Week 8 Reading Reflection

The thing I found most interesting in this weeks reading was the concept of Private Offerings.  I was unaware of this type of investment until reading this chapter, and found the whole concept of private investment really cool.

The thing that confused me the most was debit and Equity financing.  This could be because I am not very fluent in the language of finance, but I believe this concept would be confusing either way.

My first question I would ask the author would be what would he believe to be the best method of obtaining money to start a business in his opinion.

My Second question for the author would be what he thinks is the biggest financial obstacle when starting a business.

I do not disagree with anything the author said

The 20 Percent

The person I interviewed is Tristan Zullo, who is an entrepreneur who started his own custom headlight company called “American Retrofits”.  Tristan declined to be filmed. Tristan said that he prefers not to say that he targets specific covers because he likes to have a product that stands out so that people want to find and contact him, but if he had to pick a target, it would be men 18-65 years old. 

The customers unmet needs are custom headlights at a reasonable price and delivered in a reasonable time.  Tristan meets this unmet need by researching build time and prices of competitors, and make sure he gets it done quicker, for less money, and with higher quality work performed.

Tristan finds his customers by using many platforms of social media, such as twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.  He finds customers that are following many trucking and off road-based pages, which is the demographic of customers he services. 

After receiving these interview answers, I went out and asked 3 target customers the same questions.  The three people I interviewed all refused to be filmed, because most strangers do not wish to have their privacy invaded and be put on a college student’s public blog for the world to see for his class.  When I asked the customers these questions, I received mixed answers.  I asked one man who seemed a little elderly, as Tristan said that his company appeals to men up to 65 years old.  The older man stated that he is in fact not interested in Tristan’s product, and finds it more for the younger generation of truck drivers.  I also asked a college aged kid, who thought that only kids his age were into custom headlights.  The third person I asked was a young adult male, approximately late 20’s or early 30’s, who stated that he sees the entire demographic being appealed to by this product. 

I believe that Tristan understands his customers problems pretty well, but may have his demographic off by some.

Half Way Reflection

Behaviors I have developed to keep up with the requirements of this course are to work ahead and plan ahead.  Working and planning in this class is key, as most of the interactive assignments may take more than one day to complete.  Doing this takes a lot of stress off this class, and makes it easier to keep with the amount of assignments this 4-credit class has. 

A moment I felt like giving up during this course was doing my 3^rd round of interviews for my product.  By then I was getting kind of sick of approaching strangers, and on this particular slow day, I had trouble finding people willing to take the time out of their day to be interviewed for my product.  However, I stuck it out and pulled through, and ended up getting some great feedback on my product that gave me a bunch of great ideas on ways to improve it.  If I had given up, I would have never gotten this feedback and would have missed out on a great opportunity.  I do feel like I have developed a slightly more tenacious attitude in the past 2 months, and nothing in particular has contributed to this, but going through this class as a whole has led to this attitude.

The three tips I would give to foster the skills that support tenacity and to develop a tenacious mindset are to:

 1. Keep working even when it gets hard

 2. Just because you don’t notice improvements right away doesn’t mean that nothing is happening and

3.  Trying something and failing really isn’t a failure, because you learned that that way just doesn’t work.