I heard some very creative ideas in COMM 101 today from my peers who pitched their unique marketable idea in an entrepreneurship exercise. In this post, I’m going to examine in detail the idea that interested me most and project how this idea could take off by using the themes from the Lean Start-Up. As mentioned in Victoria Yang’s blog, the Lean-Start-up is suited to aspiring entrepreneurs because it involves less risk of failure, more flexibility which is easier to achieve in smaller organizations, and just generally searching for a suitable business plan which does not have to be pre-defined. The idea I’m most interested in developing is an app tentatively named: UBC Events. This idea for a smartphone app would collectively display all the current and upcoming events being held or affiliated with UBC along with RVSP and information on how to attend. This app could a pain killer or a vitamin – it serves to eradicate the problem of people who can’t always get enough (if any) information to attend an event they’d be interested in if word never reached them, or it could be enhancing an organized way of being aware of all the recreational activities to connect more social circles in UBC. I’m positive that this idea has great potential as the target market would be the majority of UBC students who own a smartphone (so, almost everyone).
If I were an entrepreneur, I would work with a few buddies closely in the early stages of developing this program to make sure the app is developed as we envisioned – perhaps we could all take up learning programming during our leisure time. In fact, having heard from many classmates through a show of hands after we pitched the idea of this app to peers, they seemed very eager in using a potential app like this and are willing to make a one time payment for using the service when they buy the app. This brief exercise mimics real market research in the Lean Start-Up because it focuses on getting continuous customer feedback on what they’d like to see in the product through its development stages.