The Venture Team:
TSCenterprises is composed by Sam Medvene, Taylor Townshend, and Chris Crampton. All three team members are Business Management majors with a Technology, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship concentration. Sam Medvene is active in the Harrisonburg nonprofit community and has many links with several organizations making partnerships for several ventures quite easy for the team. Sam also works for a t-shirt company allowing the team to have access to direct resources and quicker turn around times for many aspects of their ventures. Taylor Townshend is the organizer and key link to the very strong tribe of the JMU dance team. Taylor has kept the two boys in the group on track with all of the different components that go into organizing ventures. Chris Crampton has been the indiegogo master which has been crucial to TSCenterprises. Chris also enjoys writing in his spare time and as a result many of the write-ups have been crafted by his innate ability. Together the three have created a strong venture team that have leaped over the many hurdles that come with creating and managing project ventures.
Innovation Questionstorming:
Throughout our final venture we continued to ask questions and further develop our product, here at a few of the many questions we asked:
- How can we incorporate indiegogo into a further success point?
- What venture can we create that stems from a passion of the team?
- How will the market perceive another product which at first glance is similar to the previous venture this semester?
- What inclusion can we make to link James Madison University to this product?
- How can we make our product appeal to more than just college students?
- How can we reach further markets?
Big Idea Hypothesis:
The Bite Me Cancer long sleeve pocket t-shirts were made to draw upon the passions of a variety of groups, genders, and ages to Childhood Cancers as well as Thyroid Cancer. The shirts include a one of a kind design that also promotes the organization of a fellow James Madison University student. They can be worn around the nation promote and spread further awareness. Through this product, the visible and monetary impact that can be made will spur more interest to individuals in comparison to other various routes such as online donations.
Key Innovations:
Some of our key innovations throughout this venture were Key Partners, Revenue Streams, Customer Markets, Key activities, and creating a Social Trend. For key partners, Nikki and Bite Me Cancer helped us greatly as we completed this venture. They were able to give us personalized messages and support through the lessons that they have learned along their organization's lifetime. For revenue streams, we used crowd sourcing with our customers. We had customers complete the payment process as well as finalize their order in one sitting. This prevented us from having to deal with collecting money from customers as well as not worry about collecting sizes. The customer markets that we were able to tap into as utilize is the backing of Bite Me Cancer. This nonprofit organization is nationally known and very well structured with a plentiful amount of resources. One example of a key activity that we took part in is indiegogo. This tool helped use through the entire process and was the single most useful technology we exploited. Lastly creating a social trend through passing this around and having it grow since its start date has been really cool to see. This trend will hopefully continue even after this course ends.
Early Adopters:
The early adopters of this venture were the friends and family of our three team members initially. We thought this all that we were going to receive in the early stages. However we were presently surprised with the support of Delta Sigma Pi, which both Sam and Chris are brothers. We also had a group of passionate Bite Me Cancer supporters that jumped on our venture immediately.
Resources:
Indiegogo-https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/bite-me-cancer-fundraising-venture/x/8682769
UniversityTees-http://universitytees.com/
Customized Stickers-www.carstickers.com
Minimum Viable Product Evolution:
First Design
Final Design
Final Business Model:
Lessons Learned:
- Fail hard and fast. This enables you to not load a lot of investment in something that is going to fail and use those resources on your next venture.
- Start your ventures as soon as you can to make the mistakes early and have as much time as possible for venture to grow.
- Vary ventures throughout the semester and try differentiate products.
- Make a product that people actually want.
- Ask random people for constructive feedback so that false responses from friends and family do not mislead any ventures that you take part in.
- Even though Indiegogo seems confusing, stick with it and the payoff is huge (saved a lot of time and frustrations)