop vendors. The app serves as the broker, it thus removing the participation of a middleman. The app will only collect a very small percentage of fee for every transaction.

COW BODY TEMPERATURE MONITORING SYSTEM: An automated system for measuring and recording the data extracted from the cattle themselves, especially for cows will be made. It will feature data logs and a real-time graphical presentation of the temperature for monitoring purposes.

BARTER TRADING SYSTEM: The solution is to have an online barter trading system. It is a mobile app where the user can easily find barter partner. It will display different options of products to barter as well as its corresponding information. Once the user has selected their choice, they will be filling out the transaction details.

I feel happy that we’ve come up with these ideas, they are yet to be presented to our instructor but I hope at one of these will be accepted.

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Sef-Assessment: Knowing Oneself

Thales of Miletus, a Greek mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher reminds us that

“The most difficult thing in life is to know yourself.”

Knowing the entirety of your being is no joke, we face dilemmas here and there which will question our worth, our importance, and our very existence. However, when we come to a point where we can already know much about ourselves, we can do better, we can share, we can conquer. To Ramana Maharshi, a Hindu sage and jivanmukta:

“Your own self-realization is the greatest service you can render the world.”

Before everything will follow as per requisite by the course, we are task to complete a Myers-Briggs Type Indicator Test and also to take the Berkeley Innovation Index Test (see photos below for the results of my test). I think the interpretation of the test is quite appropriate. I got below average grade on the BII and I was hoping that this will change after the course of a semester, hoping for myself to activate an innovative-side personality. Tackling about my result, the idea of this subject or this course is quite opposite to my personality. As you can see from the photo, I am more introverted, more intuitive, I use mind over feelings, judging over prospecting, and more turbulent in behavior. To be an entrepreneur, this personality doesn’t really coincide to such. However, in a company, not all people have the task to talk to the customer or the public. There are also those who plays a vital role in the back-end and I guess I am one of those. There are a lot of aspects which I need to develop and I am open for it for the sake of developing myself.  

You can try the tests here:

https://www.16personalities.com/

https://berkeleyinnovationindex.org/

To know more about INTJ personality, read this:

https://www.16personalities.com/intj-personality

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The Journey Begins!

The beginning of another semester is HERE!

Hi! I’m Darwin Jone Jupiter, a BS Computer Engineering student. From this post to the proceeding ones, the content of this blog would be my journey on our Technopreneurship course. Join and keep track with my updates as I set sail, venturing  on this exciting journey!