The impact of 296 on my Start Up

As of mid-October, I have partnered up with my cousin and a good friend in an attempt to make an old entrepreneurial dream of mine come true. The last push that made me finally put an old idea into practice was the class discussion we had with the owner of Great Dane’s Coffee, Andrew Mckee, a Sauder graduate that encouraged students to put whatever entrepreneurial idea they had into practice.

For a while I have thought about creating T-shirts with a design focused on the football rivalry existent in my hometown, Rio de Janeiro. After the discussion with Andrew I went straight to my cousin, who is a graphic designer, and began to explain my thoughts and come up with ideas of how we could make things work.

Although 296 was influential in encouraging me to get my start up going, it was also extremely important in shaping the way I thought about important aspects of a product. When we first began to talk about the pricing, for example, I would always refer back to the learning’s from my class to claim that in order to penetrate the market and attract new customers in the early stages of our company we must set a low price in order to lure them in. It was also really important to figure out what was our target market in order to be able to channel our distribution and increase its accuracy, and these concepts only became important to me after we covered in class and went over the need of these aspects.

My start up project was a great way to apply the concepts I learned in 296 into real life. It enforced the fact that the knowledge we are gaining is fundamental for a business to work.

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