Book

I was just talking to my friend trying to come up with some type of scheme to make money. Being a college student really is a hustle. More money more problems might be true, but I'll deal with that when I get there. Being broke does evoke the entrepreneurial endeavor. So like I was saying I was talking to my friend about how were going to make money in the next month. We talked about doing a 50 50 raffle on state patties and giving the winner something cool. Selling t-shirts, starting a club. All types of stuff. While I was trying to go to sleep, unsuccessfully obviously, I began to think about writing a book. Not that I am a good writer, because I am not at all, I am sure there are at least 10 grammar mistakes just in this paragraph, but because my story is a story that should be told and just isn't. I am a college student, I grew up in the Poconos, I did lots of dumb stuff, I broke laws, lived life and partied, I still do. It is a common story, but not one that's written about. My failures, successes, emotions and just my story in general, poured out, unedited, misspelled; a true representation of life, with errors and all.
Authors make money from nothing, they tell stories that they make up and people pay to read them. I honestly think I should just write a book without ever rereading what I typed and publish it. Now is the time to do it when the stories and emotions are fresh and true. Yeah people would get mad, but who really cares the book would be the truth and how I feel so it would be even more liberating than profitable. Get that paper: My story. Nothing more.

Marketing

So the latest ENGR 407 assignment has begun and it really has me thinking what it takes to become successful in the world of entrepreneurship. Is it a good idea, or how well you market an idea? The truth is it usually takes both, unless of course your idea is incredible or the marketing is amazing. For instance, the marketing behind the pet rock must have been done extremely well.
So, all this being the case, what can a broke college student do to market a new idea? This is the question that I have been working on to try and become successful in terms of this project. Being that people have become so used to seeing commercials they tune them out, viral videos seem to be the simple solution. How many products are actually sold and promoted through viral videos though? I want to think of something new that will attract people's attention. Maybe I can have Colbert say something about my product being that he endorses everything. On a serious note some of the ideas I have come up with so far are giveaways. If I hand out of cup of hot chocolate for free as long as someone signs up on my mailing list I think that would be a huge success locally. The networking principle also works although it is semi a popularity contest in the real world who you know matters. Stickers work and presentations also work. People have been so bombarded by advertisements through electronics and technology that I feel the best way to advertise and the cheapest (per e-mail) would be face to face communication. Talking to people is the new form of advertising. People trust people telling them something who are standing in front of them much more so than the people who make a commercial.

Innovation in News

I feel like news has been the same for so long. The same biased reporting classified as unbiased news when the truth is that there is no such thing. There will always be a bias when you report a story; as they say, there are two sides to every story. So my idea comes with accentuating the biases and giving the option of which side of the story you want to hear. It would be a website with three videos on it. On the top would be a quick description of the stories facts. Then, under that would be two videos, each one reporting the two different sides of the story. This way you could choose what you want to hear. Once these two videos were recorded you the two reporters would debate the points and that video would be located on the bottom. Showing the biases will complement peoples' intelligence rather than insult it and the fact that it would be on the internet would make it easy to start in terms of capital and I truly believe it would begin to get enough traffic to start to charge for the service and eventually turn into a tv show.

Iphone App

I know the Iphone application market is flooded, but the opportunity Apple created for entrepreneurship is one that I don't think has ever been so easy to access (this is of course coming from someone who hasn't gone through the process yet.) Anyways, I was at a invention to venture conference when I met someone who had created an Iphone application that had been very profitable for him. He said it takes a while to get paid, but there are no start-up fees or anything, Apple just takes 30% of your revenues. This being so I saw an opportunity for me, a broke college student, to make some real money. My business partner and I teamed up and went onto freelance sites like guru.com and put up profit sharing Iphone application programmer needed. We advertised that the programmers would receive 25% of our companies profits and the amount of responses we got back were insane. I am very excited to see how the application turns out and how the long distance communication between my programmer and I works.

Crash and Burn

For this project I believe every group has experienced a big crash and burn. I thought it would be a lot easier than it is. The main problem I came across was that without any money to prepurchase items it was very hard to make sales. People don't trust college students unless they know them. I have found the sale of food to be fairly successful, but the truth of the matter is thats not something I would ever want to do. I do realize that it may be profitable, but I wonder how profitable it would be once I expanded and had to hire cooks and get kitchen equipment since right now the most orders I can make in a day in my apartment is 5. When I was at home I was able to make 10 orders, but it is a little harder in a tiny apartment kitchen. On that note I kind of wish I was able to use more startup money to fund an order of creative t-shirts. Realizing that the clothing market is oversaturate I know how hard creating an innovative idea would be, but just making cool shirts and selling them for $10 is profitable being that you can get 100 custom shirts for $3 thats $700 for one shipment.

I was studying the other day using flash cards or index cards and I thought it would be so nice to have an organizer for all of the cards for the different classes I have and I thought of a little plastic container with five slots the outside would be two horizontal slots and the middle would have a verticle slot. From there I thought of other ways that organization would help with this product and I realized another problem I had with studying with index cards. At the end of a midterm I would just throw them out, but when it became time for the final I always wished I held onto them. To fix this problem you could just have 3 plastic cards in each slot so you can put a card in between each midterm so you know what you have to study. Every slot would have a fingerwide cut in it so you could put your finger in it easily.